In this elegant yet hard-hitting volume, Julie Trottier asks a simple question: why is it, after all the time, money and attention devoted to the management of global water resources, we have made so little headway? Isn't water research massively funded? Isn't the calendar filled with international water conferences? Are we not living in the age of instant global communication? Concerned at the incapacity of water researchers to build on each other's work and their blindness to realities they do not wish to see, the author argues that if we truly wish to understand the problems of water and its management in the world, we need to unravel a thick set of entangled interactions. Using a range of examples from around the world, including North America, Middle East, Europe and Africa, and at a variety of scales from the local to the global, she shows how we can decode the discourse relating to water in order to reformulate the problem and pose possible solutions.