The water sector has a major leadership role to play in addressing the global water crisis. How can it make the radical shifts in approach that are needed? This paper highlights the reality that the management of water, and the ways in which water flows are directed, reflects social relations of power, not just between human groups, but also between humankind and the non-human world. Drawing on in-depth ethnographic research with indigenous communities and other water users in river catchments around the world, it considers alternate cultural worldviews that encourage more sustainable beliefs and practices, and asks how larger societies might make imaginative use of these in contemporary and future engagements with water. In a thought experiment intended to reposition human–non-human relations, it proposes a concept of ‘re-imagined communities’ advocating more collaborative forms of conviviality – living together – with other species. Opening the door to ideas about pan-species democracy, it calls for decision-making processes in which a wide range of expertise is brought together to exchange knowledge, with an explicit and practical remit to ‘speak for’ and promote the needs and interests of the non-human inhabitants of the ecosystems on which all living kinds depend.

水部门在解决全球水危机方面可以发挥重要的领导作用。它如何才能实现所需的方法的根本转变？本文强调了这样一个现实，即水的管理以及水流的导向方式反映了社会权力关系，不仅在人类群体之间，而且在人类与非人类世界之间。借鉴与世界各地河流集水区的土著社区和其他用水者的深入人种学研究，它考虑了鼓励更可持续的信仰和实践的替代文化世界观，并询问更大的社会如何在当代和未来的参与中富有想象力地利用这些与水。在一个旨在重新定位人与非人关系的思想实验中，它提出了一个“重新想象的社区”的概念，提倡与其他物种一起生活的更多合作形式的欢乐。它打开了通向泛物种民主思想的大门，它要求决策过程汇集广泛的专业知识来交流知识，明确而实际地为“代言”并促进人们的需求和利益所有生物赖以生存的生态系统中的非人类居民。