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This dissertation advocates inclusive and integrated more-than-human relations as humans, technoscience, and nature become increasingly entangled in contexts of climate change and socio-ecological crisis. Researching in the environmental humanities between 2017 and 2020, I situate my study in Cape Town, South Africa, where the fluctuations between water's abundance and absence—as evidenced by the 2018 drought—have necessitated new approaches to ontology and epistemology that critically disrupt dominant systems of thought. Using the Cape Flats Aquifer and its aboveground area, the Philippi Horticultural Area, as my primary field sites, I focused on the legal battle that has surfaced between various human actors over land and water use, to explore how different human-nature relationships emerge, and to evaluate the social and environmental implications thereof. The overall inquiry guiding my research is how the Cape Flats Aquifer can make the case for multispecies relations by examining how it flows, or is brought into, existence. First, I present the different kinds of evidence that make the aquifer and its aboveground area un/seen; second, I assess whether alternative ways of evidencing the aquifer exist with a focus on farming practices in the Philippi Horticultural Area; third, I question what ought to be part of the aquifer evidentiary if sustainable, adaptive, and resilient human-nature relations are to be achieved? I argue that humans, multispecies, and earthly bodies such as the aquifer ought to be understood as relational, multiple, and intimately implicated in each other in the face of unpredictable climatic conditions.

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Through exploring the relationship of people to water and how that relationship changes when water becomes a commodity, this study addresses the devaluation of the relationship of people and water in the environment they live in and contrasts the devaluation with the value attributed to commodified water by neoliberal economic policy. Where the relationships between people and water are financialised, commodification sets people and water apart in planning and policies as if they are separate entities. Focusing on the effects of the Lesotho Highlands Water Project in the commodification of water in Lesotho, this study contrasts life lived with freeflowing water and with commodified water. Through ethnographic data collected over 18 months in three villages around the Katse Dam and the Mohale Dam, the dissertation demonstrates that development agencies do not take into consideration the human-nonhuman relationship that exist between communities and their environment. The study demonstrates that economic development through the damming of rivers has rendered people both ecologically and economically precarious. Drawing from these findings, the study proposes that development based on the extraction of natural resources and the assumption that people and environment are separate, should be replaced with an integrated theory of habitability and wellbeing that includes, in its social theory, the relationships of people with soil and water. The thesis was guided by multispecies, political ecology and economic anthropology theories.