Water Theft Through the Ages: Insights for Green Criminology
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Water Theft Through the Ages: Insights for Green Criminology Alexander Baird1 · Reece Walters2
© Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract Contemporary criminological discourses identify the emerging phenomena of water theft in societies experiencing drought and water insecurity (Brisman et al. 2018). Such analyses point to policies of privatization, to the marketization and commodification of freshwater, and to state politics premised on trade and fiscal prosperity. Notwithstanding the relevance of such debates, this article demonstrates that water theft and regulations prohibiting and punishing such offenses are indeed not new. Throughout history, various civilizations and societies have created and administered laws to protect freshwater and to punish and prevent water theft. This article seeks to contribute to contemporary criminological discourses by identifying and analyzing the laws and regulations of water theft within select ancient civilizations. Such analyses provide insights at both a conceptual and practical level. Such past examples of water management, non-compliance and sanction provide useful insights into contemporary acts of water theft, water justice, and the future governance of life’s most essential resource.
Introduction Professor Paul Lawrence (2012), the influential British criminal justice historian, has argued that much criminological scholarship has looked into its disciplinary past, as well as the political and social contexts that shaped it, to better understand its theoretical, methodological and ideological trajectories (see also Knepper 2016). Such historical contours have focused on—and revealed why—specific acts were deemed criminal and others not within particular social moments. For arguably the world’s most influential historical criminologist, Clive Emsley (2019: 283), “the historian’s methods of reading and assessing surviving traces of the past have led to an exploration of those agents and institutions * Alexander Baird [email protected] Reece Walters [email protected] 1
School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Deakin University, 221 Burwood Hwy, Burwood, VIC 3125, Australia
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School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Deakin University, 75 Pigdons Rd, Waurn Ponds, VIC 3216, Australia
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responsible for creating those traces.” In this article, we invoke this sentiment, to both trace and reveal how an essential compound of life has been governed historically, and how contemporary criminological and political discourses may garner insights for addressing current challenges. Moreover, historical explorations enable us to examine complexities and continuities with the present that aid contemporary understandings for conceptual thinking as well as policy and practical development (Bosworth 2001; Godfrey 2011). Indeed, such approaches have been adopted regarding water, notably with water law. For example, in 1986, Professor Eric T. Freyfogle of the University of Illinois College of Law produced a seminal piece on “wa
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