The Work of Water offers a powerful rethinking of environmental governance. Pakistan's Punjab Irrigation Department manages one of the world's largest irrigation networks. Such bureaucracies are considered paradigmatic sites of corruption, inefficiency, and depoliticization. This book turns this assumption around, arguing that the promise of welfare and development hinges not on elite policy or expertise but on everyday bureaucratic labor. Hayat reads the Indus Basin as an infrastructural ecology—an archive of human design and environmental response—within which infrastructures of conflict are sustained by the labor of peace, bureaucratic work is ethical labor, politics is tempered, and authority is gendered. Moving between offices, courtrooms, village council gatherings, treaty arbitrations, canal outlets, and archives, this book traces how the materiality of water is produced and invites reflection on how futures of public goods might be held open in times of intensifying climate strain. At stake, Hayat demonstrates, is not only the governance of nature, but the nature of governance itself.
