‘Worlding’ is a concept developed by scholars in a variety of social sciences and humanities fields (e.g., Law 2004; Roy 2011; Spivak 1985; Tsing 2005). There are nuances in what it means in this literature, but in a nutshell ‘worlding’ is a way for a researcher to come to grips with situations in which combinations of seemingly unlike things – people, places, things–appear to hang together as if they all inhabit the same common world. For example, what are the common threads that tie together things as different as people who may be both citizens concerned about plastics and consumers who buy water bottled in plastic from their grocery store with companies that publish sustainability reports with data about their recycling efforts and which also mine the tar sands? ‘Worlding’ offers an analytical foothold for researchers trying to understand such seemingly unlike elements of a broader situation.
I find ‘worlding’ a useful concept for at least two reasons. One, is the -ing suffix. that suffix transforms thinking about a given situation into a doing instead of simply being fixed as they are (or appear to be). a second reason I find the concept useful is that to act as if a situation–with all its disparate people, places, and things–hangs together in a coherent way that can subsist and persist being that way is not the same thing as saying the situation actually is or can hang together as such. This latter point leaves room for error and learning on the part of me, the researcher. In this sense, worlding is like a kind of conceptual loosening agent that can help open up possibilities for questioning, learning, surprise, and avoiding over quick for closures of possibilities as such. It also allows me to understand some of the way my own lines of questioning and thinking about a given situation are playing their own role in formatting the very situation I claim to be studying i.e., worlding add me, the researcher, into the action that goes into acting as if a given situation hangs together in a common world. This means I am implicated. I don’t get to stand in some nonexistent outside point looking in on the world I’m curious about. Here, ‘worlding’ plays well with other concepts I’ve learned to work with and find useful (e.g., avoiding a view from nowhere (Haraway 2016); letting go of presumptions about perspective (Mol 2002). If I have a ‘perspective’ on the world, where am I actually standing? Answer: no real place. I am always somewhere, there is no ‘outside’ on which to stand, separate from it all).
Now all of this might sound abstract, but it actually has quite practical implications. Take e-waste for example. In one of my books about the topic I referred to how e-waste is as much an allegory as it is a practical waste problem (Lepawsky 2018). In the mid 2010s, the international police organization, INTERPOL ran an enforcement program covering Africa called “Project Eden” (INTERPOL, n.d., 21). A scrap yard/dumpsite in Accra, the capital city of Ghana was referred to by local and international media as Sodom and Gomorrah (Akese et al. 2022). How is it that a mishmash of seemingly unlike things – an international policing organization, the Bible, scrap dealers, electronic repair techs, private realty concerns – come to be connected through the plastics, glasses, and metals of discarded electronic devices found in a Ghanaian city?
More recently, I’ve been looking into what some tech companies, such as Intel, TSMC, Meta, Amazon, Apple, have started calling ‘net positive water’. For these companies, net positive water is achieved, they claim, when their extraction of water for operations is counterbalanced by inputs of water through variety of water restoration projects. These restoration projects can be anything from making a company’s operations more efficient, to harvesting rainwater, constructing wetland treatment systems, to restoring habitat, among other activities (Reig et al. 2019, 24). The calculations for net positive water are based on definitions of geographical features that might, at first, seem like objective ‘natural kinds’ but which, on further inspection, turn out to be somewhat squishy. For example, a guidance document for making these calculations defines a ‘site’ as, “the physical area over which the implementing organisation owns or manages land and carries out its principal activities. In most cases it is a contiguous area of land but may also include physically separated but nearby areas” (Alliance for Water Stewardship 2021, 1). How many is “most cases”? In what situations should non-contiguous areas be considered as part of the equation? How close or far away from a given site is “nearby”?
Net positive water calculations are premised on quantitative techniques that themselves do worlding work. Take the hydrological model that is the foundation on with those calculations are premised. It’s got a very technical name: the PCRaster Global Water Balance (PCR-GLOBWB 2). It was developed by Earth scientists (Sutanudjaja et al. 2018) for a variety of water related research. PCR-GLOBWB 2 assembles five different ‘sub-models’ to define geographical features like ‘catchments’ (at a basic level, a catchment is an areal unit that collects water). There are some parts of the Earth where PCR-GLOBW 2 has trouble replicating the behaviour of water actually measured on the ground. These differences between modeled and measured behaviour in specific locations is overcome through a variety of standardized statistical techniques. This kind of difference between modeled and measured results is a very normal part of scientific modelling in general and hydrological modelling specifically. It’s no criticism to point out that hydrological models “stitch together data and theories” into “‘water worlds’” (Van Stan II and Simmons 2025, 240).
Global hydrology models like PCR-GLOBWB 2 standardize parameters, like rainwater storage or snow-water behaviour, by taking the results of field-based studies in different specific locations around the world and treating them as generalizable descriptions of how water behaves elsewhere on the planet. Again, this is a normal practice of this kind of scientific modeling. It is literally impossible to run field experiments at every location on the Earth’s surface where different vegetation types grow and may change seasonally or otherwise. Van Stan II and Simmons offer a wonderful description of planetary hydrology models, like PCR-GLOBWB 2, as, “as geographical chimera – a hybrid ‘organism’ that is a disparate empirical patchwork” (Van Stan II and Simmons 2025, 252). This kind of stitching work is worlding work. There’s nothing controversial in pointing out that modelling of this type is a pragmatic stitching together of results from specific measurements into more generalizable forms. It also means that the quantitative inputs, outputs, and results of such models need to be interpreted with care rather than treating those numbers as simply neutral, numeric descriptions of nature.
As the saying goes, models are wrong but can be useful. Among the things they can be useful for is navigating the line between how the world is and how those using the model claim the world ought to be. Guidance documents and hydrology models like those described above do this worlding work. They bring together not necessarily like things – companies, wetlands, watersheds, and sustainability metrics, mathematical formulas, and stream gauges – and act as if they can all subsist and persist in the same common world. But do they? And, if so, for whom and for what? For what purpose(s)? When? Where? And under what conditions? These are the kinds of research questions I’m looking into with respect to net positive water and the tech sector.
Works Cited
Akese, Grace, Uli Beisel, and Muntaka Chasant. 2022. “Agbogbloshie: A Year after the Violent Demolition.” African Arguments, July 21. https://africanarguments.org/2022/07/agbogbloshie-a-year-after-the-violent-demolition/.
Alliance for Water Stewardship. 2021. Guidance Note to Complement the Definition of “Site” in the AWS Standard 2.0. https://a4ws.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/Guidance-Note-Site-Definition-of-AWS-Standard-FINAL-25-June-2021-1.pdf.
Haraway, Donna. 2016. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press.
INTERPOL. n.d. Environmental Security Strategic Plan 2017-2020. Accessed July 28, 2026. https://www.interpol.int/content/download/5094/file/Strategic%20Plan%202017-2020.pdf.
Law, John. 2004. After Method: Mess in Social Science Research. Routledge.
Lepawsky, Josh. 2018. Reassembling Rubbish: Worlding Electronic Waste. MIT Press.
Mol, Annemarie. 2002. The Body Multiple: Ontology in Medical Practice. Duke University Press.
Reig, Paul, Wendy Larson, Samuel Vionnet, and Jean-Baptiste Bayart. 2019. Volumetric Water Benefit Accounting (VWBA): A Method For Implementing and Valuing Water Stewardship Activities. World Resources Institute. https://www.wri.org/research/volumetric-water-benefit-accounting-vwba-method-implementing-and-valuing-water-stewardship.
Roy, Ananya. 2011. “Slumdog Cities: Rethinking Subaltern Urbanism.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 35 (2): 223–38. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2427.2011.01051.x.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 1985. “Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism.” Critical Inquiry 12 (1): 243–61.
Sutanudjaja, Edwin H., Rens van Beek, Niko Wanders, et al. 2018. “PCR-GLOBWB 2: A 5 Arcmin Global Hydrological and Water Resources Model.” Geoscientific Model Development 11 (6): 2429–53. https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-11-2429-2018.
Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. 2005. Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection. Princeton University Press.
Van Stan II, John T., and Jack Simmons. 2025. “Water Models as Geographical Chimera: Precipitation Interception Routines as an Example of ‘Patchwork Empiricism.’” Water Alternatives 18 (2): 240–60.
Electronic Planet Research Lab 