Consequential power and the politics of (land-water) binaries

Early April 2026, I found myself in a typical Dutch polder landscape, together with a group of international PhD students.We were there to learn about an area specifically engineered to temporarily store excess water during heavy rainfall, using a control weir to regulate water levels.This 'water inundation area Blokhoven' in the province of Utrecht, serves to accommodate up to 23 Olympic-size swimming pools of water should the need arise due to heavy rain or high water levels in the rivers. 1 A staff member of the local water authorities demonstrated the opening and closing of the floodgates to control the water flows.Next to the gate system, a 'fish passage' was installed to allow fish and other river creatures to navigate the infrastructural challenges placed in their way (see Fig. 1).All this infrastructure, along with the extensive management system that monitors, governs and maintains it, is designed to ensure that Dutch citizens keep their feet dry.Indeed, "maintaining dry feet" is literally how the regional water authorities describe a key component of their work, next to providing clean water, proper dikes, as well as recreational infrastructure that allows citizens to walk through and appreciate wet areas like Blokhoven. 2 All these components together are referred to as the 'water system', the efficacy of which is increasingly coming under pressure due to climate change, leading to more frequent transgressions of the officially mandated water levels. 3 If anything, our Blokhoven visit clearly demonstrated this special issue's central claims: that the land-water relation is not a binary but a continuum, and that this continuum is interrupted, managed, lived