Towards a Minor Logistics: Community and Ecology in a Watershed Project

This article proposes a reconfiguration of logistics thinking, through attention to water provisioning and protection in the context of diverse economies and ecologies. With reference to a community-based watershed management project in rural Belize, I discuss how elements of this initiative at once accompany extractive resource management and reveal its limits and alternatives. Challenging a teleology of optimization, the participants’ coordination efforts and ethical negotiations draw attention to logistics in an alternative register: historically grounded; relational; involving compromise among people and with more-than-human agencies. This rural water system is not historically positioned ‘before’ the reach of globalized supply chains – indeed its landscape is steeped in enduring colonial-extractive legacies. Instead, I suggest a typology of logistics (including community and ecological forms) to account for the uneven effects and percolations of industrial logistics, and for the situated politics of moving, sustaining, and mediating water, people and ideas across fields of difference.