In this paper we will present the Everyday Water project as a case study of recent cultural research on domestic water use and its application to natural resource policy and practice. This project is innovative not only because it is a research partnership between a development company and a university but also because of the cultural research approach the project brings to the issue of water resource sustainability and management. The Everyday Water project moves away from thinking of water as a discrete resource or utility, and instead understands its consumption in terms of shifting definitions and uses of services, cultural traditions, and the intersection of everyday practices and expectations with socio-technical systems. The findings so far indicate that while people are prepared to take some DIY measures to save water while they are 'stuck' within current socio-technical systems, many can imagine alternatives, and would be prepared to do more with improved knowledge, better leadership, fewer obstacles, and more incentives to bring about a shift to a different kind of water culture.

The economic crisis has generally been understood in terms of financial excess, speculation and fraud. This article suggests that there is a need to decenter this focus on financialization and instead reflect on the crisis as a cultural as much as an economic event. It addresses the normalisation of practices of calculation and investment within everyday life, especially in the figure of the 'citizen-speculator' who is now required to view housing as a site of accumulation and object of speculation, not only for debt-fuelled consumption in the present but also as a source of asset-based welfare in the future.

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