Egypt's irrigation infrastructure comprises a vast network of dams, canals, offtakes, and ditches, which direct water from the Nile throughout the Nile Valley and Delta to millions of farmers who rely on that water to cultivate their land. In this paper, I focus on the vital work of maintenance, which keeps this infrastructure functioning and the water flowing. Yet rather than taking maintenance as an inherent good, I look critically at what exactly is being maintained. I contrast two forms of canal maintenance: first, the work that Egypt's Ministry of Water Resources and Irrigation conducts, mostly during an annual maintenance period; second, the maintenance that farmers conduct on an everyday basis. State-led maintenance, I argue, is as much about reasserting state authority over the irrigation system as it is about fixing problems within the system. The unsung maintenance of irrigation ditches by farmers, on the other hand, is not only about cleaning ditches but also building communal relations among farmers that are key to the delivery of the water on which they depend. Focusing attention on the decision-making processes around maintenance reveals the variegated outcomes of this work and how it maintains not only the material but also social order.

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The use and management of the world's freshwater has become a critical focus of scholarly engagement. In the introduction to this special issue on water worlds, we highlight two contributions that science and technology studies offers to recent conceptualizations of water relations. The first emphasizes the multiple ontologies of water, resulting from its varied enactments in different sociotechnical assemblages. The second underscores water as a substance that does not merely mediate relations between existing social groups, but constitutes a necessary material for the organization of life in late modernity.Water flows through our lives. It quenches thirst, sustains crops, generates power, cools industry, carries ships, disposes waste, and maintains ecosystems. Where the flow of water is reliable, clean, and plentiful, it fosters growth; where the flow is too much, too little, or too dirty, it wreaks havoc. The use and management of the world's freshwater has therefore become a key contemporary issue: a topic of intense political debate and popular concern, and a focus of considerable scholarship within the social sciences.This literature has yielded rich insights into how we understand water. We now recognize water to be much more than something that falls from the sky as rain, runs through