"Through the brilliant selection of the devices to exhibit her ideas, the author invites readers to think deeply beyond courts or treaties establishing a human right to water and shows how many other factors also contribute to and shape this." — Gayathri D Naik, LSE Review of Books
"[Ballestero's] insightful analysis convinces the reader that such apparently mundane technical devices are indeed wonderful in their capacities to compose the water worlds of the future." — Veronica Strang, PoLAR
"The book holds profound insights on how the powerful—in this case, those who find that the fate of water rests in their hands—develop a philosophy of history and engineer the ways that their work will be remembered and built upon in the future. Ballestero also pushes fellow ethnographers to reflect on people’s vision not in terms of their effectiveness or how well they map onto one’s own desires. A Future History of Water rather convincingly presents ways to engage with how interlocutors manifest their visions into being in spite of the clouded visibilities of the present." — Kessie Alexandre, Current Anthropology
“Andrea Ballestero masterfully brings analytic complexity to wide-ranging fields while simultaneously showing us that these fields are not as separate as they first seem. If this sounds like ethnographic magic, that's because it is: the magic of a most creative method carefully and brilliantly pursued to provide awareness of scholarly habits of thought, in the process, offering alter-inspiration.” — Marisol de la Cadena, author of Earth Beings: Ecologies of Practice across Andean Worlds
“Andrea Ballestero is one of the most eloquent environmental ethnographers of her generation and one of the most important ethnographers of scientific practice that I have ever encountered. Her writing is beautiful, her theoretical and analytic ability are stunning, and the connections that she makes between her empirical evidence and larger conversations in the social sciences are breathtaking. While there are other anthropologists who write about the kinds of techniques that Ballestero dissects, historicizes, and theorizes, nobody does it while always grounding them in social relations and social reproduction.” — Paige West, author of Dispossession and the Environment: Rhetoric and Inequality in Papua New Guinea