Technology providers from around the world are currently marketing digital water meters to households or communities with the promise of using water more efficiently and distributing it more fairly in the face of increasingly scarce drinking water resources and simultaneous population growth. In ethnographic case studies at different places and in different contexts, this research draws on the basic assumption that the everyday experience and daily use of water is as diverse as the ways in which people talk about and relate to water. And there is a difference in what happens to their everyday life experience when digital water meters are introduced. The research focuses on the migratory movements of technologies and follows the technology of smart water metering and its introduction in several places in Europe and Africa (Switzerland, Germany, South Africa, Botswana and Tunisia), closely observing the transformation of water issues, water narratives and water practices. Who are the actors involved, how did they become involved and what power relations are implemented with the technology? What existing practices of counting water and what infrastructural history is/will be affected? Are alternative/informal ways of solving water problems or of distributing water excluded by the new technology?
