More transfers of water over long-distances are prepared across Germany to ensure drinking water supply security in times of droughts and peak drinking water demands on hot summer days.

Originally, such transfers were meant as an exception for e.g. metropolitan areas with high industrial and public water demand and unfavourable local water resources. Today, already 20% of Germans are supplied with water imported from other administrative areas or hydrological basins.

Research shows, however, that such large-scale water infrastructures can limit alternative water management and use strategies for decades while posing the risk of conflicts, habitat destruction or unsustainable irrigation practices.

To understand better how such long-distance water transfers ‘function’ , David, Robert, Fanny Linda and Kristiane analyzed how the Fernwasser Elbaue-Ostharz long-distance water transfer infrastructure developed temporally and spatially since its first ideas at the end of the 19th century until today.

By using the concept of *lock-ins* we could show how in different time periods technological conditions, institutional logics, economic pressures as well as political interests intertwined in ways that facilitated the ongoing persistence of the long-distance water transfer – even after the breakdown of the German Democratic Republic in 1989/90 and the associated tremendous drop in water demands.

In contrast to top-down implementations of such long-distance transfers (e.g. in Franco’s Spain), our analysis reveals how the latest expansion of the Elbaue-Ostharz transfer was explicitly demanded by local citizens, officials and environmentalists alike in the Südharz region.