A plot of one's own: gender relations and irrigated land allocation policies in Burkina Faso

Women in development / Gender / Land use / Land management / Policy / Female labor / Households / Irrigated farming / Social impact / West Africa / Burkina Faso / Dakiri

A well of one's own: Gender analysis of an irrigation program in Bangladesh

Irrigation managementGroundwater irrigationGender differencesWomen in developmentPovertyHouseholdsAgricultural productionPrivatization

Transformations to groundwater sustainability: from individuals and pumps to communities and aquifers

If the success of agricultural intensification continues to rely on the depletion of aquifers and exploitation of (female) labour, transformations to groundwater sustainability will be impossible to achieve. Hence, the development of new groundwater imaginaries, based on alternative ways of organizing society-water relations is highly important. This paper argues that a comparative documentation of grass-roots initiatives to care for, share or recharge aquifers in places with acute resource pressures provides an important source of inspiration. Using a grounded anti-colonial and feminist approach, we combine an ethnographic documentation of groundwater practices with hydrogeological and engineering insights to enunciate, normatively assess and jointly learn from the knowledges, technologies and institutions that characterize such initiatives. Doing this usefully shifts the focus of planned efforts to regulate and govern groundwater away from government efforts to control individual pumping behaviours, to the identification of possibilities to anchor transformations to sustainability in collective action

Attention to sociotechnical tinkering with irrigation infrastructure as a way to rethink water governance

Inspired by the proposal of political scientists and anthropologists to focus on “practice” as the smallest unit of analysis for understanding politics, as well as the renewed scholarly attention to materiality, this paper sets out to show that detailed ethnographic attention to processes and acts of sociotechnical tinkering provides a useful entry-point for understanding water governance. This is so methodologically, because infrastructural forms of tinkering are very visible, and therefore researchable, manifestations of agency and change in water governance. Attention to sociotechnical tinkering helps shift the basis for understanding water realities from official norms, designs and laws to everyday practices. This in turn allows questioning, rather than assuming, how expertise and agency are exercised and distributed in water governance, thereby also providing useful information for re-thinking water politics. In addition, by explicitly engaging with the contingency and capriciousness of actual water flows, a sociotechnical tinkering approach entails a much-needed re-appreciation of the materiality of water, infrastructure and other matter, a re-appreciation that extends to those who design, construct, operate and use water infrastructure

Correction: Kemerink-Seyoum, J.S.; et al. Title attention to sociotechnical tinkering with irrigation infrastructure as a way to rethink water governance [Water, 11, (2019) (1670)] DOI: 10.3390/w11081670

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Water Rights for the Landless in Western India: From Pani Panchayat to Water Entitlements

Cet article compare deux tentatives de séparer les droits des eaux du droit à la terre qui ont été entreprises dans l’Etat de Maharashtra en Inde occidentale lors des 25 dernières années : le Pani Panchayat qui a commencé pendant les années 1980 d’une part, et la mise en œuvre actuelle de réformes concernant la gestion de l’eau promouvant explicitement le droit à l’eau, de l’autre. La mesure dans laquelle ces initiatives ont facilité le droit à l’eau des pauvres sans terre est liée au différents discours sur le développement sous-jacents associés avec ces deux processus. Ceux-ci expliquent aussi les différences quant au rôle de l’Etat ainsi que la législation promulguée dans les deux cas de figure. L’article se conclut par un appel pour une action politique immédiate prenant avantage de l’espace offert par les processus de formalisation du droit à l’eau afin d’intervenir activement en faveur des pauvres sans terre.European Journal of Development Research (2009) 21, 195–212. doi:10.1057/ejdr.2008.19

Engaging with the politics of water governance

The goal of the study is to strengthen the analytical purchase of the term water governance and improve the utility of the concept for describing and analyzing actual water distribution processes. We argue this is necessary as most writing on water governance is more concerned with promoting particular politically inspired agendas of what water governance should be than with understanding what it actually is. We believe that water governance at heart is about political choices as to where water should flow; about the norms, rules and laws on which such choices should be based; about who is best able or qualified to decide about this; and about the kind of societal future such choices support. We identify distributions—of water, voice and authority, and expertise—as the empirical anchor and entry‐point of our conceptualization of water governance. This usefully allows foregrounding questions of equity in water governance discussions and provides the empirical foundation for a meaningful engagement with the politics of water governance