Ruling by canal: Governance and system-level design characteristics of large scale irrigation infrastructure in India and Uzbekistan

This paper explores the relationship between governance regime and large-scale irrigation system design by investigating three cases: 1) protective irrigation design in post-independent South India; 2) canal irrigation system design in Khorezm Province, Uzbekistan, as implemented in the USSR period, and 3) canal design by the Madras Irrigation and Canal Company, as part of an experiment to do canal irrigation development in colonial India on commercial terms in the 1850s-1860s. The mutual shaping of irrigation infrastructure design characteristics on the one hand and management requirements and conditions on the other has been documented primarily at lower, within-system levels of the irrigation systems, notably at the level of division structures. Taking a 'social construction of technology' perspective, the paper analyses the relationship between technological structures and management and governance arrangements at irrigation system level. The paper finds qualitative differences in the infrastructural configuration of the three irrigation systems expressing and facilitating particular forms of governance and rule, differences that matter for management and use, and their effects and impacts

Introduction to the Special Issue: Water Grabbing? Focus on the (Re)appropriation of Finite Water Resources

Recent large-scale land acquisitions for agricultural production (including biofuels), popularly known as 'land grabbing', have attracted headline attention. Water as both a target and driver of this phenomenon has been largely ignored despite the interconnectedness of water and land. This special issue aims to fill this gap and to widen and deepen the lens beyond the confines of the literature’s still limited focus on agriculture-driven resource grabbing. The articles in this collection demonstrate that the fluid nature of water and its hydrologic complexity often obscure how water grabbing takes place and what the associated impacts on the environment and diverse social groups are. The fluid properties of water interact with the 'slippery' nature of the grabbing processes: unequal power relations; fuzziness between legality and illegality and formal and informal rights; unclear administrative boundaries and jurisdictions, and fragmented negotiation processes. All these factors combined with the powerful material, discursive and symbolic characteristics of water make 'water grabbing' a site for conflict with potential drastic impacts on the current and future uses and benefits of water, rights as well as changes in tenure relations.ESR

Irrigation management transfer in sub-Saharan Africa: an analysis of policy implementation across scales

This article explores how irrigation management transfer policies were implemented in Mali, Mozambique, Malawi and Zimbabwe. In Mali and Mozambique, where the irrigation bureaucracy controlled one large irrigation system, state agencies retained control over irrigation management despite reduced state funding. In Malawi and Zimbabwe, where the state irrigation systems and the irrigation bureaucracy were smaller, users have taken over irrigation management, but are having trouble sustaining irrigated agriculture. We show how irrigation management transfer policies were shaped by the interplay between international donors, macro-economic dynamics, national politics and the interactions with (and the nature of) irrigation infrastructure, bureaucracies and organized users.</p

Petrol pumps and the making of modernity along the shores of Lake Victoria, Kenya

This paper explores how pump irrigation has evolved along the Kenyan shores of Lake Victoria. Over the past two decades access to petrol pumps has allowed small-scale horticultural enterprises to start up and then transform the size, intensity and nature of their production. We analyse the spread of petrol pumps as the assimilation and wider use of a modern device along a mutated trajectory of change. We argue that it was not led by external actors but is a local and self-organised process driven by actors who negotiated interfaces between themselves and those operating at the macro level. The assimilation unfolded not as a temporally and spatially linear process but through its embeddedness in complex and dynamic social relationships that structure access to the key resources required for vegetable production. This in turn has given rise to a range of strategies in which the pumps' performance is adjusted to fit with various socially differentiated contexts

Below the radar: Data, narratives and the politics of irrigation in sub-Saharan Africa

Emerging narratives call for recognising and engaging constructively with small-scale farmers who have a leading role in shaping the current irrigation dynamics in sub-Saharan Africa. This paper explores whether new irrigation data can usefully inform these narratives. It argues that, for a variety of reasons, official irrigation data in sub-Saharan Africa fail to capture the full extent and diverse nature of irrigation and its rapid distributed growth over the last two decades. The paper investigates recent trends in the use of remote sensing methods to generate irrigation data; it examines the associated expectation that these techniques enable a better understanding of current irrigation developments and small-scale farmers' roles. It reports on a pilot study that uses radar-based imagery and analysis to provide new insights into the extent of rice irrigated agriculture in three regions of Tanzania. We further stress that such mapping exercises remain grounded in a binary logic that separates 'irrigation' from other 'non-irrigated' landscape features. They can stem from, and reinforce, a conventional understanding of irrigation that is still influenced by colonial legacies of engineering design and agricultural modernisation. As farmers' initiatives question this dominant view of irrigation, and in a policy context that is dominated by narratives of water scarcity, this means that new data may improve the visibility of water use by small-scale irrigators but may † Jean-Philippe Venot and Sam Bowers are joint first authors. General comments and other correspondence should be addressed to Jean-Philippe Venot. Correspondence on remote sensing radar analysis should be addressed to Sam Bowers. Water Alternatives-2021 Volume 14 | Issue 2 Venot et al.: The politics of irrigation data in Sub-Saharan Africa 547 also leave them more exposed to restrictions favouring more powerful water users. The paper thus calls for moving away from a narrow debate on irrigation data and monitoring, and towards a holistic discussion of the nature of irrigation development in sub-Saharan Africa. This discussion is necessary to support a constructive engagement with farmer-led irrigation development; it is also challenging in that it involves facing entrenched vested interests and requires changes in development practices

The fluid nature of water grabbing: the on-going contestation of water distribution between peasants and agribusinesses in Nduruma, Tanzania

This research article published by Springer Nature Switzerland AG., 2015This article contributes to the contemporary debate on land and water grabbing through a detailed, qualitative case study of horticultural agribusinesses which have settled in Tanzania, disrupting patterns of land and water use. In this paper we analyse how capitalist settler farms and their upstream and downstream peasant neighbours along the Nduruma river, Tanzania, expand and defend their water use. The paper is based on 3 months of qualitative field work in Tanzania. We use the echelons of rights analysis framework combined with the concept of institutional bricolage to show how this contestation takes place over the full spectrum of actual abstractions, governance and discourses. We emphasise the role different (inter)national development narratives play in shaping day-to-day contestations over water shares and rule-making. Ultimately, we emphasise that water grabbing is not a one-time event, but rather an on-going struggle over different water resources. In addition, we show how a perceived beneficial development of agribusinesses switching to groundwater allows them to avoid peasant-controlled institutions, avoiding further negotiation between the different actors and improving their image among neighbouring communities. This development illustrates how complex and obscured processes of water re-allocation can be without becoming illegal per se

The ‘Farmer Lens’: A Gender Blinder? Considering Farmer Diversity in Research and Policy on African Farmer-led Irrigation Development

In research-policy debates on food and agriculture in Africa, the phenomenon of farmer-led irrigation development is now receiving wide attention. This can be seen as the adoption of the ‘farmer lens’ in research on the use and management of common pool land and water resources for irrigation. While it emancipates a farmer’s perspective in irrigation, we also observe that the farmer lens obscures attention for inequities and gender and social diversity in debates on African smallholder farming. Therefore, we reflect in this paper ex-post on survey data and field observations from two of our finalized research projects in Mozambique on farmer-led irrigation development, and we scrutinize the assumptions that we made in the design of these projects. Based on our reflections, we come to the conclusion that an emphasis on farmers’ agency in general indeed has the effect of a gender blinder, because it invokes an image of the ‘African farmer’ that is one-dimensional – agential but gender-less – and we suggest that a stronger focus in research on (irrigated) plot use, virilocality and flows of mobility could produce more accurate representations of inequities and gender and social diversity in irrigation. Such data, in turn, can critically inform the design of more grounded, human-oriented irrigation policies in Africa

The ‘Farmer Lens’: A Gender Blinder? Considering Farmer Diversity in Research and Policy on African Farmer-led Irrigation Development

In research-policy debates on food and agriculture in Africa, the phenomenon of farmer-led irrigation development is now receiving wide attention. This can be seen as the adoption of the ‘farmer lens’ in research on the use and management of common pool land and water resources for irrigation. While it emancipates a farmer’s perspective in irrigation, we also observe that the farmer lens obscures attention for inequities and gender and social diversity in debates on African smallholder farming. Therefore, we reflect in this paper ex-post on survey data and field observations from two of our finalized research projects in Mozambique on farmer-led irrigation development, and we scrutinize the assumptions that we made in the design of these projects. Based on our reflections, we come to the conclusion that an emphasis on farmers’ agency in general indeed has the effect of a gender blinder, because it invokes an image of the ‘African farmer’ that is one-dimensional – agential but gender-less – and we suggest that a stronger focus in research on (irrigated) plot use, virilocality and flows of mobility could produce more accurate representations of inequities and gender and social diversity in irrigation. Such data, in turn, can critically inform the design of more grounded, human-oriented irrigation policies in Africa