Paper short abstract:

In this paper I explore attempts to integrate water, time, and chemical infrastructures in Sri Lanka's irrigated agriculture system. I complicate theories of agrarian transformation, highlighting the need to consider the ways in which development infrastructures unify and break apart over time.

Paper long abstract:

Intensified agriculture involves the promotion of synthetic and mechanised inputs alongside the rationalisation of water and labour inputs. Critics argue that these processes often damage the environment and rural communities, leaving small farmers disadvantaged or dispossessed. Such analyses have also tended to assume that this process is more or less inevitable, and follows from the top-down imposition of new agricultural methods. In this paper I question these assumptions and argue that the intensification of farming requires the alignment of several infrastructures at a precise moment - something not easily accomplished and even when achieved is always in danger of decay. To show this, I explore the development, promotion, alignment, and collapse of water, time, and chemical infrastructures in Sri Lanka's Mahaweli irrigated agriculture systems and the various attempts by government to create an overarching subjective infrastructure, at the level of individual farmer dispositions, to unite them. Drawing from secondary sources held at the Mahaweli Library and ethnographic fieldwork in a Mahaweli village, I show how the unification of material and subjective infrastructures has always been precarious, and this owes to their inherent trend towards separation and 'falling out of time.' The consequence has been an only ever partial correspondence of material and subjective infrastructures, leading to repeated 'crises of management' at local and national levels. This finding complicates theories of agrarian transformation, highlighting the need to consider more carefully the ways in which development infrastructures unify and break apart over time, at different moments producing and undoing different effects.