Paper short abstract:

This paper shows how the study of both the sociotechnical and political dimensions of infrastructures reveals the everyday ways of governing of the Turkish state, between coercion and arrangements. We will use the example of small hill reservoirs built for irrigation in Izmir region.

Paper long abstract:

The processes linking state action, the environment and infrastructure have been studied in Turkey through the notion of developmentalism. This paper proposes to continue this reflection by showing how looking at the very materiality of infrastructure also makes it possible to question state-society relations. While this issue has mainly been approached from the angle of conflict around conflictual infrastructure projects, we will focus this time on less contested small objects. In 2012, the Turkish government launched a national program aimed at the construction of "1000 gölet (small reservoirs) in 1000 days". Paying attention to these technical objects at the local level, in the region of Izmir, showed which actors appeared during the planning of projects, their implementation and then their appropriation by farmers. By looking at their everyday ‘ways of doing’, their encounters, the arrangements they find in circumventing the rules to make the projects work, this research proposes to study governance in acts, or in action. It thus shows how the study of both the sociotechnical and political aspects of infrastructure makes it possible to question state-society relations "from below", without falling into a binary opposition between a state whose intervention is only top-down and a society that is only in resistance. This approach is in no way opposed to conflict-centered research: it shows how, through infrastructure projects, an authoritarian state governs through both coercion and flexibility, repression and transactions, by force and compromise.