Paper short abstract:

Using a World Bank irrigation system completed in 1974 in Southern Romania as an ethnographic entry point, this paper works with the notion of “irrigation citizenship” to understand the social-ecological transformations of a large scale irrigation in the context of rapid post-socialist change.

Paper long abstract:

While irrigation citizenship reflected the property regime over land during state-socialism, post-1990 processes of land restitution and land privatization, as well collapse of the vertically integrated economy that accompanied the network of the canals, pumps and pipes, transformed the economic and material basis of irrigation citizenship. The state sovereignty over the irrigation system’s territory was replaced by a multitude of landholders who own parts of the formerly integrated system, a process that makes the concept of splintering often used to understand transformations of infrastructures particularly useful. While not abandoned, but unable to integrate economically and hydrologically any longer the territory and the residents, the irrigation system now hosts three political-economic and ecology fixes: independent vertical irrigation by small landholders, land grabbing next to the canals, and water grabbing by large agro-industrial business. This study joins other studies which suggest that a long term analysis on infrastructure systems yields unique insights over their changing political and word-making rationalities. Seeking to inject a temporal dimension into the analysis of large scale irrigation systems, I analyze how the rapid and radical transformation of the property relations, political, and economic foundations of the local environment have transformed the local citizenship previously formed around the irrigation system. How, this paper asks, does an irrigation system designed for state-socialist political economy change? How are its material components unbundled, circulated and in what new hydro-social and economic fixes do they become embedded? What local political forms does it create and how do these change?