Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

Based on ethnographic research in Romania’s Bărăgan Plain, this paper shows how drought operates through the breakdown of irrigation systems. Conservation farming emerges as a partial substitute for lost infrastructure, transforming historical neglect into individualised responsibility.

Paper long abstract

This paper approaches drought as both a climatic and an infrastructural condition. Drawing on ethnographic research among industrial farms and smallholders in Romania’s Bărăgan Plain, it argues that contemporary drought is inseparable from the dismantling of socialist irrigation systems and the uneven redistribution of land and responsibility following decollectivisation. Farmers experience drought through soil moisture loss, crop stress, and pest proliferation, as well as through the absence of functioning canals, pumps, and collective maintenance regimes that once buffered climatic changes. In this sense, severe meteorological and pedological drought becomes an infrastructure-mediated drought (Carse 2017), exposing an agroecology historically configured for irrigation. In response, farms increasingly turn to conservation agriculture as partial substitute for lost irrigation systems. This shift, however, requires capital-intensive machinery, chemical inputs, and new forms of farming knowledge, deepening inequalities between farms that can afford such investments and those that cannot. I argue that these conditions give rise to novel socioecological relations in the agrarian landscape, which I conceptualize as agro-socioecologies of drought: the changing relations between soils, infrastructures, technologies, knowledge, and agrarian livelihoods that emerge under recurrent drought. The paper shows how drought transforms infrastructural neglect into individualized technical problems, reframing historically produced vulnerabilities as matters of farm-level or individual competence.