Presentation short abstract

Using a socio-technical and feminist political ecology lens, this paper examines how land tenure, caste, and gender shape the invisible architectures through which groundwater is known, accessed, and governed in Nepal’s Terai.

Presentation long abstract

Groundwater governance in Nepal’s eastern Terai is marked by deep disjunctions between what is formally recognised as “governance” and the informal, often invisible, socio-technical practices that actually sustain irrigation. Drawing on mixed methods research, including 401 household surveys, multi-season ethnographic fieldwork, and visual documentation, this paper examines how land tenure arrangements, caste hierarchies, and gendered labour co-produce differentiated access to electric and diesel pumps in contexts where groundwater is the primary irrigation source.

I argue that the dominant policy frameworks in Nepal reproduce a radical separation between visible infrastructures (electric meters, subsidies, formal pump schemes) and the subterranean social relations that enable irrigation to function: informal pump markets, shared labour, seasonal leasing, and embodied practices of watering. These layered forms of access constitute what I term invisible architectures, a stacked socio-material assemblage through which aquifers are known, managed, and contested.

Through this lens, groundwater knowledge is not simply technical, hydrogeology, electrification, pricing, but is actively shaped by property relations, migration, and gendered responsibilities. This paper shows how these dynamics challenge state imaginaries of “user communities” defined solely through formal electrification or surface/groundwater distinctions.

By centring the everyday politics of marginal and tenant farmers, the paper contributes to critical debates on groundwater knowledge production, exposing how the separation of visible and invisible waters reproduces inequities, while local practices gesture towards more just, situated futures of groundwater governance.