Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the social values placed on precolonial water management structures in South Delhi and it juxtaposes their idealisation with public disdain over the wasteful and centrally managed post-colonial infrastructures that lead to inequitable water access in India's capital city.

Paper long abstract:

South Delhi was once a landscape renowned for numerous watery oases mandated by a succession of precolonial rulers. These water catchment structures ranged from wide artificial reservoirs known as tālāb to intricately ornate and aesthetically pleasing step-wells, called baoli. Such oases served as sources of nourishment and as centers of recreation and leisure. They aggregated to create a hydrosocial oasis in what was otherwise an arid region. In this paper, I explore the legacy of these water structures as well as the efforts to uphold them as models for a new (or renewed) type of sustainable urban infrastructure in contemporary New Delhi. The methodology for the discussion draws from site visits, expert interviews, and the analysis of water policy documents composed by governmental and non-governmental organizations. In looking to these sources of information, I explore how frugal and communally maintained precolonial water management practices are juxtaposed with wasteful and centrally managed post-colonial water management infrastructures. This discussion includes the idealization of past practices, which contrast with outcries over an emerging urban water dystopia. At issue, I argue, is not merely the material challenge of infrastructural revival; instead, what emerges is the challenge of transforming ideologies around contemporary water management and use. The ongoing legacy of post-enlightenment modernity looms large in the analysis, as do questions of pre- and postcolonial resource ethics. But at the heart of the conversations in circulation is a desire to return to prominence the watery oases that could help usher in a renewed hydrosocial balance.

Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the co-production of knowledge and ignorance with regard to Delhi's water. I detail how their entanglement is tied to both material and bureaucratic practices, perpetuating a "negotiated" state of water that takes longer-term (infra)structural solutions off the table.

Paper long abstract:

State quantifications of Delhi's water supply proclaim some of the highest levels of water access in urban South Asia. However, accompanying such representations are a number of discrepancies and ambiguities, suggesting an appearance of legibility is produced in the absence of data and key calculations. Recent studies of the everyday state demonstrate that the co-production of legibility and illegibility may be more norm than exception, thus requiring a re-thinking of some of the core theorizations concerning biopolitical power and statecraft. This paper examines the co-production of both knowledge and ignorance with regard to the city's water. I show that their entanglement is tied to material and bureaucratic practices that have both arbitrary and deliberate dimensions. Ultimately, such practices perpetuate a "negotiated" state of water, politicizing water at localized levels, while taking longer-term (infra)structural solutions off the table. Consequently, neither poor nor elite residents escape Delhi's ambiguous water supply and face differing degrees of vulnerability to its uncertainty and distributive injustices. This article advocates for discerning the (co-)production of differing types of legibility and illegibility as well as the discursive, material and situated effects of such knowledge and ignorance production with regard to urban water governance in the everyday.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the relationships, spaces, and times associated with an Indigenous Community's fresh water source, exploring the instabilities of water governance and relations to the state.

Paper long abstract:

The Chilean government health agency has repeatedly informed Peine Indigenous Community's Potable Water Committee that their water will only be 'potable' if they add chlorine. If they don't, the government will appoint a professional to manage it. People from Peine speak disdainfully of the Chilean state. 'The authorities', they say, are remote, disinterested and unhelpful, instead; the community is 'like our own state'. As autonomous agents, they call on mining companies operating in indigenous territory to fund infrastructure, health, welfare and education projects that they design and work on. For example, thirty years ago, after striving for a source of fresh water for decades, they found Chaquesoke, a spring located 43 kilometres away, in the foothills of a tutelary mountain named Miñisques. They then spent two years, in communal labour gangs, digging the rocky ground and laying pipes. Peine's project to bring fresh water to town in the mid-1990s relied on some government funding through the newly-created Indigenous Development Corporation established under the Indigenous Law (1993) and funds resulting from the mining industry's growing interest in demonstrating their 'social responsibility', but was completed with local labour. This paper explores the relationships, spaces, and times associated with the flows of Peine's fresh water to show how changes to local, national, and global governance of water are interlinked in unstable ways. It traces the community's historical struggle for fresh water and their recent opposition to its chlorination as an exploration of community governance which is focussed on autonomy and sustained by water.

Paper short abstract:

The hydro-sociality of water in Bangladesh; social property relations embedded in land use and contested notions of water as waterscapes of power: How water is experienced and represented by different actors and implications for irrigation management and construction of social relations.

Paper long abstract:

This paper outlines concerns relating to interpreting the hydro-sociality of water in the context of a multilateral donor-funded engineering project in Bangladesh. (The problem is likened to the well-known ancient Indic parable of the blind men and the elephant). In this sense, large-scale irrigation schemes are characterised by a considerable diversity of representations and understandings across individuals, agencies and interest groups. Many values associated with the development of waterscapes are contested, not least prioritised in different ways: as we find among economists, engineers, systems managers, government and private interests, local water-user groups, landless households, women's groups and so on. How to find a non-antagonistic common understanding to some of the broad issues and concerns among the various actors is a conundrum of contemporary irrigation anthropology.

The crucial concern is social property relations or the historical social relations that are embedded in land use and contested notions of water. Here, we need to understand the hydro-sociality of water; the way that water is entwined with broader social relations and how water is produced by, and simultaneously constitutes, social and power relations. In these waterscapes of power, we need to note: (a) how water is experienced and represented by the different actors/stakeholders, and (b) the implications for how water is managed and social relations constructed.

The paper is based on work for a multilateral-funder in Bangladesh 2016-2017 involved an ethnographically informed study of water distribution systems and the changing farming landscapes in the Ganges Kobadak and the Teesta Barrage schemes.

Paper short abstract:

The paper focus on ongoing contestation of a mining project proposed in the páramo of Kimsakocha. It argues that community resistance is encouraged by the material, symbolical and emotional engagements between communities and the hydrosocial territory, mostly disregarded in environmental governance

Paper long abstract:

This paper aims at exploring what does impending resource extraction mean to people engaged with nature in their everyday lives. Water, society and territory are co-produced generating certain socionatural configurations, known as hydrosocial territories. Conflicts emerge when new actors attempt to reconfigure those socionatures, based on conflicting meanings and understandings of the interplays that configure them. In this sense, disputes and resistance have emerged to the Loma Larga mining project located in the southern Ecuadorian highlands. It is owned by the Canadian company INV Metals and its exploitation is currently being negotiated with the government. Local communities participate in water management and their livelihoods are sustained by the páramo (high Andean wetlands ecosystem) of Kimsakocha. They fear the degradation of the ecosystem and its impacts in their own survival. Communities find themselves contesting the State, as the main advocate of mining as an engine for development, as well as corporate interests.

The paper is based on ethnographic research conducted in Ecuador in 2016. It proposes an understanding of socioecological conflicts through a combination of political ecology and emotional geographies. It is argued that resistance to the mining project and further critique of the deepening of natural resource extraction are encouraged by the material, symbolical and emotional engagements between communities and their socionatural spaces, which are mostly disregarded in environmental governance.

Paper short abstract:

This paper examines Indigenous Australian attitudes to historical and recent dams and water diversions, highlighting the intersection between geographical and historical variation in moral responses to the manipulation of water flows.

Paper long abstract:

Indigenous engagements with water are dynamic and contextually contingent, and contemporary attitudes and environmental valuations are shaped by diverse pre-existing water histories. Geographical variation intersects and interacts with such histories to influence the moral position taken by individuals and groups and their negotiating position as they engage in public debates or decisions about water diversion, management, and use, as well as the tradeoffs and risks of associated negative impacts. This paper draws together Indigenous historical and contemporary perspectives regarding the diversion, damming and manipulation of water sources from tropical watersheds that span Australia's remote north. The cases support the proposition that Indigenous people are often concerned about industrial-scale water diversion and damming. Yet our regional studies also undercut the notion that such concerns emerge from an Indigenous culture that passively responds to the prevailing hydrology, or the idea popular in settler Australia that these hydraulic environments are themselves unaffected by past human action. Indigenous attitudes to diversion and damming are informed by previous experiences of water manipulation, which include the social relations that shaped these practices, at times with demonstrably pre-colonial origins, as well as by contemporary perspectives on the tradeoffs between development, sustainable local livelihoods, and environmental and cultural impact. Our analysis of the Australian context draws on and informs ongoing international debates about hydroscapes and hydrosocial states, large scale irrigated agriculture, aquaculture, mining, and other water-intensive development in regions occupied by Indigenous peoples and experiencing high and increasing water variability.

Paper short abstract:

This paper will consider Akwamu hydro-sociality with the Volta's water and Akosombo Dam. It will explore how the ritual flow of blood is used to assert intimacy between the Akwamu, their waterscape and their gods believed to control water that counter national claims of water as state-controlled.

Paper long abstract:

This paper will consider local Akwamu hydro-sociality with the Volta River and Lake as framed through blood. Specifically, it will consider how the ritual flow of blood is used to assert intimacy between the Akwamu, their waterscape and their gods believed to control water that counter national claims of water as state-controlled. I will explore how blood's flow, as ritually enacted by Akwamu authorities, was thought to induce water's flow in the midst of Ghana's hydro-energy crisis in 2015. My ethnographic case study is the Akosombo Dam as an intersection of national and local hydro-sociality.

Constructed amidst post-independence fervour under President Kwame Nkrumah's leadership, this hydro-electric dam created Lake Volta and resulted in a mass government-led forced resettlement of 78,000 people that vastly altered local human relationships to their water environment.  The state-induced blockage of the Volta's water for hydro-energy, as well as increased internal migration for livelihood opportunities, have threatened to reshape local hydro-sociality as stipulated by the pre-dam Akwamu population.

But water, as a somewhat inherently unpredictable material, can also undermine state-assertions of control. This paper will consider Akwamu interpretations of reduced rainfall to feed the Volta's waterways, which caused a national energy crisis, as a sign from their gods which in turn sought to shift the state of asserted water ownership. I will explore how blood's ritual flow was the medium through which to unblock intimate Akwamu hydro-social relations with their gods and waterscape, and how this countered hydro-social states of national governance over water.

Paper short abstract:

The paper highlights the development encounter between a hydrosocial Indian state, affected indigenous communities, and hydroscapes in North-east India.

Paper long abstract:

A flowing river is a hydroscape of livelihood, rituals and identity, cultural politics and development resistance, affect and emotions for many indigenous communities in India and South Asia. While the Indian state regards rivers to be largely (not exclusively) as a productive resource for irrigation, generating employment and augmenting revenue, a useful waterway for reducing transportation costs, and a renewable source of energy (hydropower) to cater to rapidly growing expanding market economy. The development approach of an active Hydrosocial Indian state is outlined in its policy document North-east Vision 2020, wherein the region is being projected as India's future energy storehouse. More than 160 small and large hydropower projects are upcoming or planned on different waterscapes traversing the ethnically heterogeneous eight states of North-east India. This explains why matters of ecology and river flows, ethnic identity and hydropower projects, relief and rehabilitation of affected communities, and political economy are interconnected in the political ecology of North-east India's rivers and states. This paper draws upon extended fieldwork documenting the voices of all stake-holders, a review of relevant literature on protest movements and people's resistance, and a critical analysis of secondary data to highlight the development encounter between a hydrosocial Indian state, affected communities, and hydroscapes. The argument highlights the contradictions within the trope of sustainable or green development, and its effective use as a discursive tool to delegitimize local resistance of affected communities in the name of national development.

Paper short abstract:

This paper will discuss the differential responses of the people of the state of Uttarakhand Himalaya to the numerous hydropower projects coming up there and the social, cultural, political and religious forces influencing these responses.

Paper long abstract:

Drawing upon a field work carried over a period of four years in the Himalayan state of Uttarakhand in India that boasts of 558 hydropower projects, this paper based on my doctoral research chronicles the mountain people's complex responses to these projects. Given the number of these projects, these being run by the corporate, their practices and the complicity of the state, it will be discussed how the region has become like an occupied territory and an internal colony.

The paper looks at how the responses of the villagers are shaped by their perception of the rivers and forests, embedded in their culture, their songs, and folk tales. The policy discourse, however, remains limited to concepts like that of e-flows and emanates from a very different perspective.

The Ganges and the Yamuna rivers, considered holiest in India, emerge from Uttarakhand hills. However, for the mountain villages, equally sacred are the smaller rivers, hence the resistances are most vibrant when the projects have come up on these. Uttarakhand has a rich environmental history and the people have repeatedly questioned the development in form of hydropower projects and have rallied for the revival of age-old self-governance mechanisms, traditional and sustainable practices of irrigation, electricity generation and water management. However, immediate gains in terms of employment and compensation are also valued by certain. This paper will delineate these nuances in the responses to the hydro-projects and look into the influences of the different socio-political, cultural and religious forces upon these.