Strategies of the poorest in local water conflict and cooperation -€“ Evidence from Vietnam, Bolivia and Zambia

Mikkel Funder
Danish Institute for International Studies, Copenhagen, Denmark; mfu@diis.dk
Rocio Bustamante
Centro Agua, Universidad Mayor de San Simon, Cochabamba, Bolivia; rocio.bust@gmail.com
Vladimir Cossio
Centro Agua, Universidad Mayor de San Simon, Cochabamba, Bolivia; vladicossio@gmail.com
Pham Thi Mai Huong
Hanoi University of Agriculture, Hanoi, Vietnam; huongmaipham@yahoo.com
Barbara van Koppen
International Water Management Institute, Pretoria, South Africa; b.vankoppen@cgiar.org
Carol Mweemba
Integrated Water Resources Management Center, University of Zambia, Lusaka, Zambia; carol.mweemba@unza.zm
Imasiku Nyambe
Integrated Water Resources Management Center, University of Zambia, Lusaka, Zambia; inyambe@unza.zm
Le ThiThan Phuong
Hanoi University of Agriculture, Hanoi, Vietnam; ltphuong_cares@yahoo.com
Thomas Skielboe
Nordic Agency for Development & Ecology, Copenhagen, Denmark; ts@iwgia.org

ABSTRACT: Media stories often speak of a future dominated by large-scale water wars. Rather less attention has been paid to the way water conflicts already play out at local levels and form part of people'€™s everyday lives. Based on case study studies from Vietnam, Bolivia and Zambia, this paper examines the strategies of poor households in local water conflicts. It is shown how such households may not only engage actively in collaborative water management but may also apply risk aversion strategies when faced with powerful adversaries in conflict situations. It is further shown how dependency relations between poor and wealthy households can reduce the scope of action for the poor in water conflicts. As a result, poor households can be forced to abstain from defending their water resources in order to maintain socio-economic and political ties with the very same households that oppose them in water conflicts. The paper concludes by briefly discussing how the poorest can be supported in local water conflicts. This includes ensuring that alternative spaces for expressing grievances exist and are accessible; facilitating that water sharing agreements and rights are clearly stipulated and monitored; and working beyond water governance to reduce the socio-economic dependency-relations of poor households.

Project politics, priorities and participation in rural water schemes

Barbara van Koppen
International Water Management Institute, Pretoria, South Africa; b.vankoppen@cgiar.org
Vladimir Cossio Rojas
Centro AGUA, Universidad Mayor de San Simon, Cochabamba, Bolivia; vladimir.cossio@centro-agua.org
Thomas Skielboe
International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs, Copenhagen, Denmark; ts@iwgia.org

ABSTRACT: Governments, NGOs and financers invest considerable resources in rural domestic water supplies and irrigation development. However, elite capture and underuse, if not complete abandonment, are frequent. While the blame is often put on 'corrupt, lazy and indisciplined' communities, this article explores the question of how the public water sector itself contributes to this state of affairs. Four case studies, which are part of the research project Cooperation and Conflict in Local Water Governance, are examined: two domestic water supply projects (Mali, Vietnam); one participatory multiple use project (Zambia); and one large-scale irrigation project (Bolivia). It was found that accountability of water projects was upward and tended to lie in construction targets for single uses with already allocated funding. This rendered project implementers dependent upon the village elite for timely spending. Yet, the elite appeared hardly motivated to maintain communal schemes, unless they themselves benefited. The dependency of projects on the elite can be reduced by ensuring participatory and inclusive planning that meets the project'€™s conditions before budget allocation. Although such approaches are common outside the water sector, a barrier in the water sector is that central public funds are negotiated by each sector by profiling unique expertise and single livelihood goals, which trickle down as single use silos. The article concludes with reflections on plausible benefits of participatory multiple use services for equity and sustainability.

Introduction to the Themed Section: Water governance and the politics of scale

Emma S. Norman
Native Environmental Science Program, Northwest Indian College, Bellingham, WA, USA; enorman@nwic.edu
Karen Bakker
Department of Geography and Program on Water Governance, Institute for Resources, Environment, and Sustainability, The University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada; karen.bakker@ubc.ca
Christina Cook
Faculty of Medicine, Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine, The University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada; clcook@alumni.ubc.ca

ABSTRACT: This introductory article of the themed section introduces a series of papers that engage with water governance and the politics of scale. The paper situates the ongoing 'politics of scale' debates, and links them to discussions germane to water governance. We call for closer attention to the inter-relationships between power and social networks in studies of water governance, with particular reference to both institutional dynamics and scalar constructions. Framed in this way, we suggest that the engagement at the intersection of politics of scale and water governance moves the concept of scale beyond the 'fixity' of territory. The paper reflects on the ways in which the recognition of scale as socially constructed and contingent on political struggle might inform analyses of water governance and advance our understanding of hydrosocial networks.

The politics of scaling water governance and adjudication in New Mexico

Eric P. Perramond
Environmental Science and Southwest Studies Programs, The Colorado College; eric.perramond@coloradocollege.edu

ABSTRACT: This paper discusses the scalar politics of the water rights adjudication process in New Mexico (US). Over the past 150 years, water governance in New Mexico has gradually shifted away from communal management towards more individualised 'water rights'. This paper addresses the consequences of this shift for water users while also addressing the literature on the politics of scale and scalar politics. Actors engaged in water governance mobilise scale, and scalar politics operate in different settings, depending on the priorities of the stakeholders. Using interviews, archival research, and institutional ethnography, I illustrate how scale of various kinds is fundamental to the process of water rights adjudication and water governance in the state of New Mexico. Although the academic sense of the politics of scale remains contested, these debates seem largely abstract to most water users, even if they materially and rhetorically engage in multiple levels of scalar politics. The framing of scale arguments ranges from the biopolitics of individual water rights holders, to the new regionalisation of ditches due to adjudication, to considerations at the larger watershed level.

Toward post-sovereign environmental governance? Politics, scale, and EU Water Framework Directive

Corey Johnson
Department of Geography, University of North Carolina at Greensboro, NC, USA; corey_johnson@uncg.edu

ABSTRACT: The EU Water Framework Directive (EUWFD) of 2000 requires that all EU member states "protect, enhance and restore" rivers to attain good surface water quality by 2015. To achieve this mandate, member states divide themselves into watershed basins (River Basin Districts) for the purposes of monitoring and remediation, even if those districts cross international borders. This paper examines three key elements of the rescaling of governance along watershed lines. First, I draw on a cross section of literatures on territoriality of the state and the changing regulation of nature to argue that analyses of the EU tend to privilege the nation-state as an ontological starting point. Second, the EUWFD as a rescaling of environmental gvernance is explored. The third element of the paper considers the relationship between the de- and re-territorialisation of environmental governance on the one hand, and the changing character of sovereignty in the EU on the other. On this basis, the paper argues that the EUWFD represents a hybrid form of territoriality that is changing the political geography of the European Union and that the redrawing of political-administrative scales along physical geographical lines provides evidence of the emergence of a new, non-nested scalar politics of governance in Europe.

State development and the rescaling of agricultural hydrosocial governance in semi-arid Northwest China

Afton Clarke-Sather
Department of Geography, University of Colorado Boulder, Boulder, CO, USA; afton.clarke-sather@colorado.edu

ABSTRACT: Over the past 20 years, agriculture in the semi-arid Zuli river valley in Northwest China has been transformed from subsistence to commercial production. Instead of spring wheat and millet, peasants now grow maize, potatoes, and cabbage for national markets. This transformation has been facilitated by a series of interventions that have rescaled agricultural hydrosocial relations in the valley. Many of these interventions, such as alternative cash crops, do not fall under what is traditionally considered water governance, but have altered peasants'€™ relationship with agricultural water nonetheless. This article (1) calls for a broadening of our understanding of scale in hydrosocial relations that gives more attention to the socioeconomic interactions that facilitate human relationships with water in the absence of the biophysical resource of water; (2) illustrates that state-backed rescaling of hydrosocial relations comprises contingent processes, which may or may not be planned; and (3) examines how water governance can mean examining what people do without water, as well as what people do with water. This article illustrates that a diverse set of state actors govern farmers'€™ relationships with agricultural water in often conflicting ways by rescaling both the biophysical resource of water, and socioeconomic institutions that affect agricultural water use.

Restructuring and rescaling water governance in mining contexts: The co-production of waterscapes in Peru

Jessica Budds
Department of Geography and Environmental Science, University of Reading, UK; j.r.budds@reading.ac.uk
Leonith Hinojosa
Geography Department, The Open University, UK; l.hinojosa-valencia@open.ac.uk

ABSTRACT: The governance of water resources is prominent in both water policy agendas and academic scholarship. Political ecologists have made important advances in reconceptualising the relationship between water and society. Yet while they have stressed both the scalar dimensions and the politicised nature of water governance, analyses of its scalar politics are relatively nascent. In this paper, we consider how the increased demand for water resources by the growing mining industry in Peru reconfigures and rescales water governance. In Peru, the mining industry'€™s thirst for water draws in and reshapes social relations, technologies, institutions, and discourses that operate over varying spatial and temporal scales. We develop the concept of waterscape to examine these multiple ways in which water is co-produced through mining, often beyond the watershed scale. We argue that an examination of waterscapes avoids the limitations of thinking about water in purely material terms, structuring analysis of water issues according to traditional spatial scales and institutional hierarchies, and taking these scales and structures for granted.

Cultural politics and transboundary resource governance in the Salish sea

Emma S. Norman
Native Environmental Science Program, Northwest Indian College, Bellingham, WA, USA; enorman@nwic.edu

ABSTRACT: This paper explores the cultural politics of water governance through the analysis of a new governing body created by indigenous leaders in the Pacific Northwest of North America: The Coast Salish Aboriginal Council. This paper investigates how the administrative structures and physical boundaries of water governance are both socially constructed and politically mobilised. The key moments explored in this article are closely linked to the power dynamics constituted through postcolonial constructions of space. Inclusion of cultural politics of scale will, arguably, provide a more nuanced approach to the study of transboundary environmental governance. This has important implications for the study of natural resource management for indigenous communities, whose traditional homelands are often bifurcated by contemporary border constructions.

Introduction to the Special Issue: Water grabbing? Focus on the (re)appropriation of finite water resources

Lyla Mehta
Institute of Development Studies, Brighton, UK and Noragric, Norway; l.mehta@ids.ac.uk
Gert Jan Veldwisch
Irrigation and Water Engineering Group, Wageningen University, the Netherlands; gertjan.veldwisch@wur.nl
Jennifer Franco
Transnational Institute, Amsterdam and China Agricultural University, Beijing; jennycfranco@tni.org

ABSTRACT: Recent large-scale land acquisitions for agricultural production (including biofuels), popularly known as 'land grabbing', have attracted headline attention. Water as both a target and driver of this phenomenon has been largely ignored despite the interconnectedness of water and land. This special issue aims to fill this gap and to widen and deepen the lens beyond the confines of the literature'€™s still limited focus on agriculture-driven resource grabbing. The articles in this collection demonstrate that the fluid nature of water and its hydrologic complexity often obscure how water grabbing takes place and what the associated impacts on the environment and diverse social groups are. The fluid properties of water interact with the 'slippery' nature of the grabbing processes: unequal power relations; fuzziness between legality and illegality and formal and informal rights; unclear administrative boundaries and jurisdictions, and fragmented negotiation processes. All these factors combined with the powerful material, discursive and symbolic characteristics of water make 'water grabbing' a site for conflict with potential drastic impacts on the current and future uses and benefits of water, rights as well as changes in tenure relations.

KEYWORDS: Water grabbing, land grabbing, resource conflicts, power relations, water rights, hydrologic complexity, reallocation, neoliberalism

Exploring the politics of water grabbing: The case of large mining operations in the Peruvian Andes

Milagros Sosa
Irrigation and Water Engineering Group, Department of Environmental Sciences, Wageningen University, Wageningen, the Netherlands; milagros.sosa@wur.nl
Margreet Zwarteveen
Irrigation and Water Engineering Group, Department of Environmental Sciences, Wageningen University, Wageningen, the Netherlands; margreet.zwarteveen@wur.nl

ABSTRACT: The operations of the large mining company Yanacocha in Cajamarca (Peru) provoke and require a fundamental reshuffling of how rights to water are allocated, resulting in changes in the distribution of the benefits and burdens of accessing water. We use this paper to argue that these changes in water use and tenure can be understood as a form of water grabbing, since they result in a transfer of water control from farmers' collectives and government agencies to the mining company, with the company also assuming de facto responsibility over executing water allocation and safeguarding certain water-quality levels. We illustrate - by using two cases: La Ramada canal and the San José reservoir -€“ the company'€™s overt and covert strategies to achieve control over water, showing how these are often backed up by neo-liberal government policies and by permissive local water authorities. Next to active attempts to obtain water rights, these strategies also include skilfully bending and breaking the resistance of (some) farmers through negotiation and offering compensation. The de facto handing over of water governance powers to a multinational mining company raises troubling questions about longer-term water management, such as who controls the mining company, to whom are they accountable, and what will happen after mining operations stop.

KEYWORDS: Water grabbing, water rights, water governance, mining, Peru

Privatised hydropower development in Turkey: A case of water grabbing?

Mine Islar
Center of Sustainability Studies (LUCSUS) and Centre of Excellence for Integration of Social and Natural Dimensions of Sustainability (LUCID), Lund University; mine.islar@lucid.lu.se

ABSTRACT: This paper investigates how river privatisation in Turkey is deployed to expand renewable energy production and the implications this has for issues of ownership, rights to water and community life. Recent neoliberal reforms in Turkey have enabled the private sector to lease the rights to rivers for 49 years for the sole purpose of electricity production. The paper focuses on the re-scaling and reallocation of control over rivers through technical-legal redefinition of productive use, access and rights; and on discursive practices that marginalise rural communities and undermine alternative framings of nature. In order to actuate hydropower projects, what previously constituted legitimate water use and access is being contested and redefined. This process involves redefining what is legal (and therefore also what is illegal) such that state regulatory mechanisms favour private-sector interests by the easement of rights on property, government incentives and regulation of use rights to water. Through this lens, in some cases this particular privatisation in Turkey can be understood as an instance of 'water grabbing', where powerful actors gain control over use and increase their own benefits by diverting water and profit away from local communities living along these rivers despite their resistance. The analysis is based on empirical evidence derived from semi-structured interviews, newspapers, governmental and NGO reports, and observations during 3 months of fieldwork in Ankara and several villages in North and South Anatolia.

KEYWORDS: Hydropower, water use rights, neoliberalism, privatisation, Turkey

Water grabbing in the Mekong basin -€“ An analysis of the winners and losers of Thailand'€™s hydropower development in Lao PDR

Nathanial Matthews
King's College London, London, UK; nathanial.matthews@kcl.ac.uk

ABSTRACT: There are currently over 60 tributary and mainstream dams planned or under construction in Lao PDR with 95% of the electricity from these dams slated to be exported to neighbouring countries. In the Mekong basin, the structure of the Thai energy sector -€“ the country's lack of domestic hydropower development and the current and planned power purchase agreements between Thailand and Laos -€“ differentiates Thailand from other regional investors. Using a political ecology approach, this paper examines how powerful state and private actors from within Thailand and Lao PDR mobilise power to control the benefits from hydropower while the social and environmental impacts are largely ignored, thereby constituting a form of water grabbing. The analysis shows that the structure and politics of the Thai electricity sector, private-sector profiteering and a strong domestic civil society are driving Thailand'€™s hydropower investment in neighbouring Laos. Thai investments are enabled by Laos'€™ weak enforcement of laws, a lack of capacity to regulate development, the existence of corruption and a tightly controlled state. These drivers and enabling factors combine with short-term economic focused regional development to create opportunities for water grabbing. The winners of this water grabbing are the powerful actors who control the benefits, while the losers, local livelihoods and the environment, are negatively impacted.

KEYWORDS: Hydropower, water grabbing, energy development, political ecology, water-energy nexus, Lao PDR, Thailand, Mekong

Exploiting policy obscurity for legalising water grabbing in the era of economic reform: The case of Maharashtra, India

Subodh Wagle
School of Habitat Studies, Tata Institute of Social Science, Deonar, Mumbai, India; subodhwagle@gmail.com
Sachin Warghade
PRAYAS, Kothrud, Pune, India; and TISS, Deonar, Mumbai, India; sachinwarghade@gmail.com
Mandar Sathe
PRAYAS, Kothrud, Pune, India; mvs.prayas@gmail.com

ABSTRACT: Since the last two decades, economic reform in India is exerting pressure on limited land and water resources. This article argues that sectoral reforms underway in different areas such as water, electricity, and the export sector are giving rise to a new form of water grabbing in the state of Maharashtra, India. This water grabbing is legitimised by the use, application and redefinition of reform instruments such as the sectoral policy statements and laws. Maharashtra, like many other Indian states, has been a theatre for the play of power among different interest groups over control and access to water resources developed through state funding. Dams were built at the cost of depriving the upland riparian communities of their land, water and other resources. The water provided by the dams - which strengthened the political power of the leaders representing the irrigated plains - is now at the core of a shift in regional power equations. Based on case studies of three dams the paper presents these contemporary developments around water allocation and re-appropriation. These developments pertain to the shift from the erstwhile focus on securing water for irrigation to the new focus of securing water to facilitate international and domestic private investments. The paper concludes by arguing that the state is able to legitimise this form of water grabbing due the emergence of a new and grand political coalition and nexus that has emerged at the behest of the ongoing economic reforms.

KEYWORDS: Water grabbing, entitlements, reforms, independent regulatory authority, India

Water grabbing in the Cauca basin: The capitalist exploitation of water and dispossession of afro-descendant communities

Irene Vélez Torres
Department of Human Geography, University of Copenhagen; and the Centre for Social Studies, National University of Colombia, Bogota, Colombia; irenevt@gmail.com, ivt@geo.ku.dk

ABSTRACT: This article examines water grabbing in the Alto Cauca in Colombia as a form of accumulation through ethnicised and racialised environmental dispossession in the capitalist system. Characterised by privatisation and historical trends of exclusion, this violent accumulation model has shaped a particular form of environmental racism leading to negative impacts experienced in historically marginalised Afro-descendant local communities. Analyzing two development projects in the upper watershed of the Cauca river - the Agua Blanca Irrigation District Project and a Project for Diverting the River Cauca - the article concludes that many actors are responsible for the negative effects of the regional development model. These include the state, national and foreign private companies, and powerful international economic stakeholders.

KEYWORDS: Water grabbing, dispossession, Afro-descendants, environmental racism, socio-environmental conflicts, Colombia

Water grabbing in colonial perspective: Land and water in Israel/Palestine

Stephen Gasteyer
Department of Sociology, Michigan State University, MI, USA; gasteyer@msu.edu
Jad Isaac
Applied Research Institute Jerusalem, Bethlehem, West Bank, Palestine; jad@arij.org
Jane Hillal
Applied Research Institute Jerusalem, Bethlehem, West Bank, Palestine; jane@arij.org
Sean Walsh
Department of Sociology, Michigan State University, MI, USA; walshse2@gmail.com

ABSTRACT: 'Water grabbing' and 'land grabbing' have been referred to as a new colonialism, dispossessing small farmers and indigenous people of land and water for the sake of investors. The current 'grabbing' is driven by perceived scarcity of food and sustainable energy, and is enabled by global financial instruments and commodity speculation. In this paper, we argue that while in many ways different, the 'new colonialism' of land/water grabbing may be better understood through analysis of old colonialism. We use actor network and place modernisation theories to analyse the history and practice of Zionist land/water grabbing in Israel/Palestine as an ongoing remnant of old colonialism. While there are clearly unique aspects to this case, there are similarities in processes, such as the narrative of modernising 'barren', 'infertile', and 'undeveloped' land. The ongoing power imbalance in water management and access, the disproportionate burden on Palestinians of growing water scarcity, and the inability of technical fixes to address the problems of relative deprivation may be seen as cautionary tales for current 'water grabbing'.

KEYWORDS: Colonisation, place modernisation, Zionism, actor network theory, water grabbing, Israel/Palestine

How the Second Delta Committee set the agenda for climate adaptation policy: A Dutch case study on framing strategies for policy change

Simon H. Verduijn
Radboud University Nijmegen, Institute for Management Research; s.verduijn@fm.ru.nl
Sander V. Meijerink
Radboud University Nijmegen, Institute for Management Research; s.meijerink@fm.ru.nl
Pieter Leroy
Radboud University Nijmegen, Institute for Management Research; p.leroy@fm.ru.nl

ABSTRACT: In 2008, the Second State Delta Committee, commissioned by the Dutch Secretary of Public Works and Water Management, provided suggestions on how to defend the Netherlands against the expected impacts of climate change, such as sea level rise, longer periods of drought, more intense periods of rainfall and additional land subsidence over the coming two hundred years (Veerman, 2008). In this paper we show that even though no crisis actually occurred, the Second Delta Committee succeeded in three areas. First, the committee managed to create awareness and set the agenda for climate adaptation policy and the issue of safety in Dutch water management. Second, the committee succeeded to a large extent in getting the media, the public and politics to accept its frame and framing of the problems, causes, moral judgments and suggested remedies. Third, the committee has to a certain degree already succeeded in having its recommendations translated into policy programmes. It will be argued that framing strategies were key to the committee'€™s success and that the committee used various framing strategies to convince the Cabinet, citizens and others of the urgency and necessity of implementing adaptation measures. The most important framing strategies identified were adherence to the climate adaptation narrative, using the story of our delta identity, creating a sense of urgency and collectiveness, and creating a crisis narrative.

KEYWORDS: Framing strategies, agenda setting, policy change, crises, climate change, the Netherlands

Environmental injustice in the Onondaga lake waterscape, New York State, USA

Tom Perreault
Department of Geography, Syracuse University, Syracuse, New York, USA; taperrea@maxwell.syr.edu
Sarah Wraight
Onondaga Environmental Institute, Syracuse, New York, USA; swraight@oei2.org
Meredith Perreault
Onondaga Environmental Institute, Syracuse, New York, USA; mperreault@oie2.org

ABSTRACT: This paper examines two interrelated cases of environmental injustice and social mobilisation in the Onondaga lake watershed in Central New York State, USA: (1) the case of the Onondaga Nation, an indigenous people whose rights to, and uses of, water and other resources have been severely reduced through historical processes of Euro-American settlement and industrial development; and (2) the case of the city of Syracuse, New York's Southside neighbourhood, a low-income community of colour, where a sewage treatment facility was constructed as part of a broader effort to remediate the effects of pollution in Onondaga lake. The Onondaga Nation and the Southside neighbourhood are connected by Onondaga creek, which flows through each before joining Onondaga lake. These communities are also linked by shared histories of marginalisation and environmental injustice. Taken together, the cases demonstrate the temporal and spatial continuities of social relations of power, and their embodiment in water resources. Conceptually, the paper brings together the literatures of environmental justice and the political ecology of water resources. In doing so, we employ the concept of waterscape as an analytical lens to examine processes of marginalisation and social exclusion in the Onondaga lake watershed. The waterscape concept, and the political ecology of water resources literature more generally, have much to contribute to the study of water-related environmental (in)justice.

KEYWORDS: Environmental justice, waterscape, water pollution, Onondaga lake, New York State

Seeing like a subaltern - Historical ethnography of pre-modern and modern tank irrigation technology in Karnataka, India

Esha Shah
Department of Technology and Society Studies, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Maastricht, the Netherlands; e.shah@maastrichtuniversity.nl

ABSTRACT: In various avatars the images of pre-modern knowledge and social organisations, also differently described as pre-colonial or traditional, are projected as alternative to the modern technologies and forms of governance not only in India but also elsewhere. I first review a few such representations of the idea of pre-modern invoked from politically diverse positions in order to demonstrate a unifying characteristic among them that form a 'view from the above'. I show how a situated position - seeing like a subaltern - can provide a way forward from the mutually opposing binary categorizations of the pre-modern and modern. Extensively referring to folk literature, I discuss here the historical ethnography of tank irrigation technology in Karnataka that covers both medieval and modern periods. I show how the technical designs of this thousand years old technology significantly transformed from the pre-modern to the modern times and how in each epoch the reproduction of the technology implied the reproduction of radically different social and cultural spaces and, most significantly, social and power relations.

KEYWORDS: Tank irrigation technology, pre-modern Knowledge, anthropology of technology, Karnataka, India

Large dams and changes in an agrarian society: Gendering the impacts of Damodar Valley Corporation in eastern India

Kuntala Lahiri-Dutt
Resource Management in Asia Pacific Program, Crawford School of Public Policy, College of Asia and the Pacific, The Australian National University, Canberra, Australia; kuntala.lahiri-dutt@anu.edu.au

ABSTRACT: This paper traces the gendered changes in agrarian livelihoods in the lower Damodar valley of eastern India and connects these changes to the large dam project of the Damodar Valley Corporation (DVC). The DVC, established in 1948, was one of the earliest dam projects in India. Although it was not fully completed, the DVC project has initiated unforeseen changes in the farming economy. The floods for which the Damodar river was notorious were not fully controlled, and the suffering of people living in the lower reaches of the valley never really diminished. This paper gives a brief description of the river and its history of water management practices and the roles of women and men in these practices. It traces the resultant impacts on gender roles, and outlines the new kinds of water management that emerged in response to the DVC's failure to provide irrigation water when demanded. More specifically, the paper explores the changes in floods, changes in the farming economy, and the impacts of temporary sand dams or boro bandhs on the livelihoods of women and men from farming families in the Lower Damodar Valley. It observes that even over a longer temporal scale, the changes unleashed by large water control projects have significant and gendered impacts on agrarian societies.

KEYWORDS: Gender impacts, canal irrigation, Damodar Valley Corporation, floods, large dams, West Bengal, India

Philip Woodhouse
University of Manchester, UK; phil.woodhouse@manchester.ac.uk

ABSTRACT: The many headlines focusing on 'land grabbing' have distracted attention from the role that access to water plays in underpinning the projected productivity of foreign direct investment in acquisition of agricultural land in developing countries. This paper identifies questions that arise about the explicit and implicit water requirements for irrigation in agricultural projects on land that is subject to such foreign investment deals. It focuses particularly on land acquisition in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), where, for savanna ecosystems that cover some two thirds of the region, rainfall uncertainty is the principal constraint to increased agricultural productivity. The paper argues that, even where land acquisition deals do not specify irrigation, choice of location and/or crop type indicates this is invariably an implicit requirement of projects. It is arguable that private investment in water infrastructure (e.g. for water storage) could provide wider benefits to neighbouring small-scale producers, thus reducing the risk inherent in much of African agriculture. However, it is also possible that foreign investment may compete with existing water use, and some land deals have included provisions for priority access to water in cases of scarcity. Empirical studies are used to identify the mechanisms through which large-scale land investments influence water availability for smaller-scale land users. The paper concludes that, although effects on water resources may constitute one of the main impacts of land deals, this is likely to be obscured by the lack of transparency over water requirements of agricultural projects and the invisibility of much existing local agricultural water management to government planning agencies.

KEYWORDS: Agriculture, land tenure, irrigation, Africa