Water Resource Management in a Vulnerable World: The Hydro-Hazardscapes of Climate Change 9780755620678, 9781848855366

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To Sharon Lash and Jim Wescoat Jr.

Published in 2013 by I.B.Tauris & Co. Ltd 6 Salem Road, London W2 4BU 175 Fifth Avenue, New York NY 10010 www.ibtauris.com Distributed in the United States and Canada Exclusively by Palgrave Macmillan 175 Fifth Avenue, New York NY 10010 Copyright © 2013 Daanish Mustafa The right of Daanish Mustafa to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patent Act 1988. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or any part thereof, may not be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. ISBN: 978 1 84885 536 6 A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library A full CIP record is available from the Library of Congress Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: available Designed and typeset by 4word Ltd, Bristol Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY

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Illustrations Figure 1  The Indus Basin and its major irrigation and power infrastructure 28 Figure 2  A typical village watercourse inlet (moga) in central Punjab Province, Pakistan 53 Figure 3  The Indus Basin and its major irrigation and power infrastructure 71 Figure 4  Field study area in Tehsil Kabirwala, district Khanewal, central Punjab Province, Pakistan 74 Figure 5  An adobe house of a small farmer, on an elevated plinth in the River Ravi flood plain, central Punjab Province, Pakistan 81 Figure 6  Schematic representation of the log linear analysis and statistically significant associations 85 Figure 7  Lai flood plain in the Rawalpindi/Islamabad conurbation 102 Figure 8  Gender-disaggregated responses to the question about the most pressing issues in the Lai flood plain, by the survey respondents 109 Figure 9  Gender-disaggregated distribution of solutions identified by survey respondents to address the flood hazard in the Lai flood plain 113 Figure 10 Pre-2001 floods; upstream view from the Dhok Naju Bridge on the Lai 121 Figure 11 Post-project upstream view from the Dhok Naju Bridge. Notice that the deposition is ongoing on the inner loop of the meander 122 Figure 12 After the project view of the meander in 2011, where it seems to have returned to its pre-project shape and configuration 122 Figure 13 Bank of the Lai in the aftermath of the demolition of some structures to remove encroachments from the flood plain 123

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Illustrations Figure 14 Foundations of the Dhok Naju Bridge in the aftermath of the channel dredging 124 Figure 15 The straightened meander of the Lai near Liaqat Bagh in Rawalpindi 124 Figure 16 Upstream view of the Lai from Chaklala Bridge, downstream from Liaqat Bagh 125 Figure 17 Schematic diagram of the structure of a karez 135 Figure 18 Map of Balochistan with the study villages indicated 137 Figure 19 A wall calendar in one of the study villages in Qilla Saifullah 138 Figure 20 Map of Nakhchivan Autonomous Region in Azerbaijan 140 Figure 21 Distribution of responses to the question on reasons for continued survival of karez irrigation in study communities 143 Figure 22 Distribution of responses to the question about disadvantages of tubewell irrigation in study communities 145 Figure 23 A contentious community meeting in Gasim Gaybali, Nakhchivan 159 Figure 24 Map of Belize 167 Figure 25 Distribution of survey respondents in Belize City 168 Figure 26 Distribution of responses to questions about water quality and reliability by the survey respondents in Belize City 175 Figure 27 Proportions of people who spend as much or more on domestic water supply than on the other household expenses 178 Figure 28 Major river basins of the western United States and key storage infrastructure 188

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Tables Table 1 Number of tawan and Section 68 cases in the Sidhnai subdivision 64 Table 2 Number of tawan and Section 68 cases in the Shorkot subdivision 66 Table 3 Conceptualization of power and property relations 77 Table 4 Significance of the source of power under each mode/social structure 77 Table 5 Water distribution schedule in Khaji Ahmed Kahriz, Ordubad city 157 Table 6 Basic water tariff comparison between WASA and BWSL 177

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Acronyms ADB Asian Development Bank AWDI American Water Development Inc. BRBD Bambanwala-Ravi-Bedian-Dipalpur BRSP Balochistan Rural Support Programme BuRec Bureau of Reclamation BWSL Belize Water Services Limited CCB Chaklala Cantonment Board CDA Capital Development Authority CENTO Central Treaty Organization CSS Central Superior Services GCM general circulation modelling GEC global environmental change GoB Government of Balochistan GoB Government of Belize GoP Government of Pakistan IOM International Organization for Migration IPCC Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change IUCN World Conservation Union IWT Indus Waters Treaty JICA Japan International Cooperation Agency KPK Khyber Pakhtunkhwa l/p/d litres per person per day MAF million acre feet MENA Middle East and North Africa MNA (Pakistan) Member of the National Assembly MPA (Pakistan) Member of the Provincial Assembly NGO non-governmental organization NWFP North Western Frontier Province PARC Pakistan Agriculture Research Council

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Water Resource Management in a Vulnerable World PID provincial irrigation department PIDA Provincial Irrigation and Drainage Authority PIDA Punjab Irrigation and Drainage Authority PIEDAR Pakistan Institute for Environment and Development Action Research PML-Q Pakistan Muslim League (Q) PMU Project Management Unit PPAF Pakistan Poverty Alleviation Fund PPN popular privatization narrative PRA participatory rural appraisal PUC Public Utilities Commission RCB Rawalpindi Cantonment Board RDA Rawalpindi Development Authority SDO sub-divisional officer SEATO South East Asian Treaty Organization TMA Tehsil Municipal Administration VO village organization WASA (Belize) Water and Sewerage Authority WASA (Rawalpindi) Water and Sanitation Authority

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1

Introduction: Hydro-hazardscapes of Modernity

To construct a coherent narrative of water, climate, society and human values is to have multiple ideational and topical balls in the air while skating on a frozen river. As scientists claim rigour in understanding water and climate, humanists offer nuance in apprehending complexities of society and human values. Intellectual cross-fertilization between the epistemic communities engaged with each of the above topical areas is nascent and somewhat piecemeal. This monograph is an attempt at an intellectual inventory of approaches to water and climate, and then an admittedly reckless attempt at offering a new synthesis – hydro-hazardscapes – that may be more useful in negotiating the two most pressing challenges of modern times: climate change and access to water. Lest the reader be already tempted to put the book down as yet another exercise in stratospheric theoretical contemplation, let me reassure that after contemplation just in this chapter, the book will return to the bottom of the troposphere and draw upon empirical examples from South Asia, Caucasus, Central America and North America to make the case for how the hydro-hazardscape approach may indeed help make better sense of human geographies at the intersection of water, climate and environmental hazards. Anthropogenically driven climate change, broadly known as global environmental change (GEC and referred to as such from hereon), has been called one of the most pressing challenges of our times by practically

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every major world leader at the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century. While many on the political right in the affluent North continue to doubt the science attributing long-term changes in the climate to carbon emissions from fossil fuel burning, the scientific evidence, as synthesized by the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has continued to become more convincing in favour of the existence of human-induced climate change. At the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, climate change sceptics have largely been marginalized, even if they get an occasional lift from communicational gaffes,1 or sloppy use of sources on the part of the climate science community.2 The future state of access to water resources and the frequency and intensity of environmental hazards have become the two key issue areas through which the substantive challenges that GEC may bring are articulated and comprehended by both the experts and the public. Access to water resources is considered to be the locus of the climate problematic here, not only because of water’s key role as the non-substitutable resource but also because of its cultural, ideational and social valence. The articulation and understanding of issues surrounding climate, water and hazards, however, is materially and culturally mediated, hence the apparent disconnect between what we know to be prudent and responsible, and our contradictory actions and behaviour. The key argument here is predicated upon the philosophical assumption that thought and action, while mutually codependent, are not necessarily consistent. Thought is mediated by material and cultural conditions to translate into action. It is only through an engagement with the complex mediations of culture and material conditions that one can chart a way forward. I take an inventory below of multiple perspectives on water and climate change that help us to understand sociocultural and material mediations. This engagement will help us distil insights on water resource geographies across local, national and international scales.

Geographical Perspectives on Climate Equitable access to water for basic sustenance and hygiene, and then for livelihoods, has been a conflict-ridden challenge for humanity, even under 2

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Introduction

notionally normal circumstances. This is assuming that there is such a thing as a normal circumstance, which as will be discussed later is a problematic assumption in itself. The water challenge, however, is further accentuated by the late modern challenge of climate change, which I argue is perhaps the keenest reminder of the fallacy of normality or of its extension into the future. As Leichenko and O’Brien (2008: 7) remind us, climate change research and its discursive agenda is premised upon the belief that ‘human activity is changing natural, life supporting processes’ which ‘in turn affect human societies through impact on human lives, infrastructure, resources and ecosystem services’. The climate change research agenda and discourse according to them has three strands in it. The most well-known and influential biophysical discourse mostly uses atmospheric modellingbased research to draw attention to the need for curtailing greenhouse gas emissions and to adapt to future climate change scenarios. Not only are there considerable disagreements between different modelling scenarios but there is also uncertainty within individual scenarios on the geographical scale, location and magnitude of changes in climatic conditions (IPCC, 2007). Consequently, while it is wise to be attentive to climate modelling scenarios for future planning, relying exclusively on them will probably be a mistake. The only certainty that the biophysical discourse can offer is that the normal conditions based upon historic mean atmospheric conditions are not going to hold into the future. Therefore, we can also be assured that the water challenge, which is codependent on climate, is likely to be accentuated as well, even from a relatively limited biophysical perspective. The second strand – human–environment discourse on GEC – on the other hand responds to the critique of the biophysical discourse’s tendency to treat human and biophysical systems as conceptually separate realms. This discourse instead integrates biophysical and social vulnerability to understand the distribution of impacts of GEC within societies. The human–environment discourse has also been called the ‘new sustainability science’, but its ‘implicit view of politics that emphasizes democratic process, transparency and open public debate’ (Leichenko and O’Brien, 2008: 18) has come under critique from two strands of research – ecofeminism and political ecology under the third ‘critical discourse’ on GEC (Leichenko and O’Brien, 2008). While the human–environment 3

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discourse emphasizes scientifically informed, open and rational debate as a pathway to addressing the GEC-associated challenges, the more critical discourse stresses the importance of differences in power between different social actors and social structural conditions that prevent against rational and optimal outcomes. The critical discourse, with its Marxist structuralist and critical realist intellectual moorings, helps us navigate the geographies of power within which GEC’s impacts and differential access to water is experienced. While the new sustainability science may plead for action because ‘we are all in the same boat’, the critical discourse acidly observes that true as that may be, we are not riding in the same class. Individual and collective behaviour is not a matter of choice for the vast majority of humanity, whose lives and actions are constrained by economic, social and political factors along class, ethnicity, gender and religious lines. Disproportionate resource use by the powerful is facilitated by predatory social practices. It is these social practices that are the main cause of misery for the powerless majority as well as the key driver of the GEC, water- and environmentrelated challenges. The seemingly simple but socially transformative call for attention to social power dynamics – driven by historically determined differential access to resources and means of production, and motivated by the desire to have still greater control over resources – has a long pedigree in human intellectual history. But there is growing recognition that even the people travelling first class don’t necessarily have the complete freedom of action that their materially privileged position on the global, national or local scale would suggest. Instead they do seem to suffer from a cognitive disconnect between what they believe and how they act. The dissonance between what humans know and how humans act vis-à-vis the socioecological challenges of GEC and accompanying changes in geographies of access to water has recently been the subject of a more nascent cultural discourse. The cultural turn invites us to engage with human habits of thought in explaining climate change mitigation and adaptation behaviour to complement the more materialist proclivities of the critical discourse. One of the earliest engagements in a cultural mode with the GEC problematic was by Wescoat (1991) in the context of climate change in the Indus Basin of Pakistan. He proposed four conceptual approaches – climate scenario assessment, critical water management problems, historical 4

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Introduction

antecedents and analogies, and Muslim political reconstruction – in the first volume of what is now a flagship journal, Global Environmental Change. Of the four approaches, climate scenario assessment has received the most attention and funding. The glamorous high science of atmospheric physics, cutting-edge computing and general circulation modelling (GCM) is the primary way we know about, and engage with, climate change. While many in the South pay polite attention to these scenarios, especially when there is donor money involved, there is little internalization or sense of urgency about climate change science and scenarios based on that science. Instead, the focus of the policy makers and the people in the South are on critical water management problems. After all, it is a well-known but rarely stated secret that Norway and Britain will be able to adapt to climate change better than Afghanistan or Bangladesh, for example. The prospect of water stress 50 years in the future is hard to get concerned about when water stress today is a clear and present danger to the life and livelihoods of millions. Wescoat (1991) argues that maybe engaging with present-day water management issues is a better guarantee towards future resilience against climate change. Equitable, ecologically sustainable and socially just geographies of access to water here and now may yet be the best preparation for many societies of the South to face the uncertainties associated with GEC. There will be more on this later in this chapter. As I stated earlier, greater uncertainty is something we have to get used to in a climate change future. But the cultures and populations of most of the global South (and in the not so distant past, of the global North as well) are no strangers to uncertainty. There is a wealth of anecdotal, historical and protohistorical knowledge to be harvested on how communities and societies have coped with uncertainty and climate variability (Wescoat, 1991). Social and technological adaptations of societies to environmental stresses or even social or political upheaval may yet be relevant to adapting to GEC. Could it be more fruitful to find out about the future by learning from the past? And finally, in a cultural mode, what Wescoat (1991) calls Muslim political reconstruction, I restate as ‘politico-cultural reconstruction’ in a secular sense. In making the case for this cultural approach, Wescoat alludes to the set of ethical and cultural standards of societies. He argues that violation of those ethnical standards under the conditions of (forced?) 5

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developmental mod-ernity is causing the problems that we are witnessing. After all, could it be that the tacit endorsement of greed as a basic principle of modern capitalist accumulation by the southern modernist elites is actually at the heart of the water stress for the poor in the South and even in the global North? Could it be that when a farmer in Pakistan or Mexico laments that people no longer have a sense of community or that society has become predatory and exploitive, they are not just weaving an old wives’ morality tale but are rather expressing an angst about the passing away of a different world of values, meaning and relationships (for example, see Mustafa and Qazi, 2008; Eakin et al., 2010)? Maybe it is engagement with that cultural perspective on resources and climate change that has the most potential in terms of including the widest number of people on a debate on climate adaptation and mitigation. In terms of the relative merits and potential of each of the approaches, Wescoat (1991: 394) himself states: The four approaches discussed here remain at an early stage of development. Many studies have used the climate scenario approach [which alone is no longer in an early stage of development]. Some have examined critical water problems, or drawn analogies from past experience. Very few have explored indigenous political and cultural perspectives on climate change. None, to my knowledge, has asked which approach has the highest priority, or how different approaches might be coordinated? If we ask who has the most at stake in the event of climate change and which approach deals most directly with those stakes, then the critical water problems and cultural approaches emerge as the most important. Climate scenario assessment can identify the stakes and raise the consciousness of water managers, but it is doubtful that scenario assessment would ever be the principle guide for action.

Wescoat’s earlier caution against faith in climate high science went unheeded by the GEC researchers. There continues to be fascination bordering on awe of high climate science’s knowledge claims, and persistent belief in its potential to change minds and actions. One of the high priests of climate science and former director of the prestigious Tyndall Climate Research Centre, Mike Hulme (2008a, 2008b, 2009), recently echoed Wescoat’s critique of climate high science and reminded us that in fact, cultural 6

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Introduction

mediations of the climate change message will be the ultimate arbiters of behavioural and policy change. Climate change is not just about getting a few recalcitrant right wingers to buy into the reality of the unfolding biophysical challenge or getting the public to behave more prudently or ethically. Rather, as the above brief review indicates, it is about challenging the structures of thinking and practice that produce and reinforce social geographies, individual and collective behaviours, and our perceptions of who we are and who we want to be. With an appreciation of the depth of the intellectual challenge posed by GEC, I turn to the state of intellectual play in the water resources field below.

Geographical Perspectives on Water Concern with explaining and then modifying water resources geographies has played out across spatial scales, from the somewhat alarmist tenor of the global scale research to the international scale research concerned with issues of war and peace, and relative power between states, to the more neo-realist and Marxist national and sub-national scale research, to the pragmatic and post-structuralist informed work on the basin and the local scale. Topically, the water resources field has encompassed multiple sectors (for example, water supply and sanitation, irrigation, groundwater, flood hazard and drought). It must be acknowledged that a comprehensive review of the water resources field, with all of its bewildering array of agendas and intellectual perspectives, would probably require a book or many books in itself. The point of this brief synthesis is not to be comprehensive across disciplines. The objective rather is to map geographical research in the human–environment tradition – which provides the broadest intellectual umbrella to shelter the diverse research agendas across spatial scales in the water field. Much of water resources research in the human–environment tradition started with the pioneering work from the mid-twentieth century through the beginning of the twenty-first century by the great American geographer, Gilbert White. Water resources were the domain of engineers, 7

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lawyers and natural scientists at the beginning of the twentieth century. Gilbert White and his students’ work helped broaden the field significantly from engineering concerns to include social issues of individual and institutional behaviour and perception (Kates and Burton, 1986a, 1986b). White’s work (for example, White, 1968, 1973b; and L’vovich and White, 1995, among others) and the behaviourist or human ecology tradition in water resources research that followed in his footsteps were criticized for theoretical and ideological ambivalence. Wescoat (1992) addressed these critiques and argued that Gilbert White and the human ecological tradition in water resources research was, in fact, steeped in American pragmatism. The pragmatic research tradition in water resources, especially as it was developed by White, was concerned with identifying and improving the process through which the practical range of choice in water resources management could be distilled from a theoretically infinite range of choice. The range of choices is constrained by individual and collective perceptions, which determine behaviour, which in turn limits or expands choices. The key pragmatic problematic, then, is how does one convince people with different perceptions and hence patterns of behaviour to come upon a shared reality so as to make optimal choices among the available ones? The pragmatic answer is that through rational discussion, improved scientific understanding and democratic discourse, decision makers and society can and will arrive upon optimal solutions to vexing water problems (Wescoat, 1987, 1992). Being that the pragmatic water research has been concerned with applied public policy, and enlightened discourse between decision makers and the general public, it is hardly surprising that it should put such stock in rationality and democracy. The realist critique, however, reminds us that social life is not populated by rational subjects, nor scientific intellectual leadership in a democratic polity (Proctor, 1998). The pragmatic response to the criticism of its apparent neglect of politics and structural conditions that confound choice has been weak even on pragmatic grounds, but then again the critique has not fully appreciated the different philosophical premise of ragmatic enquiry either (Wescoat, 1987; Proctor, 1998). The pragmatic strand in water resources research, as per the concerns of the signature pragmatist John Dewey, has been premised on the key philosophical suppositions of: 8

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Introduction

1. learning from experience; 2. hazardousness of life; 3. quality of research and knowledge as a function of its practical relevance; and 4. public discourse and democracy (Wescoat, 1992). Pragmatic water research consistent with the above broad tenets has had strong emphasis on ex-post analysis of water projects to: inform future water policy; focus on flood and other water-related hazards as central to water research; give attention to policy relevance of inquiry; and allow free and open debate. Of the above themes the hazardousness of life is particularly important insofar as it helps us move away from the pervasive bias towards thinking based on ‘average conditions’ and decision making in water resources. Attention to hazardousness of life re-centres environmental extremes as an integral part of human experience instead of anomalies to be either assumed or engineered away. This theme, along with public discourse and democracy, is a key building block of the hydro-hazardscape perspective that will be developed later in this chapter. Largely out of a critique of the Pragmatic mode of inquiry in water resources and hazard field emerged the more political economic approaches under the conceptual rubric of political ecology. The new radical critique drew attention to social structural factors such as ethnicity, gender, class, global political economy and power relations, which not only limited access to resources for certain groups of people but also made them differentially more vulnerable to suffering damage from environmental extremes and then allowed them limited capacity to recover from the damage (Waddell, 1977; Hewitt, 1983; Susman et al., 1983; Bohle and Watts, 1993; Wisner et al., 2004). The concern with social structural factors and social power relations in limiting access to resources was to resonate particularly in the water field at the local level in terms of access to irrigation and flood hazard, and then again with regard to water supply privatization in the global South (Swyngedouw, 1995; Mustafa, 1998; Bakker, 2005). A quite different body of work by Wittfogel (1955, 1957) pointed to the historic centrality of water resources development in the evolution and maintenance of social and political structures. Wittfogel describes water 9

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resources management systems as the primary instrument for the state and its defining power structures to produce and reproduce themselves. His notion of hydraulic civilizations, however, ascribes a causal centrality to waterworks, which is too simplistic and deterministic. Water resources management and control systems, although extremely important, are by no means the sole drivers of social life. Their effect instead is mediated by a host of historical, cultural and political economic factors that produce and then reproduce social geographies. The concern with the macro-international scale impact of water resources on water politics has been articulated more recently within the context of the water wars thesis. Thomas Homer-Dixon is one of the more influential proponents of the environment and security nexus, but his formulation of the nexus describes population growth as an integralcausative component of the nexus, where environmentally-induced conflict and violence is mediated by environmental scarcity (Homer-Dixon, 1994; Homer-Dixon and Blitt, 1998). The population, environmental scarcity and conflict model has become the dominant paradigm for understanding the environment and security nexus, and is at the core of the water wars thesis. In his later work, Homer-Dixon (1999) posits that maldistribution of resources, environmental degradation and population growth can all equally contribute to potential social instability and conflict. The demographic pressure part of the model is problematic at best and counter-productive at worst. Scholars like Hartmann (1999) point to the analytical obfuscations, devaluation of civil society, legitimating and normalizing of injustice, and even sanctioning of thinly disguised racism and sexism, as the main pitfalls of accepting the model. Many have also outlined detailed comments against accepting population growth as the driving force for environmental degradation (for example, see Smith, 1991; Mies and Shiva, 1993; Peet and Watts, 1996; Silliman and King, 1999). Even in Homer-Dixon’s (1999) formulation, the weight of evidence points to distributional inequities in causing ‘ecological marginalization’ of the majority of the unprivileged in most societies; yet somehow, absolute demographic pressures and average resource distributions per capita continue to feature prominently in his conclusions; for example:

10

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Introduction Ecological marginalization occurs when unequal resource access combines with population growth to cause long-term migrations of people dependent on renewable resources for their livelihood. (Homer-Dixon, 1999: 177, emphasis added)

If the bulk of environmental conflict and instability is indeed the outcome of distributional factors, then what is the point of smuggling the old wine of population growth as a driver of resource depletion (Homer-Dixon, 1999) in the new bottle of ‘environmental scarcity’? According to many scholars – for example, Peet and Watts (1996) – to switch focus from political economic factors affecting access to resources is in fact tantamount to turning a blind eye to the injustices at the heart of producing affluence for the few at the expense of scarcity and misery for the many. Beyond the conceptual objections to the ‘water scarcity equals conflict over water’ idea, even on its own terms the idea of water wars has been challenged and found wanting. Wolf (1997, 2002) argues that based on empirical evidence, there is a much greater chance of transboundary water conflicts being resolved through collaboration than armed conflict. Others, like Amery (2002), while analysing the short-lived hysteria in Israel over a local water development project in Lebanon on the Wazzani Spring – a tributary of the Jordan River from which Israel draws 60 per cent of its water resources – argue that conflict over water continues to hold the potential for turning violent. More recently, Zeitoun and Warner (2006), in explaining their hydro-hegemony framework, have drawn attention to the fact that lack of overt armed conflict does not mean that asymmetries of power at the international level do not play a role in water management. Conceptually the hydro-hegemony thesis draws its intellectual capital from the somewhat odd coupling of Antonio Gramsci’s theorization of power as hegemony with a neo-realist (in the international relations sense) understanding of states’ and state-like actors’ behaviour in the international arena. Using case studies of the Jordan, Nile, Tigris and Euphrates River Basins, Zeitoun and Warner (2006) argue for a hydro-hegemony framework where the more powerful riparian individuals impose unfavourable water agreements on the weaker by a threat of the use of force, or through superior bargaining or discursive power. The idea is that, under hydro-hegemony, 11

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the militarily and economically more powerful actor – Israel, for example – imposes unfavourable terms upon the weaker parties such as Jordan or the Palestinian authority through a deployment of superior bargaining and discursive power. They define hegemony in a Gramician sense as coercive power, which is legitimized by the consent of the party being subjected to the power. Their framework provides important insights to understanding instances of asymmetric transboundary water negotiations. The notion of some sort of Palestinian consent or subjection to superior Israeli power/knowledge for accepting unfavourable terms in water negotiations is, however, questionable. Without quibbling too much with the nomenclature, maybe what Zeitoun and Warner (2006) want to talk about is hydro-dominance rather than hydro-hegemony. An alternate explanation for lack of apparent violent conflict over water is the virtual water thesis. The basic argument of the ‘virtual water’ thesis is deceptively simple. Formulated in the context of water ‘scarce’ countries of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), which have been the prime candidates for water wars, Allan (1998) explains the absence of water wars by hypothesizing that these countries relieve their water stress by importing food and agricultural products, which are really imports of the water that it took to produce them, from the international market. The thesis focuses on the agricultural sector at the national and international scale because typically in most countries the agricultural sector accounts for more than 90 per cent of water use. A virtual water concept is not just a description of a biological reality of water use in biomass production, but has a strong prescriptive element to it as well. Virtual water should be part of a water management strategy of a country because, firstly, it is a politically silent and hence socially stabilizing strategy for meeting water ‘scarcity’. People will not revolt or cause trouble as long as they get fed, without necessarily caring if the food is produced domestically or internationally. Secondly, it draws attention to the water footprint, or the amount of water required to produce different commodities, and hence further legitimizes the water demand management and efficiency ethos. Lastly, virtual water as part of a country or region’s water management strategy is a recipe for geopolitical stability, because it keeps water scarcity from developing into a water war (Allan, 1998; Roth and Warner, 2008; Zeitoun et al., 2010). 12

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The concept has spawned considerable interest in the water resources field, mostly from people engaged in international or sub-national regionalscale water politics and economics. Studies of virtual water flows across countries and regions proliferate, as does accounting of water footprints (for example, see Hoekstra and Hung, 2005). The thesis is certainly an invaluable pedagogical tool in helping understand the consequences of consumption lifestyles on water resources, but there continue to be worries about its policy relevance or intellectual robustness. Wichelns (2010), for example, wonders if countries really trade in commodities and not water, what do we really learn by restating the trade in water terms? Why should we not also talk about other factors of production such as labour, land, energy and so on? What do we learn by terms such as blue, green and brown water instead of soil moisture, groundwater, irrigation water, etc.? And if many other factors besides water admittedly feed into policy calculations, how does the monochromatic virtual water packaging facilitate optimal policy decisions? The virtual water thesis is ultimately a rational theory that has generally been applied at the meso- and macro-scales, with little application thus far at the micro-farm and community scale. Its progenitor has certainly acknowledged the need to address the unfair global political economy, issues of sub-national redistributive justice and excessive consumption of the elites in the global South (Allan, 2005, 2011). But ultimately the contribution of virtual water to socially just water geographies is likely to be constrained by its rationalist intellectual moorings, and its almost exclusive application at the level of spatial and social aggregates at the macro-national and international scales. The rationalist part of the theory is predicated upon certain assumptions of the existence of an absolute scarcity of water; for example, Hoekstra and Hung (2005: 46), in analysing global virtual water flows, state: ‘It is a fact that some regions of the world are water scarce and other regions are water abundant.’ On the face of it, the statement is not so unreasonable after all: if an individual does not have enough water to drink, then surely there is a scarcity. But if the difference in consumption between rural Africa and the industrialized north in terms of water consumption is less than 4 m3 and more than 100 m3 respectively, then surely there is a hint there that the water scarcity is more social than absolute. If one wants to 13

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grow wheat in the Arabian Desert, there is definitely a scarcity, but if one wants to do camel herding in the same environment, there is probably sufficient water for that. The whole notion of scarcity is essentially based upon the simple arithmetic of dividing estimates of available freshwater resources with the population levels, with per capita water availability below 1,000 m3/ person/year deemed to be water scarcity. This is a simple but problematic notion of scarcity. The sterile mean value is divorced from the cultural and political context within which the scarcity is differentially experienced by people who inhabit the geographies that the number describes. Absolute scarcities, rational inter-sectoral and international virtual water transfers would be great if the world was populated by rational people and power structures – needless to say, it is not. The other key issue is that of scale. Scarcities and water stresses are ultimately experienced at the scale of individuals, households and communities. Understanding how macro-scale water geographies translate into configurations of water access and vulnerabilities, and are in turn inflected by micro-/local-level coping and adaptation strategies, is material to devising pathways for undermining the power structures that create those geographies. Virtual water provides us with little insight on understanding and then undermining those geographies across spatial scales. Analyses limited to the macro-scale may be all very well analytically, but that scale limitation by itself has limited emancipatory potential. This is without even going into the notion of how scale itself is a construction and an outcome of social processes. Nowhere is the need for a focus on the political economic and discursive factors driving resource use and distribution across spatial scales more urgent than in the field of water resources. The sterile per-capita freshwater availability numbers by country may seem alarming (as they do to Gleick, 2000, for example), but they really serve to divert attention from water’s problematic social geography, its extremely skewed distribution across sectors and across social groups, and discursive construction by the power elites as a ‘resource’ to be deployed in isolation from its ecological and social roles towards modernist economic development (Sneddon and Fox, 2006). In the irrigation sector, for example, in this manuscript I offer a realist conceptualization of power to explain differential access 14

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to water in rural Pakistan, which also happens to be congruent with differential vulnerability to flood hazard. Using ethnographic research, I argue that participatory reforms in the irrigation sector being called for by international donors across the world are unlikely to be effective in addressing issues of inequity and hence inefficiency in the water sector without addressing issues of vast differences in power at the micro-scale. Within the groundwater sector, the impact of tubewell-led water management on the resilience of the poor can be seen in Rajasthan and northern Gujarat in India where surface water and groundwater development has been ongoing since the second half of the twentieth century. These regions have witnessed a remarkable increase in agricultural productivity, but at what costs for long-term resilience? The Indira Gandhi Canal, the largest trans-basin irrigation canal, has been criticized for a host of waterlogging and salinity and equity problems (Rao, 1992). In the groundwater realm, depletion of aquifers has been alarming and has forced new and seemingly durable institutional arrangements such as tubewell cooperatives upon farmers in Rajasthan. This could be taken as a sign of emergent resilience but its top-down nature has so far had limited success in practice with too many internal conflicts and mixed results in terms of poverty alleviation (Birkenholtz, 2008). The need for new institutions to help manage the costs and benefits of new technology has spawned new configurations of power and production in these regions. Consequences can be unpredictable, with some reported cases of scheduled caste poorer farmers capitalizing on strong social capital and/or higher quality groundwater aquifers. More often, however, it is upper caste/richer farmers who are best placed to dominate and direct new institutions as well as command access to new technology, and so further solidify their positions and exacerbate inequality. Even in those regions where development has prioritized short-term gain over long-term resilience, agricultural productivity is in decline. Furthermore, because of drought and groundwater depletion, rural indebtedness is increasing, and households are sliding into poverty with particularly insidious consequences for women, who face the brunt of nutritional deprivation as a result (Moench et al., 2003; Moench and Dixit, 2004). Reportedly in the arid parts of Gujarat, for example, gendered nutritional 15

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inequality and selective gender-based abortions have led to male:female ratios between the ages of 6 and 14 years being as low as 1,000:662 – that is, more than a third of the girls are missing in that age cohort (Moench and Dixit, 2004). Linking the micro- and macro-scales in historical surveys of the role of water development in Ecuador and Spain, Swyngedouw (1997, 1999) outlines how water development was the locus of various cultural, economic and political tensions that characterize the modern societies of the two countries. He argues that water development in urban Guayaquil, Ecuador and the national water development in Spain are illustrative of how nature and society exist in an interpenetrating dialectical relationship, which in the case of water development creates geographies reflective of the power relations and hybridized modernities in the two societies. The notion of hybridized modernities and cross-scalar connections between global neoliberalism and local-scale geographies of access to water are thrown into sharp relief in the literature on water supply privatization and commodification. The water sector overall in the last two decades of the twentieth century underwent a paradigmatic shift from engineering-based supply management towards demand management, water markets, conservation, environmental quality and non-structural measures to enhance supplies (Serageldin, 1995; Gleick, 2000; Rogers et al., 2002), particularly in the domestic water supply and sanitation sector. Some of the earliest engagement by geographers with water supply and sanitation issues in the developing world cautioned against uncritical copying of Western technical and institutional standards, and, furthermore, called for treating the domestic water supply as a human right rather than an economic commodity (White et al., 1972; White, 1973b). This notion of domestic water as a human right was to resonate with the next generation of researchers in the water sector. The research on the domestic water supply sector in the 1990s was with reference to the ascendancy of neoliberalism on the global scale and the concomitant rush towards commercialization and privatization of water supply systems, particularly in the urban areas of the North and the South (for example, see Swyngedouw, 1997; Loftus and McDonald, 2001; McDonald and Pape, 2002; Bakker, 2003a, 2003b; McDonald and 16

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Ruiters, 2005). Along with the concern about privatization of publiclyowned water distribution networks to global capital was interest in decentralization of state water management, the role of civil society in municipal and rural water sector reforms, and the impacts of water sector reforms on social power relations (Kaika, 2003; Brannstrom et al., 2004; Budds, 2004). The concern with water supply privatization has been nested within the larger political ecology agenda of critically evaluating the impact of globalization on resource use and social justice. The case of urban water supply is doubly illustrative of issues of social justice and production and reproduction of geographies of power according to Swyngedouw (1997). Bakker (2003a: 338), in reviewing the pathways of water supply privatization in the urban areas of the South, argues that ‘state power did not operate continuously over the urban fabric, but rather in the case of public services was constructed as an “archipelago” highly correlated with socio-economic status’. Swyngedouw (2005) calls the wave of water privatization part of a strategy of ‘accumulation through dispossession’ on the part of the global capital, but a dispossession which is not going uncontested by its poorest victims. Much of the literature on neoliberal-inspired water supply privatization is quite attentive to the institutional and theoretical nuances of both water supply privatization as well as the neoliberal project in general. Bakker (2005) posits a typology of water privatization, with reference to the water privatization experience in England and Wales. Her typology lists commodification (defined above), commercialization and ultimately privatization as the three tiers of neoliberalization of water. Commercialization, according to Bakker (2005: 544), entails changes in management practices that ‘introduce commercial principles (such as efficiency), methods (such as cost-benefit analysis), and objectives (such as profit maximization)’. Privatization, on the other hand, goes a step further towards asserting complete private ownership rights over water and its conveyance infrastructure. Loftus (2007), using ethnographic data to evaluate the experience of commodified municipal water supply in Durban, focuses on how women negotiate the tension between use value of water to fulfil their care-giving roles and the exchange value of water in their capacity as economic actors. He argues, based on the evidence, that the feminist approach opens up new 17

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possibilities for democratic change. Deedat (2002), using ethnographic data as well, documents how poor people first welcomed and were then against prepaid meters when they ended up being deprived of water because of their inability to pay in the rural Northern Cape region of South Africa. An ethnographic approach as used in this type of research, as will be illustrated in Chapter 7 in this book, can convey the nuances of the subjectivities in privatization contexts (instead of some objective reality) and hence engage with the questions of social justice and identity, beyond the narrower question of the efficacy of privatization. While the above literature has mostly been steeped in the Marxist, dialectical and critical realist types of materialist analysis, there is an emerging trend of also focusing more on the discursive aspects of water resources. This is not just in terms of water as a conduit for wealth, culture, community, spirituality and identity, but more importantly the very discursive construction of water as a material resource, commodity, ecosystem service or a compound subject to certain scientifically known physical behaviour. For example, Linton (2008) contests the foundational scientific orthodoxy of the hydrological cycle to explain water’s physical behaviour in the environment. He argues that the hydrological cycle model internalizes the geographical location and historical moment which created it (that is, eighteenth-century climatically temperate and socially modernizing and politically expansionary Europe). He further argues that the nineteenth-century European circumstances do not pertain to the vast majority of the world and people’s experience of water from other parts of the world is different from what the hydrological cycle model suggests. Critiquing water development in the Mekong Basin, Sneddon and Fox (2006) also mobilize the post-structuralist insight of the construction of the basin as a knowable, measurable and controllable resource, which can be owned, divided and commodified. They argue that the water managers’ discursive construction of rivers in the Mekong Basin is akin to treating them as water taps without any regard to the complex physical and social interconnections and relations that they engender. It is this construction that is partially at the core of environmental and social challenges in the basin. It is this post-structuralist moment in water that we will be taking forward to build the hydro-hazardscape framework to inform the case studies in this volume. 18

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Towards a Theory of Hydro-Hazardscapes of Climate Change The pragmatic origins of socially inflected water resources research means that it has always had a strong thematic and conceptual overlap with hazards research, especially when it came to researching flood, drought and other meteorological hazards. As in the water resources field, there were vigorous debates between pragmatists, neo-realist radicals and socialnature-based post-structuralists in hazards research as well. These debates reflected broader philosophical tensions within geography and cognate disciplines between critical realist and pragmatic accounts of human– environment interactions. Addressing this debate, Proctor (1998) suggests that critical realists and pragmatists look at the world in philosophically very different ways. Pragmatists are interested in understanding empirical reality and are satisfied with lower-order truths, which enable them to change a small part of reality. Critical realists, on the other hand, seek to find the structural conditions responsible for particular empirical conditions and are reluctant to suggest solutions to problems, because they fear that such specific solutions ignore important larger truths (Proctor, 1998: 368). I concur with Proctor’s suggestion that the vigour of this debate, with its dialectical tension between pragmatism and critical realism, should be valued for itself. Indeed, the two perspectives do not represent different evolutionary stages of thought within geography but rather important complements. Critical realists, with their concern over structural truths, may be best suited to ‘suggest to pragmatists what can and cannot realistically be done – a very pragmatic consideration’ indeed (Proctor, 1998: 369). A related development to the evolution of the radical school within hazards geography was the publication of Neil Smith’s Uneven Development (1984). Smith argued that contemporary capitalism was producing nature at a global scale because the human relationship with nature under capitalism was governed by exchange value more than use value. Therefore, the earlier distinction between pre-human first nature and human-made second nature was no longer relevant. In fact, the relationship had to be reconceptualized as a materially produced first nature by the process 19

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of labour versus a more abstract second nature that derives from social relations governed by exchange values (Smith, 1984: 55). This argument coincided with the publication of Hewitt’s Interpretation of Calamity (1983), which made a comparable argument for hazards: a pre-human (first) nature was no longer responsible for hazards, but, in fact, human social systems and discursive constructs were responsible for creating the material reality of hazards as well as our knowledge of those hazards as ‘unscheduled’ or ‘accidental’ interruptions of ‘normal’ life. Smith and Hewitt’s articulation of a materially produced first nature and socially constructed second nature under capitalism has been expanded and refashioned in recent years by Castree (1995), Castree and Braun (2001), Demeritt (2001) and Robbins (2001) to highlight the discourses used to construct the reality of nature. This social nature or socio-nature argument does not deny the materiality of such non-human entities as trees, birds and rivers, but rather argues that we cannot separate their material existence from our knowledge of them. This is not to suggest that a human can will a bird into existence, but rather that there is no Olympian point from which we can gain value-free objective knowledge of its existence. The socio-nature thesis is not intended mainly to stand judgment on the truth or falsity of claims about nature – though that is a secondary part of the project – but primarily points out how discourses on nature create their own truths (Castree, 2001). These constructed truths legitimize and enable the enormous transformative power of modern societies to alter and hence socialize nature in a material way (Dove, 1994; Scott, 1998; Dove and Kammen, 2001; Robbins, 2001; Agrawal and Sivaramakrishnan, 2003). The insights of the socio-nature thesis have been nested within the post-structuralist thought popularized by Jacques Derrida (Braun and Wainwright, 2001). However, accusations that this theory demonstrates pointless, postmodernist relativism are largely misplaced (Demeritt, 2003). The chief merit of the thesis, as its main proponents insist, lies in its potential to undermine relations of power and bring about radical change for the better – a very modernist, Enlightenment belief (Castree, 2001; Demeritt, 2003). In that sense, then, the socio-nature thesis coincides with the political objectives of the political ecologists and pragmatic geographers. The social construction of nature thesis emphasizes the discursive aspect of the human-nature relationship and, in the process, 20

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destabilizes classic Enlightenment dualisms of nature/society and culture/ environment (Proctor, 1998). Realist political ecology, on the other hand, emphasizes material relations within the context of a relatively stable nature/society dualism to achieve similar progressive and liberation ends. The differences and paradoxes among pragmatism, critical realist political ecology and socio-nature theory provide a creative tension that not only enhances the analytical robustness of the discipline of geography, but also highlights its practical relevance (Proctor, 1998). I use hydro-hazardscape as an integrative concept to analyse the litany of material, discursive and policy factors that contribute to the production of water resources geographies with their accompanying patterns of differential access to water and vulnerability to the hazards that emanate from it, especially in a climate change context. The term ‘hazardscape’ substitutes for the term ‘natural hazards’, which connotes some external nature as the key causative element in the hazardousness and vulnerability of life. The term hazardscape has also been used before as shorthand to denote multiple hazards in an areal unit (Corson, 1997). My use of the term, however, draws attention to the spatiality of hazards and draws upon the three perspectives reviewed above. The concept of hazardscape is also inspired by the landscape tradition within cultural geography. According to Henderson (2003), within geography, landscape is associated with four dominant discourses: 1. landscape as landschaft, which is concerned with the processes of diffusion and transmission of the material culture elements (for example, housing, farms, fences) that constitute folk cultural forms; 2. landscape as social space – that is, the everyday lived space of neighbourhoods, bazaars, roads and so on; 3. the epistemological landscape, or landscape as revealing human social practice and ideology; and 4. the apocryphal landscape – that is, ‘landscape as a way of seeing, especially a way of seeing which relishes the gaze, that asserts power by privileging perspectival vision, which, far from being a mere way of seeing, informs the actual, material making of places’ (Henderson, 2003: 192; also see Williams, 1973; Cosgrove, 1984; D. Mitchell, 1996). 21

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The landscape idea has strong emancipatory connotations; for example, Olwig (1996: 630–1) conceives of landscape as a ‘nexus of community, justice, nature and environmental equity’, which, beyond a way of looking, is a ‘substantive reality, a place lived, a world produced and transformed, a commingling of nature and society that is struggled over and in’ (D. Mitchell, 2003: 792). The term hazardscape mingles the ‘landscape as social space’ and ‘apocryphal landscape’ ideas to express a similar politically emancipatory concern with both the lived reality and the expert view of hazards. Hazardscape implies a more conscious analytical way of seeing, for example, by a city planner, than the more aesthetic view of a landscape. Further, hazardscape awards a centrality to hazardousness as a part of everyday life, where vulnerability, human–environment interactions and exposure to hazards become exemplars of wider struggles over social justice. The centrality of hazards in social life is a key point here. The term quite actively forces us away from a normalized view of human–environment interactions and instead re-centres the hazardousness of life as integral to understanding human–environment interactions, especially in the context of water management. This is not a call for a pessimistic view of the world, but rather a more realistic view of the world where environmental extremes and uncertainty are not accidents and anomalies to be assumed away in our consciousness and hence marginalized as a guide to action. The pragmatic policy insight here is that the hazardscape view cautions against planning outwards from mean/normal conditions and instead invites us to think inwards from extremes, where uncertainty is not scary but rather part of life to be engaged with. Hazardscape fuses the material and discursive aspects of how hazardous spaces are produced, contested and struggled over. With the above discussion in mind, the term hazardscape may be defined as simultaneously, an analytical way of seeing, which asserts power, and a social space where the gaze of power is contested and struggled against to produce the lived reality of hazardous places. Hazardscapes are therefore constitutive of the ideological filters used to view hazardous spaces and the produced social spaces where those ideologies are contested and struggled over. The hydro-hazardscape perspective, which privileges the hydrosphere-related concerns on climate change with its simultaneous engagement with the material and the 22

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discursive, the powerful and the powerless, and the uncertain and the anomalous, will be illustrated by the case studies in this book, in the hope that it will propose a new policy and research paradigm to negotiate the challenges ahead of us in the water field.

How this Book is Organized The second chapter will highlight the international and sub-national scales of hydro-politics in the Indus Basin with most of the attention to sub-national scales of water conflict in the Indus Basin. Some of the issues covered will be the Indus Waters Treaty negotiations between India and Pakistan, and the subsequent ongoing inter-provincial conflict between upstream and downstream riparians, both in India and Pakistan. The chapter in particular will draw a contrast between the monochromatic modernist engineering discourse that defines the parameters of the international and sub-national hydro-politics in the basin and variegated experience of water use by the people in the basin. The key argument is that much of the present-day conflict stems from the discursive construction of the Indus Basin as a knowable, controllable and divisible resource, whereas in a problematic present and an uncertain climate change future, the drivers of conflict are likely to be steeped in issues of identity, ecology equity and multiple values of water to the people living in the Indus. A discursive reconstruction of the Indus which is more consonant with its complex human ecological reality will suggest pathways for conflict resolution and avoidance that the present dominant discourses are unlikely to be able to facilitate. The third chapter argues for attention to the legal frameworks that sanction and legitimize the state’s water management structures and practices. It does so by critically analysing the Canal and Drainage Act 1873 which is the key enabling legislation for water management in Pakistan. The Act, with slight variations, is also relevant to water management in South Asia overall. In a critical legal geographical mode, it is argued that the state apparatus and its underlying laws do not just have a history but also a geography. The Canal and Drainage Act and its implementation by the state not only have geographical impacts, but have geographical 23

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relations implicit in the post-colonial Pakistani state form and the ideology and functionality of the Act. Formal legal frameworks are a definitional lens that informs state water managers’ perception of reality, and it is this constructed reality that the water users have to subvert in myriad ways. With an understanding of the legal landscape, the narrative moves on to Chapter 3 about the experiences of water management in the micro- and meso-scale in Pakistan. The fourth chapter will present a case study of local-level irrigation and flood management in the canal colonies of central Pakistan. The chapter will highlight the role of social power in influencing both differential vulnerability to flood hazard and access to irrigation water in contexts with different types of power relations at play. The case study material presented will be contrasted with policy-level construction of irrigation and flood management. The chapter’s key arguments are as follows: 1. in Pakistani rural hydro-hazardscapes, different modes of power from a violence-based feudal mode to a largely ideational-based power/ knowledge mode operate in different geographical contexts; 2. depending on the mode of power in a local hydro-hazardscape, particularities of the place and power relations therein will determine the potential success of any participatory reforms; 3. the bureaucratic ethos of water managers in Pakistan are deeply embedded in modernity and notions of technocratic efficiency, which the water managers deem to be privileged vis-à-vis the water users’ subjectivities and contextual experiential knowledge; 4. the social and ideational distance between the water bureaucracy and water users is not only contributive towards geographies of inequity and vulnerability in the hydro-hazardscapes, but also plays a role in further eviscerating the bureaucracy itself. Moving on to urban hazards, the case of a study of flood hazard in the urban Lai watershed in the Rawalpindi/Islamabad conurbation could serve as an exemplar of emerging urban hazards in the global South. The chapter reconsiders vulnerability to contemporary hazards within the context of a globalizing world characterized by the hegemony of technocratic and social modernity. Analyses of the hydro-hazardscape in 24

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the Rawalpindi/Islamabad conurbation reveal that flood victims perceive a much greater range of choice in dealing with the flood hazard than the policy makers. On the other hand, flood managers (typically state agents) see a very limited range of choice because of their modernist technocratic engagement with the local stream-centred hazardscape. With greater climatic uncertainty, it is argued that even today, the hydro-hazardscape in the conurbation is characterized by intense differentials in vulnerability because the powerful technocrats are out of sync with not only the lived reality of the hazard victims but also with the physical complexity of the hydrological system they are trying to control. Analysis through the hydrohazardscape lens helps expand the range of choice, and suggests pragmatic solutions to hazardous situations. Chapter 6 will draw upon case studies of groundwater management in the Balochistan province of Pakistan and the Nakhchivan region of Azerbaijan to investigate the role of indigenous versus modern groundwater extraction technologies in meeting multiple objectives. By specifically focusing on the karez system and its decline in Balochistan and resurrection after virtual extinction in Nakhchivan, the chapter will seek to engage with wider issues of the role of water management in enhancing social capital, which could be used for developmental ends and building resilience against climatic uncertainty. The key concern will be understanding how resilience and economic growth might have a contradictory relationship. The argument is to focus on resilience against droughts and climate change through hybrid traditional technologies as a pathway to long-term social and environmental sustainability in the arid realm. Turning towards the most fundamental of water uses – that is, domestic use and sanitation – Chapter 7 problematizes the experience of water privatization in Belize City, Belize. The chapter outlines how the water privatization experience was inflected by the small culturally Caribbean nation’s recent history of colonialism, conflicted identity and nascent nationalism. Access to domestic water supply and sanitation has undeniably important material consequences, but more than that, under globalization it has important symbolic and discursive value. Those symbolic and discursive values are an important component of Belizean urban hydro-hazardscapes, insofar as they legitimize people’s resistance to neoliberal globalization. The chapter contests recent accounts of 25

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privatization as some inexorable process in which the poor are helpless victims, and instead argues that along with the internal contradictions of neoliberalism, its downfall – at least in the water sector – is no less an outcome of poor people’s resistance to its appropriation of their most basic right to water. Chapter 8 undertakes a critical analysis of the prior-appropriation doctrine governing water management in the 18 states of the western United States. The chapter critiques the doctrine for treating water as private property subject to buying and selling uncoupled from locality. Drawing upon examples of Hispanic and Native American water communities, the chapter argues for a more place-based approach where multiple values of water beyond its economic value for agricultural and industrial uses are also taken into consideration. In the context of global climate change, the American West has a number of forthcoming challenges beyond the existing ones with regard to social equity between different ethnicities and environmental quality. Moving towards a legal regime with a more communal instead of individualized view of water, and a greater attention to building resilience against hazards, will be essential for meeting the present and future challenges. The hydro-hazardscapes of the American West are as much in need of reform as they are in the Indus. The concluding chapter will bring together the key themes emerging from the case studies and analyses presented in the book. The key constitutive concepts of hydro-hazardscapes include social power, a constructivist notion of places and spaces within which water resources geographies are analytically constructed by the powerful and differentially experienced by the vulnerable, and re-centring of the hazardousness of life instead of normality of mean conditions in water resources policy and research. These are the key themes upon which this book will expound. It is hoped that the case for a hydro-hazardscape approach as not just an intellectual exercise but a guide to action will become clearer through the following pages.

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2

Hydro-politics on the Basin Scale in the Indus

Introduction The semi-arid environment of the Indus Basin is home to more than a quarter of a billion people with some of the lowest human development indicators in the world (UNDP, 2011). As if the marginal environment and the pervasive poverty were not enough, deep political fissures across international, sub-national and local boundaries characterize the political geography of the basin (Figure 1). The basin would be a hostile desert if it were not for the Indus Basin rivers and the largest contiguous surface irrigation system in the world emanating from those rivers. Needless to say, just as Egypt has been described as a gift of the Nile, the bustling ancient cultures of north-western South Asia and present-day Pakistan and northwestern India can be described as the gift of the Indus. Given the stakes involved, in terms of the lives and livelihoods of millions of people, the Indus River Basin has been a veritable laboratory for international and national research on various problems with water distribution, development and management, especially as they pertain to issues of water efficiency, equity, hazards and environmental quality (Michel, 1967; Mustafa and Wescoat, 1997; Wescoat et al., 2000; van Steenbergen and Oliemans, 2002). The story of water resources in the Indus Basin is intricately linked to the political geography of South Asia, particularly in colonial and post-colonial

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Figure 1: Political geography of the Indus Basin. 02c-WaterResMan_Chap 2_027-046.indd 28

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times (for example, see Siddiqi, 1965; Michel, 1967; Ali, 1988; Biswas, 1992; Gilmartin, 1994, 1995). But much of the attention to the hydropolitics of the Indus Basin has been either through a historical lens or limited to the international scale, and very little research has been conducted on the contemporary sub-national levels of prevalent and potential water conflict in the basin in the context of climate change. Is there a nexus between security and politics centred on water (hereon referred to as hydro-politics)? What are the implications of a security-centred approach to hydro-politics? What are the implications of conflict over water across inter-provincial and international scales? What are the discursive underpinnings of hydro-politics in the Indus Basin and how might those be understood in the context of climate change? These are some of the key questions for this chapter. The scenario assessments for north-western South Asia are ambivalent at best. Contrary to dire pronouncements on glacial melt and potential water scarcity in the central and eastern Himalayas (for example, see IPCC, 2007), the evidence for the western Himalayas, which are the main source of water for the Indus Basin, are rather mixed. Field-based research, coupled with climate models in the upper Karakorams, has demonstrated that, in fact, glaciers in the upper Karakorams may actually be expanding and the temperature trends might be downwards, contrary to what might be expected under climate change (Hewitt, 2005; Fowler and Archer, 2006). The simulated responses of hydro-agricultural and meteorological systems also point towards regionally inflected intensity and direction of agricultural yields and temperature trends (Sultana et al., 2009; ul-Islam et al., 2009). The science itself points towards the earlier discussion about climate change challenges being more about negotiating and internalizing uncertainty in decision making rather than responding to some known future scenarios. It is with this challenge of internalizing uncertainty in water management in mind that I discuss the contours of hydro-politics in Pakistan, and how a discursive critique of the prevalent approaches might hold greater promise for a more secure and resilient future, rather than a strictly material one. After a brief historical review of hydro-politics in the Indus Basin, this chapter will build a narrative of contemporary hydro-politics in the basin on the international scale, with reference to the dispute resolution between India and Pakistan under the rubric of the Indus Waters Treaty (IWT), and on the inter-provincial scale, with reference to the Kalabagh 29

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Dam controversy in Pakistan, and the water dispute between the Punjab and Haryana states in India. The chapter will highlight the discursive construction of the Indus Basin as a knowable, measurable, controllable and divisible resource divorced from its dynamic hydro-ecology, and even more so from the rich history and contemporary reality of human interactions with it. The narratives on the macro- and meso-scales of the Indus will hopefully point towards the relevance of a hydro-hazardscape approach not only to negotiate climate uncertainty but also to avoid the potential human and financial costs of – not necessarily violent – conflict over the Indus.

Historical Overview of the Indus Basin Hydro-Politics The Indus Basin has been host to irrigated agriculture for at least five millennia, but none of the pre-colonial water development matched the environmentally and socially transformative power of the water development undertaken by the British colonial government in the later half of the nineteenth century (Wescoat, 1999). Coincidentally, much of the massive water development undertaken by the British in the Indus Basin was at least partially motivated by national security considerations, and many of the consequences and conflicts arising from the development of the Indus Basin irrigation system were viewed through the lens of the Raj’s security in north-western India. Whitcombe (1982) and Gilmartin (1994) have ascribed the following motives to massive water development by the British colonial administration in the Indus Basin: 1. increase in food production with an eye towards famine prevention; 2. anticipation of increased tax revenues from the potential increase in agricultural production, which was expected from water development; 3. increasing government control of the local population by encouraging them to take up settled agriculture and thereby minimizing the security threat they might potentially pose to the power of the state; 4. demonstrating control of the environment by superior Western science to the natives, thereby discouraging them from posing any threat to the security of the empire; 5. creation and development of new social elites through the settlement policies that were to follow the water development. These new elites, 30

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who owed their material and political power to their connections with the British Empire, helped further secure British rule. Needless to say, the environment and security nexus, even from a narrow realist perspective of military and political security, was very much in the minds of nineteenth-century water developers and managers. Gilmartin (1994) documents at some length the importance of local-level water management to the patron–client relationship that the British Empire had developed with the local elites and the importance they attached to that relationship, as a guarantor of the security of British rule in north-western India. In fact, the nineteenth-century history of water development and management in the Indus Basin is a story of constant conflict between the security-minded civil administration, which favoured the privilege of the local elite, and the water engineers, who wanted science and engineering to be the fundamental criteria of water management. De facto the security and stable governance-driven agenda of the civil administration generally prevailed over the technocratic agenda of the engineers, in the colonial period as well as in the post-colonial period (Ali, 1988; Gilmartin, 1994, 1995; Mustafa, 1998 and 2002b). Besides the concern with local-level implications of security, the Indus Basin water development, particularly in the upper Indus Basin, was not without conflict even at the regional level. Very early in the history of water development in the upper Indus Basin, the downstream province of Sindh, which was at the time part of the Bombay Presidency, started vigorously objecting to further water development projects in the upper basin (for example, see Michel, 1967). Although the conflict was generally limited to bureaucratic wrangling between the water bureaucracies of the two provinces directed towards undermining each other’s water projects, it was still a foreboding of things to come in the post-colonial Indus Basin. However, the British government was quite sensitive to the implications of the conflict in the atmosphere of nationalist struggle in South Asia during the late 1930s and 1940s (Michel, 1967). The themes of inter-provincial and local-level conflict over water and its implications for national and international security were to carry over into the postcolonial period and were to define the water and security nexus for the post-colonial Indus Basin. 31

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Post-Colonial International Scale Hydro-Politics in the Indus In the immediate aftermath of the partition of the subcontinent between the two independent states of Pakistan and India, the more urgent issue of water distribution between the now-divided Indus Basin between India and Pakistan eclipsed the inter-provincial water conflict between Sindh and Punjab. Downstream Sindh Province and the upstream Punjab Province redirected much of their historical hostility on water issues towards the Indian government’s plans on water development projects on the headwaters of the Indus tributary rivers running through its territory. As a result of the partition of the two countries, on 15 August 1947 the headworks of two important canal systems were left in the Indian territory, while the command areas of the canals were in the Pakistani territory. In the absence of any arrangement for sharing of water in those canal commands, the ‘Standstill Agreement’ provided for maintaining of existing flows until 31 March 1948. Upon the agreement’s lapse, the provincial government of Indian Punjab suspended supplies to Pakistan the very next day. This suspension of water was seared into the Pakistani consciousness as evidence of Indian desire to undermine the fragile new dominion (Gazdar, 2005; Iyer, 2005). The supplies were, however, restored 18 days later and soon after the two countries concluded what came to be known as the ‘InterDominion Agreement’ for continued negotiations for a final settlement of the water issue. The brief episode of the suspension of water supplies in 1948 alarmed the Pakistani water bureaucracy into initiating the Bambanwala-RaviBedian-Dipalpur (BRBD) link canal project for the diversion of Ravi River flows to the Sutluj in anticipation of future closures by the Indian Punjab. An important consequence of this project was demonstration to the Pakistani engineers of the viability of compensatory inter-river water transfers – a lesson that was to be at the core of the Pakistani negotiations during the IWT negotiations (Gazdar, 2005). Thanks to the active mediation and financial support of the World Bank and the Western powers led by the United States, India and Pakistan signed the Indus Waters Treaty (IWT) in 1960, allocating the entire flow of the three eastern tributaries of the Indus River to India and the three western tributaries to Pakistan, with some provision for limited 32

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non-storage uses for irrigation and electricity generation for India on the three western tributaries. The World Bank rewarded (in a manner of speaking) both Pakistan and India with massive aid inflows to build storage and conveyance facilities to provide remedial water supplies for the flows that were supposedly lost to the other country (for details of the negotiating process, see Michel, 1967; Gulhati, 1973; and Biswas, 1992). The resources for water storage and diversion facilities in both the countries were made available in the context of the Cold War geopolitical context of super power rivalry between the USA and USSR. Pakistan had relatively early aligned itself with the US-led Western military alliances such as the Central Treaty Organization (CENTO) and the South East Asian Treaty Organization (SEATO). India, on the other hand, was one of the founding members of the Non-Aligned Movement, which sought to chart an independent course between the two super powers. But despite the trappings of apparent non-alignment, the USA at the time looked upon the Non-Aligned Movement with considerable hostility as a front for proSoviet post-colonial states from the South. In the context of the Cold War rivalries, such hostility towards non-aligned countries was quite understandable, as one was deemed to be in the Soviet camp if one was not in the American camp. Furthermore, the government of India at the time did maintain friendly relations with the Soviet Union and did draw upon the Soviets for military hardware. In that context then, the Western allies led by the United States were willing to make much more resources available to both India and Pakistan to spread their influence in South Asia than would probably be forthcoming in the post-Cold War world. The war on terror in the early twenty-first century, and the perverse strategic significance of Pakistan in terms of preventing it and its nuclear assets falling into radical Islamist hands, however, might provide an additional impetus to Western powers to make available resources for investment in the Pakistani infrastructure, as well as to mediate water conflict between the two countries. The IWT was a trilateral treaty between India, Pakistan and the World Bank. The treaty was concluded in an atmosphere of considerable mutual suspicion, particularly in the context of Pakistan’s paranoia about upper riparian India’s ability and intentions about depriving Pakistan of water. The treaty was negotiated by nationalist engineers, and it did not concern itself with any of the contemporary principles of equitable sharing 33

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of water between riparians (Siyad, 2005). The treaty mirrored the political landscape of the time by dividing the basin between the two countries instead of having any provision for meaningful cooperative management or sharing (Gazdar, 2005; Iyer, 2005; Siyad, 2005). The IWT provides for specific coordination mechanisms through the Indus Commission and dispute resolution was to be stepwise from the Indus Commission, to the two governments, to a Neutral Expert, to the Court of Arbitration. The key feature of the IWT was its extensive technical annexures, which are typically interpreted very literally by the Pakistani engineers, while the Indian engineers tend to emphasize the criteria for a techno-economically sound project design, which is also recognized by the treaty (Iyer, 2005). The massive water development carried out in both India and Pakistan, as part of the Indus Basin Water Development Project in the aftermath of the IWT, provided a temporary boon to agricultural water supplies in the basin. But one of the more obvious hydro-political implications of the IWT was the capacity of the two governments to build infrastructure with more overt security implications. The efficacy of canals as a defensive infrastructure that could serve as tank ditches and hinder enemy movement was not lost on the military planners of the two countries. General J.N. Chaudhury (Chief of Army Staff of the Indian Army from 1962 to 1966), commenting on the prospect of an Indian assault on Lahore on the eve of the 1965 India–Pakistan war, proclaimed: ‘All my experience teaches me never to start an operation with the crossing of an opposed water obstacle; as far as I am concerned I have ruled out Lahore or a crossing at Dera Baba Nanak’ (Nawaz, 2008: 209). But he was made to go against his better judgment when he was ordered to mount precisely such an assault on Lahore by his civilian bosses. The quote, however, illustrates the recognition of the defensive importance of canals and other water bodies in Indian and its twin Pakistani military thinking. The alignment of the BRBD canal was very much dictated by military considerations and it served its defensive purpose quite well during the 1965 war (Nawaz, 2008). On the Indian side, the importance of defensive considerations cannot be discounted in the alignment and operations of canals (for example, the Indira Gandhi canal). The 649-km canal does serve the purpose of a tank ditch in addition to being an irrigation canal. While some have pointed to the ecological and economic pitfalls of the canal, 34

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measures such as encouraging settlement only on its left bank seem to indicate a strong defensive bias in its conception, alignment and operation (Rao, 1992). The military functionality of canals is well known on the Pakistani side as well, where canals are often operated to simulate flooding during military exercises, to the detriment of their supposed function as irrigation water suppliers. The IWT has been relatively successful, at the very least by virtue of surviving two and a half wars (the half war being the military conflicts over Kargil in 1999 and the ongoing one over Siachen Glacier in Kashmir) and frequent military mobilizations by India and Pakistan. But some of the disputes that arose in the context of the treaty are also indicative of the nature of the treaty and the nationalist-driven hydro-politics of the basin being inflected by the engineering discourse. Relatively early on there was disagreement on Indian plans to build the Salal hydroelectric project on the Chenab River. After negotiations at the governmental level, the Pakistanis accepted the project in the 1970s. Subsequently, the Tulbul/Wullar project from the early 1980s on the Jehlum and the Baglihar hydroelectric project from the late 1990s became prolonged sources of disagreement. Because of Pakistani objections, work on the Tulbul/Wullar project was stopped in the 1980s and the project is still a subject of negotiations between the two governments. On the Baglihar project, however, the government of Pakistan invoked the arbitration clause for the first time in the treaty’s history in 2005 (Siyad, 2005). Pakistani objections on the Baglihar were primarily regarding the technical specifications of the ‘run of the river’ project. The project had been initiated in 1992 and the Pakistanis did not object to it until 1999 when they complained about changes in the design of the project on which they had not been consulted. The Indians protested that the changes were necessary for the techno-economic viability of the project. The public view in Pakistan, however, was that India was somehow trying to dam the Chenab River, which was Pakistan’s by virtue of the IWT, while the Indians viewed Pakistani objections as yet another example of their negativism about any projects on the three western tributaries to which they had a right (Iyer, 2005; Sinha, 2006). The dispute was a manifestation of the differing approaches of the two countries’ engineers to the interpretation of the treaty referred to above. In the words of Iyer (2005: 3143): 35

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Water Resource Management in a Vulnerable World Pakistan regards the western rivers as its rivers under the treaty, and tends to look with jaundiced eyes at any attempts by India to build structures on those rivers. Structures give control, and Pakistan is reluctant to agree to India acquiring a measure of control over those rivers, that stand allocated to Pakistan. The treaty gives Pakistan virtually a veto power over Indian projects on the western rivers, which Pakistan tends to exercise in a stringent rather than accommodating fashion.

Pakistani possessiveness about the western rivers notwithstanding, it is also a fact that much of Pakistan’s technical objections to projects such as Baglihar are informed by security concerns, such as India’s potential ability to impound water during low-flow winter months and/or to release excess water during high-flow months to cause flooding in downstream Pakistan. India, of course, protests that: 1. it cannot flood Pakistan without flooding itself first; 2. the structures are necessary for the development of the disputed state of Jammu and Kashmir; and 3. the design elements of the Baglihar are necessary for the safety and techo-economic viability of the project. The Neutral Expert appointed by the World Bank to resolve the dispute gave his binding decision on the Baglihar dispute in 2007, essentially asking India to respond to some of the Pakistani concerns while rejecting others, and therefore allowing the project to go forward with some design changes (Miner et al., 2009). Besides this challenge to the IWT, there was some talk in India in 2002 of rescinding the treaty because of the so-called ‘cross border terrorism’ in India by Pakistan, particularly the attack on the Indian parliament and ensuing mobilization of the two countries’ armed forces. But overall the expert view was that the treaty was serving both the countries’ interests and rescinding it would open a Pandora’s box in terms of bilateral water sharing between India and Pakistan and other South Asian countries that India could ill afford to open (Iyer, 2002). The overall point is that the international hydro-politics in surface water between India and Pakistan are delimited within the bounds of 36

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the IWT. The treaty is a product of its time and would probably not have been negotiated the same way today. Pakistan’s perceived negativism on Indian projects on the three western tributaries do rankle with Indian nationalist elements just the same as Indian river development arouses Pakistanis’ worst fears about their neighbour’s intentions. The trust deficit between the two countries is played out through the technical negotiations between the two governments and rhetorical posturing in the respective media of the two countries. The IWT, however, does seem to moderate the worst impulses of the two countries vis-à-vis each other, and perhaps that is the greatest strength of the IWT. Iyer (2010), for example, in recognition of the strength of the treaty as an example of India–Pakistan cooperation, cautions primarily Pakistan against finding solutions outside of the treaty or undermining it by being too negative or literal about it. Akhter (2010), responding to Iyer’s defence of the treaty as the best possible forum of India–Pakistan water dispute resolution, points out that laws such as the IWT cannot be treated in isolation from the social and historical contexts within which they were formulated or have to be implemented. He goes on to argue that the politics, economics and human geography of the Indus Basin, as well as the understanding of that geography, has changed. The IWT cannot be understood solely with reference to its internal logic but in the human context in which it is understood and implemented. With issues like salt water intrusion in the Indus delta, waterlogging and salinity in the Punjab, groundwater depletion and other ecological concerns, perhaps it is time to revisit the treaty with a view to aligning it better with the newer realities of the Indus Basin. The IWT, by performing an amputation surgery on the basin much the same as the political bifurcation of the subcontinent, made matters simple and allowed the two countries to pursue their nationalist agendas without much need for more sophisticated and involved cooperation in the water field. This lack of cooperative sharing of water leaves the ecological and social consequences of the treaty to be negotiated and contested at the sub-national level, with considerable negative consequences for the ecology and societies of the Indus Basin. It is to the discussion of the sub-national scale hydro-politics that we now turn.

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Tracing the Contours of Sub-National Inter-Provincial Hydro-Politics In both India and Pakistan, inter-provincial hydro-politics have been political lightning rods in terms of inter-provincial relations. In the case of India, the issue of interstate water distribution became one (among many others) of the catalysts for a very destructive separatist insurgency. In the case of Pakistan, however, the conflict over water distribution between dominant Punjab Province and the remaining smaller provinces in the federation, particularly Sindh Province, has remained peaceful and limited to the political arena, though its wholesale appropriation by the Sindhi nationalist elements in their rhetoric bodes ill for the future. I will review the Indian example to evaluate the prospect of Pakistan heading down the same unfortunate path as the Indian Punjab, because of the simmering controversy over the construction of additional storage on the Indus River. The details of separatist insurgency in the Indian Punjab can be found elsewhere (for example, see Singh, 2000). Suffice it to say here that like all civil conflicts it had a multiplicity of contributing causes – for example, ethno-religious identity politics, the question of distribution of resources including water between the states of Punjab, Haryana and Rajasthan, and finally mishandling by the central government of India of the Sikh grievances – thereby making it into a full-fledged armed conflict. Of the many causes, the issue of water distribution between the states of Punjab, Haryana and Rajasthan came to be used very liberally by the Sikh nationalist elements in their rhetoric against the central government of India. To recap briefly the history of the conflict, the Indian government carved out the state of Haryana along linguistic and religious lines out of the south-eastern portions of the state of Punjab in 1966. Earlier in 1955 an interstate agreement dividing the waters of the Sutluj, Ravi and Beas Rivers between the undivided Punjab and the states of Jammu, Kashmir and Rajasthan had ushered in an era of extensive water development on the Beas and Sutluj Rivers (Corell and Swain, 1995). The victory of the Sikh nationalist Akali Dal Party in the Punjab in 1967 further compounded the conflict between the states of Punjab and Haryana, with the Punjab insisting upon exclusive control of the water of the Beas and Sutluj, the two rivers being exclusively within its territory, while Haryana demanded 38

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an apportionment of the waters based on ‘needs and [the] principle of equity’ (Corell and Swain, 1995). The liberal use of the water issue to inflame public opinion in the Punjab, coupled with the power politics by the central government, widened the schism between the Sikhs and the national mainstream in India, resulting in the tragic loss of lives in a brutal civil insurgency throughout the 1980s. I will turn to some of the themes that emerge from the domestic conflict emerging from hydro-politics in north-western India below. The water conflict between the three states of Punjab, Haryana and Rajasthan can be viewed in the context of single-minded commitment on the part of the Indian government towards massive engineering interventions for water development. The Pong Dam on the Beas River, the Indira Gandhi Canal from the Harike Barrage on the Ravi, the Beas– Sutluj Link Canal and the Bhakra-Nangal Dam project on the Sutluj, to name a few of the gigantic water projects, have completely rendered the hydrology of the Indian Punjab (much like its western counterpart in Pakistan) more cultural and political than natural (Figure 1) (for example, see Government of Rajasthan). The motivation of the Indian water managers, much like their Pakistani equivalents, was to maximize the development of the water resources and put them to narrowly (economically) defined beneficial use. Many questions present themselves when trying to analyse the role of water in instigating a fratricidal conflict, which almost spun into an international conflict between India and Pakistan when the Indian armed forces were mobilized in 1987 on the pretext of stopping Pakistan’s alleged support of militancy in the Indian Punjab. Was there a dissonance between the dominant technocratic view of water with a single-minded focus on large water development projects and the Sikh society’s wider cultural, spiritual, economic and social values for water? What role did the dissonance play in further fanning Sikh militancy in the Punjab? What was the role of the Punjab Rivers in the identity politics of the Sikh population in the Punjab? And could it be that the interstate water distribution issue came to be linked to the politics of ethno-religious identity? What role did the greenrevolution technologies play in creating the massive demand and therefore conflict over water? To what extent was the water conflict underpinned by concerns for equity and food security as opposed to surplus accumulation 39

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from commercial cash crop production? These are some of the questions I will revisit in the context of the Kalabagh Dam controversy and the interprovincial water conflict over the Indus River waters in Pakistan. As mentioned earlier, in Pakistan the inter-provincial conflict over the allocation of the Indus River’s waters dates back to the beginning of massive canal construction by the British in the Punjab from the midnineteenth century onwards. The first substantial inter-provincial water allocation treaty between the Punjab and the downstream riparian Sindh province dates back to 1945. The treaty allocated 75 per cent of the waters of the main-stem Indus River to Sindh Province with the remainder going to Punjab Province. The treaty further allocated 94 per cent of the water from the five eastern tributaries of the Indus River to Punjab Province, with the residual water going to Sindh Province (Michel, 1967; Talpur, 2001). The partition of the subcontinent and the subsequent signing of the Indus Waters Treaty by India and Pakistan in 1960 allocated most of what was Punjab’s share of the Indus Basin waters, according to the 1945 Sindh–Punjab Agreement, to India, and provided for construction of storage and link canals from the western half of the Indus Basin to the eastern half to compensate for the water lost to India. The Sindhis widely perceived compensatory water and the storage on the Indus and Jehlum Rivers to be compensation to Punjab Province at the expense of Sindh (for example, see Talpur, 2001). The Kalabagh Dam controversy is proving to be yet another insult to the long series of injuries that Sindhis perceive to have been inflicted on them by Punjab Province by its appropriation of Sindh’s rightful share of water (for example, see Talpur, 2001). While the focus of sub-national hydro-politics in Pakistan has been surface water, which I discuss below, it would be useful here to point to the significance of groundwater in the basin and related problems of waterlogging and salinity, which are likely to have much greater impact on water use, agricultural productivity and hence hydro-politics in the long run. The estimated 0.8 million water pumps in Pakistan supply almost 50 per cent of the crop water requirements in the country (Qureshi et al., 2008). One of the consequences of this major groundwater development has been secondary salination of 4.5 million hectares of land, half of which affects the Indus Basin irrigated lands. An additional 1 million hectares of the 16 million hectares of irrigated land in the Indus are affected by 40

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waterlogging from canal seepage and inappropriate irrigation practices. The problem of salinity is most acute in downstream Sindh Province, where 70–80 per cent of the soils are classified as moderately to severely salinized. These problems of land degradation are having severe adverse affects on agricultural productivity and most remedies have largely been unsuccessful (Qureshi et al., 2008). The ongoing simmering conflict between Sindh and the Punjab on surface water supplies detailed below should be viewed in this context, where the land degradation and saline groundwater situation in the downstream province make its thirst for surface water supplies much more pronounced. This is besides the pervasive problems of poverty, lost productivity and consequent social instability, which have not attracted as much resources and attention of the water managers of the country as they deserve. The seemingly perpetual water conflict between Sindh and the Punjab had a tentative settlement in the form of the Inter-Provincial Water Accord of 1991, when the four provincial governments (Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Punjab, Sindh and Balochistan), which were all governed by the same political party for the first time, agreed to a water allocation formula. The accord, based on the assumed average flow of 114.35 MAF (million acre feet) of water in the Indus system, allocated 55.94 MAF of water to the Punjab and 48.76 MAF to Sindh Province (Pakistan Water Gateway). Although Afzal (1995) argues that the actual apportionment came closest to what a reasonable one could be, the accord nevertheless suffered a crisis of legitimacy. This was in question firstly because the negotiating process leading up to the accord was not transparent and did not include all the stakeholders, particularly from the smaller provinces, and secondly because of the suspect legitimacy of the political set-up in Sindh Province at the time. Furthermore, even the official figures for average annual flows for the Indus Basin used in the Inter-Provincial Water Accord and subsequent justifications for additional storage on the Indus River, particularly Kalabagh Dam, are suspect. Many, including Khan (unpublished manuscript) and Abbasi and Kazi (2003), convincingly argue against the official methodology of using the higher number for flows in the Indus system, particularly because it is based on a shorter time frame (that is, since 1977), and because the higher number works to the disadvantage of the downstream riparian, Sindh Province. The official 41

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argument in favour of the construction of the Kalabagh Dam on the Indus River paints the picture of a scarce water resource, which is being wasted by being allowed to flow out to the sea, and outlines a doomsday scenario should additional storage not be built on the Indus River (Ministry of Water and Power, 2002). The controversy is beginning to polarize public opinion in Pakistan, particularly in Sindh Province. On the internal security front, the water scarcity in Sindh, especially in the aftermath of the drought experienced in southern Pakistan in the later half of the 1990s, coupled with single-minded focus of the Pakistani water bureaucracy on water development, has made the issue of the construction of the Kalabagh Dam project and the existing water scarcity in Sindh Province a surrogate for a litany of Sindhi grievances against a Punjabi-dominated political, military and bureaucratic system in Pakistan (for example, see Eckholm, 2003). On the other hand, for the Pakistani water managers, Kalabagh Dam has become a metaphor for the persistent meddling of the ‘untrained’ and ‘non-expert’ politicians in what they perceive, or wish to be, a purely engineering issue. All types of appeals to patriotism, science, economics and neo-Malthusian scenarios are being pressed into service by the Pakistani government and the engineering establishment to make the case for Kalabagh Dam in addition to other storage projects on the Indus. The dam project at the moment is in cold storage, particularly on account of the combined opposition of not just Sindh but the provinces of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KPK) (formerly North Western Frontier Province, or NWFP) and Balochistan as well. KPK is concerned about the potential flooding of rich farmland and Pashtun cultural heartland by the lake, which will be created behind the dam. The province is also reluctant to lend its support to the project because of suspicions based on the poor record of the Pakistani government in providing for the rehabilitation of dam affectees from earlier large dam projects. The objections on the additional storage issue on the Indus are not just limited to the nationalist politics of smaller provinces. Other very convincing arguments have also been made by environmental and citizen groups in Pakistan, pointing out that Pakistan’s irrigation sector has some of the lowest conveyance efficiencies in the world. The detractors argue that instead of going for very expensive, environmentally damaging and 42

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economically dubious storage and mega project solutions to the water issue in Pakistan, perhaps enhancement of the existing infrastructure’s efficiency, coupled with better on-farm water management and more appropriate irrigation and farming techniques, will more than make up for any additional water, which may be gained from mega projects (for example, see Khan, unpublished manuscript; Kamal, 2001; Mustafa, 2005). More academically rigorous research on the subject will be useful in informing water policy debates in Pakistan. The Indus waters distribution controversy over the past two decades has been limited to sloganeering and street protests on the part of the populace of Sindh, and to a lesser extent KPK, as well as heated debates among the water managers and provincial governments of the Pakistani federation. Incidentally, in the case of the Punjab, the province which stands to benefit the most from the potential construction of the Kalabagh Dam and other water development projects (for example, the Greater Thal Canal project, which is to supply additional water from the Indus to the Thal area of the Punjab), the public opinion at the grass-roots level is disinterested at best, unlike in the case of Sindh. This is one controversy where the dissonance between the engineers’ conceptions of how to manage and develop water seems to be driving the conflict rather than any popular demand for additional water projects on the part of the Punjabi public. For example, the Punjabi-dominated Pakistan Muslim League (Q) (PML-Q) in Pakistan, which was the ruling party through the first five years of the twenty-first century, has been at great pains to try to mobilize grass-roots public support for the dam with little evidence of success (Daily Times, 2003).3 This is in stark contrast to the Indian Punjab situation, where the public opinion was quite inflamed in support of keeping Punjab’s waters from Haryana. Whereas in the Sindh case there may have been a fusion of hydro-politics with identity politics of Sindhi nationalists, in the case of the Pakistani Punjab there does not seem to be any popular passions regarding hydro-politics. Consequently, given the shallowness of the popular support for additional water development on the Indus River, there is an opportunity for a more enlightened and multidimensional policy dialogue to resolve the controversy. The sub-national water issue in Pakistan has taken a new twist recently with the worst floods in the country’s history in 2010. The floods were a 43

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consequence of the anomalous intense rains in the western Indus Basin, something that used to be observed every few decades but has been observed more than three times in the past decade alone. The anomalous weather (its possibility as a result of climate change notwithstanding), the enormity of the disaster and the role played by the highly regulated river channels and the irrigation system management procedures have drawn renewed scrutiny from the public and the media. There is concern that the singleminded focus on maximizing water withdrawals and greater regulation of the river system may have contributed to accentuating the already very high flood peaks.4 Furthermore, the issue of deliberate breaching of side levees to protect irrigation infrastructure – something that is routine operating procedure for flood management – has drawn media attention and accusations of favouritism when it came to protecting some parts of the flood plains at the expense of others. This is also an issue I will be addressing in Chapter 4, focusing on the local scale of water management (Mustafa and Wrathall, 2011). The floods are being used by the pro-dams lobby to call for construction of more storage on the Indus. The tragedy cannot be viewed in isolation from the dominant engineering view of the basin as a resource to be deployed to maximize productivity with relative neglect of the hazards associated with it (Mustafa and Wrathall, 2011). The single-minded focus on maximizing productivity from the Indus while trying to control its hazards has led to an inequitable distribution of the benefits from the water development, as well as vulnerability to the flood and drought hazards associated with the Indus. This is something I will revisit in later chapters. Greater action research on some of the questions listed in the case of the Indian Punjab will also serve to inform the water policy dialogue in Pakistan, in addition to providing the basis for conflict resolution. The spectre of an Indian Punjab-style insurgency with hydro-politics as one of the key issues is a nightmarish scenario for Pakistan, just the same as the higher frequency of 2010-style floods under climate change. These scenarios are, however, avoidable provided the parameters of the discourse are widened from purely engineering concerns to wider social, cultural, environmental, equity and justice-related concerns on water resources. 44

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Towards a Social Construction of Hydro-Politics across Spatial Scales The discursive construction of the Indus Basin hydro-hazardscape as a knowable, controllable and divisible resource, much the same as the discursive construction of the Mekong, as documented by Sneddon and Fox (2006), is really at the heart of the conduct of hydro-politics between India and Pakistan, and to a lesser extent at the sub-national level in India and Pakistan. Climate change will bring new and unforeseen challenges to water management in the basin. Until then, reducing the dissonance between the variegated view of the Indus Basin populations and the monochromatic modernist material view of its water managers will be key to a resilient future for the basin. The poorest people in the Indus delta, marginal groundwater zones and low-lying flood plains in the Indus Basin are as much victims of the heroic water development in the basin as its ecology. At the international level, the IWT has served an important moderating function in the hydro-politics between India and Pakistan. The treaty is a product of its time and could be fruitfully modified and renegotiated to bring it more in line with contemporary international watercourse law, Helsinki Rules and emerging concerns with water quality and principles of equitable sharing. But that renegotiation, if it ever happens, is going to be contingent upon significant improvement in the bilateral relations between India and Pakistan. As long as the two countries continue to be hostile and mutually suspicious, the flawed IWT will have to be a very imperfect medium for the conduct of hydro-politics between the two countries. At the sub-national level, water issues in the Indus Basin hydrohazardscape, much like everywhere else, are typically nested within broader issues related to democratization, resource distribution, social justice, ethnic, religious and linguistic identity, and economic well-being. With the complex interconnections that contribute towards security broadly conceptualized, it is a very difficult task to tease out the specific role of water in enhancing or diminishing national, human, economic or cultural security. It is obvious at the intuitive level that given the central role of water as the basis of all life, it is critical, but human institutions and discursive constructs mediate access to it and the multiple values that societies hope 45

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to derive from water; for example, economic/utilitarian, aesthetic, cultural and spiritual (for a global discussion of such values attached to water, see Tvedt and Oestigaard, 2006; and a special issue of Water Nepal, 2003). Just the fact that more than 95 per cent of water withdrawals in the Indus Basin are dedicated to agriculture where its efficiency does not exceed 36 per cent is a clear indicator that the scarcity of water is institutional rather than absolute (Kahlown and Majeed, 2002). Increased irrigation water use efficiency through engineering as well as institutional reforms, coupled with inter-sectoral water transfers, has the potential to more than make up for any water scarcity. Consequently, the question of whether water shortages and inequities in its distribution will lead to violence or threats to human security also becomes contingent upon how water-related institutions behave. One important lesson to be drawn from this overview of water and security in the Indus Basin is that the dissonance between the single point engineering-based agenda of the water managers (which ends up contributing more to cash crop production and further integration of local and national economies into the global economy) and the wider agenda of the water users is one of the main contributors to conflict over water (for example, the Kalabagh Dam issue in Pakistan). Lastly, if issues of water distribution are left alone to fester, they can become a very dangerous tool in the hands of political leadership, espousing other ethnic or linguistic agendas; for example, the case of the Indian Punjab or as documented by Amery (2002) in the case of Israel and Lebanon. The emotional and cultural appeal of the water issue is such that its misuse has the potential of causing considerable grief to the ones who choose to ignore it. The overarching theme that seems to emerge is that there is enough water to provide for the needs of considerably larger populations than there are at present in the Indus Basin. However, given its vexingly uneven distribution across space and time, human institutions and ingenuity are going to be the final arbiter of whether this precious resource, the basis of physical, cultural and spiritual life, will be the basis for cooperation or conflict in the future. A discursive reconstruction of the Indus that is more consonant with its complex human ecological reality will suggest pathways for conflict resolution and avoidance that the present dominant modernist discourse is unlikely to be able to facilitate. 46

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3

Critical Legal Geographies in Hydro-hazardscapes

The legal framework, which legitimizes, organizes and eventually concretizes state power on lived socio-spatial relations, has been a relatively neglected area of interest in the field of resource management. Part of the reason for this relative lack of interest by geographers in connections between law and geography may have been partially because of the popular misconception about law as a closed field of knowledge and praxis (Blomley, 1994a). Law, however, is contingent, political and contestable, often perpetuating and legitimizing exploitative and oppressive geographies of social power, leading to specific configurations of hydro-hazardscapes in the water sector (Blomley, 1994b; Chouinard, 1994; Butler, 2009). Law and the state apparatus are inextricably linked in the process of production and reproduction of socio-spatial patterns of access to resources, and the empowerment and disempowerment of certain social agents in the process. This chapter revisits and synthesizes the law and geography nexus, as developed by various geographers and some legal experts, to analyse the ideology and geographical implications of a key piece of legislation, the Canal and Drainage Act 1873, governing water resources management in Pakistan. The chapter further explores the connection between the concomitant state apparatus to the Act and its geographical implications for more equitable and just hydro-hazardscapes, with the help of data regarding the enforcement of the Act collected from the irrigation authorities in

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Pakistan. The analyses presented here are not specific to the Act being investigated. The critical legal approach deployed in this chapter could fruitfully be used to investigate other water-related legal doctrines such as the ‘prior appropriation’ doctrine in the western United States, to unpack their socio-spatial imaginaries so as to point the way to legal landscapes that are conducive to more equitable and just hydro-hazardscapes.

The Law and Geography Nexus in Water Resources Management The legal geographical studies can be distinguished into two broad categories: the impact assessment approach and the critical legal geographic approach (Blomley, 1994a; Palm, 1997). The impact assessment approach emphasizes the geographic consequences of various legal regimes; for example, land use laws, water laws or anti-homeless laws (see Matthews, 1984; Platt, 1996; Platt and Kendra, 1998). The critical legal geographic approach, on the other hand, in the words of Chouinard (1994: 432), treats law as: [a] set of regulatory ideas and discourses, practices, institutions and lived relations which ‘set’ state-enforced terms of people’s engagement in productive and reproductive activities on a daily basis, and the rules governing their incorporation as citizens and dependents of the state in patriarchal, capitalist societies.

In the critical legal geography perspective, law is both geographic and political, shaping people’s life spaces and hazardscapes in socially transforming ways. This perspective, at least in geography, has also been primarily concerned with the formal law and the state’s implementation of those laws (for example, see Mitchell, 1997). More along the lines of our concern with hydro-hazardscapes, D’Souza (2002: 256), for example, explaining interstate water disputes in India from a critical legal perspective, argues that: [w]hen ‘national’ law, evolved in the historical context of colonisation, intersects with ‘international’ law, evolved in the historical context of

48

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Critical Legal Geographies in Hydro-Hazardscapes European capitalism, it reproduces imperial-colonial relations of superordination and sub-ordination that locks the water sector in a developmental catharsis.

While D’Souza’s analyses on the macro-scale of the Indian State and its constitutive units points to the contradictions between the neocolonial legal regimes putting a premium upon state sovereignty and control over spaces, and capitalist-driven developmentalism supported by multilateral and international donors, the analyses of the Canal and Drainage Act here will seek to undertake textual analyses of the law on the meso- to microscale of a canal command. Much of the literature in the critical legal tradition has, however, been more concerned with issues of legal pluralism, which encompass the myriad customary and informal legal practices on the meso- and microscales (for example, see Chanock, 1985; Moore, 1986; Merry, 1991). The attention to legal pluralism has not gone unnoticed by geographers and Pue (1997) makes a strong appeal for greater geographical attention to legal pluralism in the critical legal tradition. The same legal pluralism could be a conduit for understanding the multiple legal regimes that frame the multiple experiences and actions in hydro-hazardscapes by both the powerful and powerless. Geographical attention has, however, continued to be on state-sanctioned formal legal regimes. Given the importance of the modern state apparatus as a system of power and control, and its role in imposing a sanctioned homogeneity on the diversity within civil society and local spaces (Clark and Dear, 1984; Driver, 1991; Kirby, 1993; Butler, 2009), the emphasis on the connection between the state and law is quite appropriate. Law has a well-articulated historical imagination, and it is not unusual to come across analyses of legal doctrines as historically specific constructs (for example, see Mann and Roberts, 1991; Hazelhurst, 1995). In the critical legal geographic approach, however, law also has a necessary geographic aspect, because it is formulated, implemented and enforced within specific historical as well as spatial contexts, which both impact legal doctrines and are in turn transformed by them (Blomley, 1994a; Butler, 2009). Sensitivity to local-level socio-spatial praxis is one of the fundamental features of a geographically sensitive legal regime. This 49

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geographical sensitivity in turn is intricately tied up with the notions of democracy and justice because at the minimum, geographical sensitivity in resource and environmental law implies that those closest to a resource or ecosystem be given an equal voice in decisions affecting them (Verchick, 1999). I will demonstrate that the Canal and Drainage Act 1873 of Pakistan comes up short, when measured against the above standards of sensitivity to geographic contexts, power differentials in social life and the need for public participation. The analyses of the Canal and Drainage Act in here will engage with the critical legal tradition by: 1. unpacking the politics and ideology of the Act; 2. investigating the Act’s implications for the balance of power between the state and the water users, especially in a post-colonial state; 3. analysing the Act’s role in producing or reproducing power relations; and 4. describing the Act’s impact on equity in water resources management in the colonial and post-colonial period. The state apparatus mediates the dynamic interaction between time, space and law in conceptually and practically important ways. The particular types of state forms and apparatus that have emerged out of the colonial experience in the Third World still maintain legal doctrines, which are consonant with geographical and historical imaginations of a colonial state rather than an egalitarian and accountable state apparatus. The Canal and Drainage Act 1873 in Pakistan is a classic example of a law which is both intricately tied up with a historically specific state formation and the state apparatus’ geographical imagination. To understand further the role of the Act in water resources management in Pakistan, in the impact assessment mode the paper will present and analyse data collected from two canal subdivisions (an administrative unit of the Provincial Irrigation and Drainage Authority (PIDA) in Pakistan). The data will help to understand the geographical impacts of the Act’s actual enforcement. The analysis of the enforcement data will provide a concrete example of how the state apparatus and the Act are complicit in perpetuating geographical patterns of inequity in water resources management. 50

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Historical Geography of Water Law in Pakistan The Canal and Drainage Act and brief variations thereof govern water use all over Pakistan, but its main import is on the Indus irrigation system initiated by the British colonial administration in the late nineteenth century and then doubled in its areal extent by the post-colonial Pakistani state. The motivations for the construction of the system have already been discussed in the previous chapter. It would, however, be useful to recall that the Indus system, like any other irrigation system, was and is more than an engineering enterprise (for other examples, see Cosgrove and Petts, 1990). As the following quote illustrates, the social aspects of colonial irrigation development in the basin were as important as the physical engineering of the system: But construction of canals depended usually on the ability of the state to mobilize local elites and their followers in canal digging, while creating new ‘communities’ of sharers in canal water and in the yearly obligations of canal silt clearance and maintenance that kept canals flowing during the summer months. This allowed not only the localized production of valuable commercial crops [such as indigo and subsequently cotton], but also the definition of a structure of power linking the state and local elites together... it [the discourse of power connecting the local elites to the state] linked the struggle over local access to resources to the discourse of ‘community’ and power that bound settled ‘communities’ to the legal and administrative structure of the colonial state. (Gilmartin, 1994: 1130, 1134)

Gilmartin (1994) describes the process of the development of the Indus Basin canal colonies as a process of continuous tension between what he calls ‘science of the empire’ – which involved the use of the whole host of the social sciences with patrilineal connections to modern-day sociology, anthropology and cognate social sciences – and ‘imperial science’ – which involved the use of natural sciences and engineering. While the science of the empire was the preserve of the imperial administrator who studied and classified the ‘native’ populations and devised strategies for social control, the imperial science was the forte of the engineers who took 51

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care of the physical infrastructure of the empire. The ethos governing water management was therefore not driven by a micro-level concern for public well-being and equity, or for the provision of a public service to the people, but rather (at least partially) by the need for consolidation and rationalization of colonial control over India by creating specific geographies of access to resources and social control. It is within this context that the Canal and Drainage Act 1873 must be viewed. In the actual engineering of the Indus system by the colonial British administration, the emphasis was on geographically extensive settlement patterns, rather than intensive patterns. A gravity-based hierarchical system of canals was laid out in which main stem canals starting from the diversion points on the Indus Rivers subdivided into distributary canals, which at times further branched off into minor canals. The village watercourses emanated from either the distributaries or minor canals and never from the main canals. The water outlets for individual parcels of land are always from the village watercourses. A fixed-time rotational water distribution system (warabandi) was devised for the distribution of water between farmers downstream from the village watercourse inlet (moga) (Figure 2). The institutional structure designed to manage the system also closely matched the hierarchical pattern of the water system. Needless to say, in such a gravity-based hierarchical system, the location of a farmer’s field is paramount in terms of access to irrigation water. The British colonial administration developed detailed classifications about the ‘industriousness’, loyalty to the Raj and ‘martial’ characteristics of different tribes and ethnicities in South Asia in general, and the Indus Basin in particular (for example, see Ibbetson, 1994). These classifications were used liberally to decide upon the amount and location of the land allotted to settlers in the newly developed canal colonies, which were previously quite sparsely populated (Darling and Maclagan, 1932; Siddiqi, 1965; Whitcombe, 1982; Ali, 1988). It was the colonial ‘science of the empire’ that dictated the spatial distribution of various ethnic groups and castes in the canal colonies, which in most instances served to reinforce the existing hierarchical nature of the South Asian society, while at the same time often producing additional patterns of sociospatial differentiation. 52

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Figure 2: A typical village watercourse inlet (moga) in central Punjab Province, Pakistan.

Although the Canal and Drainage Act 1873 gave strong powers to the irrigation engineers for the management of the system, those powers when translated into canal remodelling and actual management of the system near the turn of the century elicited loud protests from irrigators, especially the more influential ones. Reliance on the local elite for control of the local population was formalized by the British colonial administration by reference to the authority of custom and tradition (Darling and Maclagan, 1932; Gilmartin, 1994). Preferential access to irrigation water was one of the privileges afforded to the indigenous elite in the Punjab as part of the bargain for its loyalty to the colonial government. The exercise of powers (which will be discussed in the following section) by the irrigation engineers, in terms of relocation or water inlets, determination of irrigable area and timing and quantity of water, based on engineering considerations, interfered with the power and privilege of the indigenous elite. The colonial administration usually allowed the local people (generally the more influential farmers) to decide the fixed-time rotational 53

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water schedule on village outlets. By 1940, less than half of the perennial canals in Punjab Province had government-sanctioned rotational schedules (pacca warabandi), whereas by the end of the twentieth century, only a few canals in the southern Punjab and Sindh Province which are dominated by large landowners did not have government-sanctioned distribution schedules (Public Works Department, 1940; Bandaragoda, 1998). Despite this greater intervention by the government at the micro-level of a village watercourse, the influential farmers continue to have substantial power to manipulate water distribution with the connivance of the local irrigation staff (Bandaragoda, 1998). At present, as in colonial times, the administration of the system is an ongoing balancing act between the imperatives of acknowledging the privilege of the indigenous elite, which were and continue to be important allies of the colonial and post-colonial state, and the engineering concerns with irrigation efficiency (Gilmartin, 1994, 1995). The all-powerful provincial irrigation departments (PIDs) were formed by the British for the management of the system by virtue of the Canal and Drainage Act. The PIDs are now called Provincial Irrigation and Drainage Authorities (PIDAs) but their basic structure, functions and mandate remain the same, because the enabling legislation for their existence (the Canal and Drainage Act 1873) remains the same. The conflict between the engineering efficiency-based discourse of the PID hierarchy and the customary rights (haq)-based discourse of the irrigators is well documented by Gilmartin (1994). The PIDA bureaucracy is still characterized by a well-articulated hierarchy of functionaries, who are typically more in tune with the requirements of their internal administrative hierarchy than public demands for equity and efficiency in water management, as will be discussed in Chapter 4. In the following section, a legal/geographical discussion of the Act will be undertaken to elucidate further the role of the state legal apparatus in irrigation and flood management.

Unpacking the Ideology and Functionality of the Canal and Drainage Act 1873 The Canal and Drainage Act 1873 has been, and continues to be, one of the most influential and longest-lasting pieces of water law in the Indus 54

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Basin. I unpack the ideology and functionality of the Act by reading it as a text, which has its autonomy but is also a socially situated product with concrete connections to socio-spatial practice (Giddens, 1979). The following analyses will concurrently draw upon the impact analysis method as well as reading the Act as a legal text in a critical legal geographical mode. Three features of the Canal and Drainage Act will be highlighted for analyses: 1. comparative powers of the state vis-à-vis the water users’ right of access to water and the geographical scales at which state powers are sanctioned by the Act; 2. the sensitivity to geographical context or lack thereof in the Act’s legal prescriptions; and 3. the overall tenor of the Act insofar as it is the bedrock legislation governing the operational and strategic vision of Pakistani PIDAs, which are involved in the provision of a critical public service (that is, irrigation water). The Canal and Drainage Act consists of 74 sections which are compartmentalized into 11 parts as listed below. The italicized parts will be the main focus of this analysis, while for non-italicized parts, only the listed section will be discussed to support the analysis: ✦✦ Part I: Preliminary; ✦✦ Part II: Of the application of water for public purposes; ✦✦ Part III: Of the construction and maintenance of work, Section 14:

Power to enter and survey, etc., Section 20: Supply of water through intervening water or change of source of supply of water, Section 20A: Special powers of divisional canal officers to initiate cases under section 20, Section 20-B: Cutting of supply for any land not being irrigated, Section 23: Application for transfer of existing watercourse, Section 27: Collector, Commissioner and a Canal Officer to have powers of civil courts; ✦✦ Part IV: Of the supply of water; ✦✦ Part V: Of water rates and recovery of charges, Section 33: Liability when water is unauthorizedly taken from canal or watercourse; 55

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Water Resource Management in a Vulnerable World ✦✦ Part VI: Of canal navigation; ✦✦ Part VII: Of drainage, Section 58: Powers of person employed in such ✦✦ ✦✦ ✦✦ ✦✦

(drainage) schemes; Part VIII: Of obtaining labour for canal and drainage works; Part IX: Of jurisdiction; Part X: Of offences and penalties; and Part XI: Of subsidiary rules.

The Act also has 73 appendices, which go into further details of water management and administrative issues. Of the 11 parts of the Act, this chapter will primarily draw upon Parts I, II, IV, IX and X to help elucidate the law and geography nexus developed in this chapter, and the connections of that nexus to socio-spatial practice of water resources management. The rest of the parts of the Act and sections are excluded from the discussion as they go into detailed technical engineering and administrative aspects of water management, and are not directly relevant to the discussion.

The Scope and Tenor of the Act The preamble to the Canal and Drainage Act 1873 immediately stakes out a claim to the state’s very strong right to administer water, thereby excluding any possibility of private ownership of the resource at anything higher than the micro-scale of a village watercourse. Although the state has been quick to recognize and at times adjudicate customary water rights, especially in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, those rights are typically operative at a smaller scale of a watercourse or village-level water management. Furthermore, at least in the nineteenth century and early twentieth century much of those customary rights translated into the influential irrigators’ rights to preferential access to water and their right to adjudicate water conflict on village watercourses. The power of the influential irrigators has continued to be an important element in water distribution in contemporary times, at least at the village watercourse level (Bandaragoda, 1998). On the macro- and meso-scales of the canal main stem, canal distributary and minor-level irrigation system of Pakistan, the state’s control does in fact exclude the possibility of any private ownership of water. The smaller-scale customary rights typically do not matter much 56

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to the overall operation of the irrigation system. By virtue of the wording of the preamble, as quoted below, the state’s right to control water for (presumably) public purposes may supersede any pre-existing rights of any private water users: Whereas throughout the territories to which this Act extends, the (provincial government) is entitled to use and control for public purposes the water of all rivers and streams flowing in natural channels, and of all lakes, (sub-soil water) and other natural collections of still water. (Nasir, 1993: 1)

The state ownership of water resources for public use and benefit is not a doctrine specific to the Act. In the American West, for example, the state is similarly deemed to hold all the waters as public property, to be conveyed and used for public benefit by private users under the prior appropriation doctrine. The state’s treatment of water as public property has implications for its ability to develop and manage the resource, and also in terms of adjudicating and recognizing private ownership of water resources. In the American West, the right to appropriate water from a free-flowing natural stream by a public or private user is inalienable, contingent upon the ‘no injury rule’, and that right balances the state’s theoretical ownership of water (Getches, 1997). The preamble of the Canal and Drainage Act emphasizes the state’s right to control water for public use without providing for a balancing right for private water use. The implications of the above comparison will become clear as the Act is discussed in further detail. The Act is also applied uniformly within the provincial bound-aries to which it extends without particular regard to geographical variations (for example, differences in customary water laws or differences in physical geography). One of the most problematic aspects of the Act is that it legally provides for water which is sufficient for only 64 per cent of cropping intensities, thereby making the management objective to be extensive development of agriculture rather than intensive development. The present cropping intensities in the irrigated zones are sometimes as high as 150 per cent.5 People in the fresh groundwater zones frequently supplement their irrigation supplies with groundwater pumping, but the people in the brackish groundwater zones do not have that option. Populations in 57

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brackish groundwater zones (which is about 36 per cent of the irrigated Indus plain) are therefore much more vulnerable to limited irrigation water supplies, but the law in its insensitivity to the local contexts makes them differentially vulnerable to irrigation water scarcity. The consequences of this insensitivity to geographical contexts for water management will become clearer as a couple of examples of its implementation are discussed in the next section of this paper. The law further provides for a strict fixedtime rotational irrigation distribution system, which works to the detriment of tail-enders of a village watercourse, who may not get any water during their turn because of channel seepage. The law with its rigidity makes the tail-enders differentially vulnerable. The Interpretation Clause (Section 3) of the Preamble to the Act lists the definitions of all the physical and administrative terms used in the Act – for example, canal, watercourse, vessels, Board of Revenue, Commissioner, Canal Officer, etc. – but it does not define or delimit the scope of the most critical concept in the Preamble (that is, ‘public purpose’) for which the government has been given the right of use and control over all the water in the territories covered by the Act. Presumably it is understood that ‘public purpose’ is what the government says it is, and that right cannot be challenged in a court of law. This will become clearer as some of the subsequent parts of the Act are discussed.

Comparative Power of the State vs. the Water Users in the Act In Section 4-A of the Act, for the first and the last time the notion of public input into administration of the irrigation system is legally recognized. According to the section, the provincial government may: from time to time... constitute irrigation committees comprising of not less than three members from amongst the local cultivators for each outlet or group of outlets and for a canal or portion of a canal, for the assistance of the canal officers for matters mentioned in Section 70 of this Act. (Nasir, 1993: 16, emphasis added)

Matters mentioned in Section 70 are offences under the Act; for example, damaging the civil works on a canal, contaminating the water, tampering with irrigation-related government property, etc. In other words, although 58

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local participation is envisaged, it is not with reference to the timing or quantity of water supply or for articulation of local needs, but primarily to assist the government in policing the local population, so that order is maintained. Even with the policing aspect of the local cultivators’ role, there is nothing mandatory or institutionalized about it. The provincial government may at its whim – that is, with no right of participation by the water users – let a few cultivators into a role whereby they can assist the authorities in investigating crimes committed by their fellow cultivators and ostensibly even assist in their apprehension. Needless to say, the scope of participation is extremely limited and the power structure extremely asymmetrical. Section 54 of the Act speaks of the issuance of a notification by the provincial government when it deems that water supply is to be applied for public purposes. The relevant case law declares that there is no need for the acceptance of the occupier who might be affected by the notification. This section again reinforces the lopsided legal tenor of the Act in favour of the government to the detriment of the water users. Section 6 of the Act states the following: Powers of Canal Officers: At any time after the day so named (after the notification), any canal officer, acting under the orders of the provincial government in this behalf, may enter on any land and remove any obstructions and may close any channels, and do any other thing necessary for such application or use of the said water. (Nasir, 1993: 20, emphasis added)

Again this provision clearly confirms the power that canal officers have acting on behalf of the state, in comparison to the water users, when it comes to interrupting the flow of water. Although Section 7 states that the revenue collector is supposed to invite claims publicly for compensation for damage arising from the actions of a canal officer according to Section 6, the following Section 8 lists the major types of anticipated damages for which claims for compensation will not be entertained. The reasons listed in Section 8 include stoppage of water supply, increased risk of floods, land degradation, stoppage of water from any natural channels or any other damage. This section was amended in 1952 by the post-independence 59

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government of Pakistan. In the older version of the section, claims for compensation were entertained for stoppage of water supply from natural channels, damage done in respect of water rights on an internal watercourse and other damages. Curiously, it is the post-independence state that takes away any marginal rights that water users did have to balance the public use right of the state. This diminution of rights of the water users is further evident in repealed Sections 9, 10 and 13 of the Act, which had provided for procedures for claiming compensation for damage to the private user. The provisions were abolished, and now the water user has almost no legal recourse to question the state’s exercise of its power. Repealed Section 13 had actually set up a deadline for the compensation claims to be paid. Clearly the postindependence state had little patience for its citizens’ claims to injury from its actions. The only relief provided by the Act in such a case is the abatement of land rent upon stoppage of water (Section 11), but that too is balanced by Section 12, which provides for the enhancement of land rent upon restoration of water supply, if that increased supply leads to an increase in the value of the land. Section 32 of the Act further reinforces the state’s absolute authority over the timing of water stoppage. The Act does not define any criterion for why, when and how long the stoppages of water can be made by the Divisional Canal Officer. The section further stipulates that the state grants permission to use water only for the cropping season or maximum for up to a year, after which the permission must be renewed. This provision sounds particularly insidious because it essentially precludes the possibility of the local water users developing a firm reliable right to the use of water through continuation of use. The permission to use water is from season to season with a maximum of up to a year as already mentioned, after which presumably the permission may be renewed or withdrawn. Although I was not able to find any cases of complete discontinuation of supply of water, the provision is still often used by irrigation authorities to vary the amount of water that is supplied to farmers from season to season or year to year. This ability to vary water supplies is again rich grounds for corruption, because the water users often have to bribe the irrigation department functionaries to keep them from reducing their water supply for any year.6 The section further strictly forbids sale or sub-letting of water except in 60

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the case of lawful conveyance from a landlord to a cultivator tenant on the same land. This is one of the most violated provisions of the Act, according to some of the field researchers in the Indus Basin (World Bank, 1994; Van der Velde and Tirmizi, 1999). The sub-section further states that water rights are appurtenant to the land and are presumed to be conveyed with the land. One of the sub-sections of Section 32 makes the government’s strong control over water air-tight by legally denying any right to the development of water rights by continued use over long periods by a user not initially authorized to use the water. In addition to defining the comparative power of the government visà-vis the water users, the Act also defines the geographical scope of that power and control to extend from the macro-scale of main stem canal commands, which at times encompass thousands of villages, down to the water user level. By virtue of some of the relevant sections of the Act, especially Section 68, the state extends its jurisdiction right down to the individual water user level by claiming the right to adjudicate conflicts between individual water users. The Act gives unchallenged executive and judicial power to the irrigation bureaucracy, which can only be challenged in a civil court to the extent of questioning the procedures followed and not to the extent of questioning the effect on water supply, from the decisions of the water bureaucracy. The water users, with regard to the supply of canal water, cannot have recourse to the law outside of the PIDA hierarchy. The Act also extends the state control down to the individual field water outlet, by specifying the state’s authority to regulate any change in the location and size of a water outlet to a field, and change in the time and location of irrigation. In fact, the Act grants canal officers the powers of civil courts when conducting inquiries into matters related to acquisition of land for construction and maintenance of civil works for conveyance of water. Section 33 of the Act reinforces the already strong police and judicial powers of the canal officers by also authorizing them to levy charges (locally called tawan) on groups of water users if it is found that water has been taken without authorization from a channel, and the specific beneficiary or culprit cannot be identified. This is one of the most remarkable instances of culpability on account of geography, where a group can be held culpable on account of its location in the command area of a watercourse. This is 61

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also one of the most cited sections in cases of moga tampering and other offences, and a source of considerable resentment among the water users. Furthermore, not providing labour for the maintenance of the irrigation infrastructure is also deemed to be an offence under the Act. The Act uses colonial definitions of different castes and ethnicities, which are designated as a labour class and can be required to provide labour. Those definitions are almost never used, nor is anybody punished for not providing labour these days, though the law still remains on the books. The overall tenor of the Act is that of a colonial legislation, which reserves maximum power for the state without particular regard for the geographical variations, and which extends the state control from the macro-scale right down to the micro-scale of field water outlets. The Act also conveys the impression that the irrigation department is to be more of a policing body against a rogue population rather than a public utility working for their benefit. The emphasis in the Act on offences and the role of the PIDA officials as policing agents of the state is something that holds quite true in practice. From my conversations with irrigation department officials, it emerged that most of them spend a majority of their time policing the system and adjudicating conflict rather than managing the system as a public utility. In the following section, I will present the data I collected from two canal sections about offences and cases registered under Section 68 and moga tampering. The data will illustrate the spatial inequities that the Act perpetuates by virtue of its insensitivity to local contexts, and in the words of Gilmartin (1994) its structural genesis as a piece of colonial legislation that serves as an instrument of reinforcing power relations make the state the de facto power holder, while allowing for the local elites to be the de jure power holder within the Pakistani rural hydro-hazardscapes.

The State and the Spatial Practice of Water Law The actual implementation of the Canal and Drainage Act 1873 in the canal colonies of the Punjab has been characterized by conflict between the state and the water users, and between the higher echelons of the irrigation management hierarchy and the field staff, since the very 62

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inception of the Act. Imran Ali (1988) documents the frustrations faced by the British colonial administration in recovering the economic price of water from water users at the turn of the twentieth century. The colonial administration’s attempts at smooth functioning of the system and efficient cost recovery were frequently frustrated by pervasive incidents of water thefts, mostly by moga tampering and illegal cuts in the canals (Ali, 1988). Furthermore, conflict on account of warashikni (taking of water out of turn) was a source of considerable conflict between water users, thereby creating a law and order situation for the colonial administration. Then as now, the government was frustrated by the complicity of its lower-level functionaries with the powerful elements among the water users in controlling the incidence of such activities. Water theft on the one hand translated into considerable loss of revenue for the state, and on the other hand led to economic losses for downstream agriculturists from lack of water. Water theft continues to be a pervasive though underreported practice in the irrigated plains of Pakistan, despite the penalties (for example, tawan (fines)) and prospect of imprisonment, provided for in the Canal and Drainage Act (Van der Velde and Tirmizi, 1999; Rinaudo et al., 2000). All water users are legally supposed to suffer equally from water scarcity (that is, get water for less than 70 per cent cropping intensity, with actual cropping intensities being much higher) according to the Canal and Drainage Act. Therefore, all the water users are theoretically equally likely to have an incentive to circumvent the system to secure greater water supplies for themselves. That is, of course, unless actual variations in the physical and social geography provide a greater push for, or a deterrent against, breaking the rules of the game. To understand the contemporary spatial practice of the implementation of the Act, I collected data about moga tampering and water theft cases (tawan cases, prosecuted under Section 33 of the Canal and Drainage Act) and cases of warashikni (theft of water by individuals by taking water out of their turn) prosecuted under Section 68 of the Act from two canal subdivision offices, Sidhnai subdivision and Shorkot subdivision, in central Punjab. In addition to the number of cases with the canal subdivision, I also collected information about the profile of the water users in each canal section from the irrigation department staff, to see how the number and nature of cases matched up with the 63

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profiles of the water users. Each of the subdivisions has sections which are dominated by small landowners and large landowners, and one of the subdivisions has a section with brackish groundwater. All canal offences are generally and routinely under-reported (Bandaragoda, 1998; Rinaudo et al., 2000), but significant variations in even the reported cases between sub-sections of canal division could point to geographical inequities in the implementation of the Act or the insensitivity of the Act to physical and social geography. The information from the Sidhnai canal subdivision is listed in Table 1. There is a significant difference between the number of tawan (collective fine on water users along a watercourse for moga tampering) cases registered in different sections of the Sidhnai subdivision. The number of cases is significantly lower in the Sidhnai section of the subdivision, where only one in 35 village watercourses had a case of moga tampering registered against its water users during 1996. Other sections have a considerably higher incidence of registered cases of tawan with the Sarai Sidhu section having a case of moga tampering reported on practically every one of the watercourses in the section in 1996. The Table 1: Number of tawan and Section 68 cases in the Sidhnai subdivision (the numbers are rounded off to the nearest whole number) Section

Yr. and no. of tawan cases

Section 68 cases

No. of mogas

Mogas/tawan cases

Mogas/Sec. 68 cases

Sarai Sidhu

1996 57 1997 84 1996 4 1997 9 1996 23 1997 27 1996 31 1997 10 1996 115 1997 130

1996 11 1997 4 1996 8 1997 15 1996 10 1997 19 1996 19 1997 18 1996 48 1997 56

114

1996 2 1997 1 1996 35 1997 15 1996 4 1997 3 1996 4 1997 12 1996 4.1 1997 3.6

1996 10 1997 29 1996 17 1997 9 1996 9 1997 5 1996 7 1997 7 1996 10 1997 8

Sidhnai Makhdmpur Wanui Totals

139  93 123 469

Source: Punjab Irrigation and Drainage Authority (PIDA).

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Sidhnai section of the subdivision, according to the local PIDA staff and my own investigations, is dominated by politically very powerful large landowners, while the rest of the canal sections mainly have predominantly smaller farmers or politically insignificant larger farmers. One of the factors explaining the major difference could be the power and influence of the larger landlords concentrated in the Sidhnai subdivision. One of the relevant irrigation department operatives in the area confirmed the suspicion by stating that they generally get much fewer moga tampering cases from large landowner-dominated areas, simply because the local irrigation staff would not dare report moga tampering by a powerful person. Consistent with the findings of other researchers in the irrigated planes of Pakistan, the factors that seemed to contribute to the difference in reported incidence of moga tampering and water theft between large and small landowner-dominated canal sections (Bandaragoda, 1998; Rinaudo et al., 2000) were as follows: 1. the irrigation staff were complicit with the large landowners and therefore did not dare register a case against them; 2. the large landowners could and did influence the irrigation staff to increase the water flow in their canal section, thereby removing the incentive for water theft; 3. the large landowners in the case of the Sidhnai section were concentrated near the end of the main canal distributary. None of the upstream water users could therefore steal water for the fear of reprisal from their more powerful neighbours. At any given time, in the Sidhnai section any or all of the above explanations were operative, to keep the number of tawan cases to a minimum. All of the canal sections in the Sidhnai canal subdivision have fresh groundwater; therefore, differences in groundwater quality or availability cannot account for the difference. Section 68 cases (involving water thefts by individuals, who take water out of turn at the expense of other water users), however, show no such variance between different sections. In fact, if anything the sections with smaller landowners show slightly fewer numbers of Section 68 cases. These types of cases are often genuine but more often than not are also ways 65

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of settling scores and forms of harass-ment between individual farmers (as documented by Ali, 1988, for the British period in the Punjab as well). Larger landowners may have cases registered against recalcitrant neighbours, or farmers may genuinely have complaints against each other. Such cases rarely have a strong political interest involved in them. Therefore, one could speculate that there is not much of a connection between these types of cases and the type of land tenure that might be dominant in a canal section. Also, since tawan cases are against the total number of water users along a watercourse while Section 68 cases are against individuals, the average number of Section 68 cases is twice the number of tawan cases. Similar data was collected from the neighbouring Shorkot canal subdivision, which is presented in Table 2. Patterns similar to the Sidhnai subdivision are repeated in the Shorkot canal subdivision. In 1996, on average every second watercourse in the Dauranpur section had a case of moga tampering registered against it as opposed to every 20th in the case of the Shorkot section. When I enquired about the reason for the massive difference in tawan cases, a similar explanation as in the Sidhnai subdivision was offered. The Shorkot canal section is dominated by larger and politically influential landowners. The irrigation staff in the larger landlord-dominated areas does not have the backbone to register tawan cases against them, even though the mogas might be tampered with just as much as in the other section. Furthermore, the Dauranpur section has Table 2: Number of tawan and Section 68 cases in the Shorkot subdivision (the numbers are rounded off to the nearest whole number) Section

Yr. and no. of tawan cases

Section 68 cases

No. of mogas

Mogas/tawan cases

Mogas/Sec. 68 cases

Dauranpur

1996 68 1997 23 1996 16 1997 22 1996 84 1997 45

1996 29 1997 19 1996 15 1997  7 1996 44 1997 26

113

1996  2 1997  5 1996 20 1997 20 1996   5 1997 10

1996  4 1997  6 1996 21 1997 45 1996 10 1997 17

Shorkot Totals

317 430

Source: Punjab Irrigation and Drainage Authority (PIDA).

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areas with brackish groundwater and that may also account for greater incidence of moga tampering and water thefts because people are completely dependent upon surface irrigation water, both for agriculture and domestic uses. The same explanation was, however, not valid in the case of Sidhnai. As observed by many in the field, mogas cannot be tampered with without the connivance of the sub-engineers and other lower staff (for example, 1999; Rinaudo et al., 2000). Whether the tampering gets reported or not is a function of how much one can either bribe the subengineers or intimidate them into keeping quiet. The differences in the power of individual landowners upon the state make a big difference in those cases, and also the people’s propensity to turn to the state for conflict resolution as opposed to turning to the local landed elite. The number of Section 68 cases is also much higher in the Dauranpur section than the Shorkot section of the subdivision and also compared to all the sections in the Sidhnai subdivision. Part of the explanation may be that in the Dauranpur section there is practically no difference in landownership between farmers; there are not even petty elites in the section. In the Shorkot section, with its hierarchy of landownership, conflict over water use is reportedly frequently solved at the local level by drawing upon the relative influence of larger landowners. In the case of Dauranpur, however, in the absence of any dampening influence of the local elite, every conflict gets reported to the irrigation department and the state has to adjudicate the conflict between generally equal antagonists. Furthermore, greater dependency on surface water supply, because of the brackish groundwater in the section, may provide an additional incentive to individual water users to try to take water out of turn.

Conclusion The state apparatus and its underlying laws do not just have a history but also a geography. The Canal and Drainage Act 1873 and its implementation by the state not only has geographical impacts, but also has geographical relations implicit in the post-colonial Pakistani state form and the ideology and functionality of the Act. Differential power relations are concretized in space, and the Act and the Pakistani state apparatus are complicit 67

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in producing and reproducing those power relations by their implicit insensitivity to the geography of power and local contexts, as is evident from the analysis of the enforcement data for the Act. The Pakistani state form is still colonial in nature, and the state apparatus in water resources is characterized by a hierarchical bureaucracy, which is structurally more attentive to its policing role over a population than its role as provider of public services. The inability or unwillingness of the Pakistani state to alter the Act substantially and make it more water-user friendly is a strong piece of evidence in this regard. To review the definition of hazardscapes, we defined it earlier as simultaneously, an analytical way of seeing, which asserts power, and a social space where the gaze of power is contested and struggled against to produce the lived reality of hazardous places. Formal law is one of the definitional lenses used by the state apparatus to view socio-spatial reality. And it is not just an idle gaze, but one of power where often the balance of power is in favour of the formal legal regime rather than any other means of apprehending the reality that the law is supposed to regulate. The gaze of power sanctioned by the Canal and Drainage Act has specific spatiohistorical imaginaries that I have elaborated upon above. That legally sanctioned reality is very different from the lived socio-spatial reality of water users, who are differentially exposed to water scarcity and other hazards as a result of the implementation of the Act. The poor and the weak have to engage in ‘unlawful’ behaviour to subvert the gaze sanctioned by the Act, or are a particular focus of the Act’s disciplining impulses. How do the geographies of access to water converge with geographies of vulnerability to hazards? This question and how the power struggles between the technocratic discourse of the water managers, and livelihoodand equity-based discourse of the water users, spawn different geographies of access and vulnerability make up the topic of the next chapter.

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4

Local Hydro-hazardscapes in the Rural Canal Colonies of Pakistan

Despite massive investments in its water sector over the past halfcentury, the Pakistani rural hydro-hazardscapes have been physically beset with persistent problems of inequity in access to irrigation water and of vulnerability to flood hazard (Wescoat et al., 2000). In this case study-based discussion of Pakistan’s rural hydro-hazardscapes, I outline the social power-infused experience of irrigation and flood hazard by rural water users, and the managerial discourse predicated upon technocratic modernity, liberal participatory ambitions and the colonial ethos of the legal structure within which Pakistani water managers have to operate. The discussionof local power dynamics will speak to the participatory ambitions of the international donor community and some enlightened segments of Pakistani civil society. The ethnographic data on the bureaucratic ethos of Pakistani water managers, especially when viewed in the context of the critical legal analysis of the Canal and Drainage Act 1873 undertaken in Chapter 3, will in turn serve to highlight the contrast between experience of water scarcity and vulnerability, and expert analytical ways of seeing and defining the water geographies. The hydrohazardscapes that are therefore thrown into sharp relief will in themselves have a few pathways towards a more socially just and climate-resilient future. The problem analyses and insights are not just endemic to Pakistan

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but are rather relevant to rural water resources geographies in most of the global South, especially where irrigation is an important proportion of the agricultural water supplies. Before I embark on a detailed discussion of the research results, it would be useful to recall briefly the physical structure of the Indus Basin irrigation system, the largest bureaucratically managed, gravitybased surface irrigation system in the world (Figure 3). The system has a hierarchical physical structure where water is diverted from the main rivers into the main stem canals, which subdivide into distributary canals, minor canals and, eventually, individual village watercourses. Location along a watercourse or along a higher-order canal is of critical importance in terms of water availability in such a gravity-based system. The water distribution from the watercourse to individual water users is based on an administratively designated rotational, fixed-time distribution system (warabandi), where water users have a fixed amount of time to water their crops, and the actual timing or quantity of the demand is irrelevant. The Canal and Drainage Act 1873, the basic blueprint for water management in the Indus Basin of Pakistan, allocates a disproportionate amount of power to the state in water management, as discussed in the previous chapter, with little balancing rights to water users. Most water users rarely interact with offcers above the level of subdivisional officers (SDOs) and executive engineers of canal divisions, who have almost absolute executive and judicial authority over water distribution, conflict resolution and general management of the system. In a highly regulated river system like the Indus, flood hazard is intricately tied up with the limitations imposed upon it by the irrigation infrastructure. In fact, much of the flood hazard in Pakistan is caused deliberately by the authorities to prevent damage to the irrigation diversion structures on the main stems of the Indus River and its five eastern tributaries. This was particularly highlighted by the pattern of flooding in the catastrophic floods of 2010 (Mustafa and Wrathall, 2011). Consequently, the connection between irrigation and flood management is of more than conceptual interest in the hydro-hazardscape sense. I will undertake a brief discussion of social power before outlining the local-level case study from canal colonies of central Punjab Province in Pakistan. With the power-infused geographies of access to irrigation water 70

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Figure 3: The Indus Basin and its major irrigation and power infrastructure.

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and vulnerability to flood hazard in mind, I will turn to the critical legal analyses of the Canal and Drainage Act 1873. The penultimate segment of the chapter will outline the bureaucratic ethos of irrigation and flood management in Pakistan. The chapter will conclude with reflections on how different discursive and material strands contribute to problematic hydro-hazardscapes, and how might the hazardscape perspective encourage pragmatic solutions to confront existing inequities and inefficiencies in the system so as to build resilience against future climate change.

Conceptualizing Social Power I develop a realist conceptualization of social power in this section. Realism involves three levels of analysis: the empirical, which is concerned with experiences as directly perceived; the actual, which relates to experiences and events, accepting that events exist independently of our perceptions of them and that each event may be perceived differently by different people; and the real, which involves abstract structures that are not measurable but contain the mechanisms that lead to the events and their perception (Bhaskar, 1975; Cloke et al., 1991; Johnston, 1991; Sayer, 1992). While the hydro-hazardscape concept is closer to the post-structuralist socio-nature thought, the realist conceptualization nevertheless allows a breadth of power analyses which complement the post-structuralist leanings of the main theoretical framework. The conceptual hybridity, much like that of the hazardscape concept, as I will demonstrate, is a strength that provides better guides to action than any temptation to retain theoretical purity. Social power is defined by Isaac (1993: 47) as ‘the capacity to act possessed by social agents in virtue of the enduring relations in which they participate’. Power has traditionally been conceptualized as an asymmetric dyadic relationship between two social agents where one has more power over the other (see Isaac, 1987; Ball, 1993). The issue here is not so much whom the powerful have the power over, but what they have the power to do in their capacity as socially situated role-bearers. However, in any discussion of the power to do things, the subjects that the powerful have the power over inevitably feature in the discussion. 72

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We do not live in a social vacuum or on the head of a pin – space matters, and social structures within that space matter. To explore what renders one social actor or institution dominant over the others is not simply a question of analysing the dyadic relationship between actor A and actor B or institution X and institution Y, but a threefold project involving: 1. the realization of the ‘intrinsic’ powers of social actors which they have by virtue of their social identities as participants in an enduring socially structured set of relationships (Isaac, 1993); 2. an awareness of the differential responses by the social structures towards social actors, which empower and disempower them (Wartenberg, 1993); and 3. actuating and facilitating the above two dimensions in regard to the organization and control over space. Property is one of the main building blocks of the social identities of actors within the modern context and particularly so in rural Pakistan examined in this study. The state is one of the main social forces with the capacity to empower or disempower social actors within any modern social context, particularly in the case of the study area because of the bureaucratic nature of the Pakistani irrigation system. In a realist structural mode I contend that social power has its origins in specific social structures, which differentially empower social actors. Consequently, here I draw a distinction between observable manifestations of power, its actual mechanisms and its real structural modes of organization. The connection between property ownership, economics and social power has been recognized by many theorists of power (see Berle, 1967; Partha, 1982, 1983; Russell, 1985; Mann, 1986; Isaac, 1987, 1993; Weber, 1993 [1920]; Dahrendorf, 1994 [1959]). Accordingly, the four villages of Pind Patekhan, Pind Jeerablade,7 Chak 15-D and Chak 13(lot), in the Khanewal district of central Pakistan, were chosen because of their exposure to flood hazard, dependence upon irrigation-water supplies and the varying property-ownership patterns between them (Figure 4). Pind Patekhan had one large landowning family and all the other residents of 73

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Figure 4: Field study area in tehsil Kabirwala, district Khanewal, central Punjab Province, Pakistan.

Hydro-Hazardscapes in the Rural Canal Colonies of Pakistan

the village were either very small landowners or tenant farmers; thereby the effect of disparate property ownership in the village was maximized. The landowning family in Pind Patekhan is one of the most politically powerful and influential families in Pakistan. Pind Jeerablade had a number of large and small farmers, so there was a range of property ownership within that village. Both the villages of Pind Patekhan and Pind Jeerablade are ancient settlements along the banks of the Ravi River, but much of their landtenure pattern was influenced by the formal land settlements undertaken by the British colonial government. Almost all of the population of the villages comprises indigenous Seraiki-speaking people of the area. Also, both the villages have fresh groundwater, which is frequently used to supplement surface water supplies. In Chak 15-D, almost everybody was a small farmer, thereby eliminating the effect of disparate property ownership. In Chak 13(lot), everybody was an equal tenant of the government and there were no landowners in the village. The villages of Chak 15-D and Chak 13(lot) were settled by the British colonial administration in 1912 and 1935, respectively, as part of their ongoing massive project in the construction and settlement of the canal colonies in the Punjab (Siddiqi, 1965; Gilmartin, 1994). Consequently, the population of the two villages is a mix of indigenous Seraiki-speaking people, as well as uprooted refugees from the Indian Punjab who moved to the villages at the time of independence in 1947. The villages of Chak 15-D and Chak 13(lot) have brackish groundwater, and the two villages are therefore almost exclusively dependent upon surface water supplies for irrigation and for domestic use. The field study presented here draws upon the 38 in-depth interviews and 154 household questionnaires administered to large, small and landless tenant farmers along the head, middle and tail reaches of the village watercourses in the four villages. The villages were selected because they fit the predetermined property-ownership profile for study villages. Furthermore, the big landlord in Pind Patekhan was willing to allow the study to be conducted in his village without interference. The sample for the interviews was based on stratified convenience sampling. Each of the interviews took between two and four hours. Unfortunately only two females could be interviewed, while a third of the questionnaire respondents were females. This under-representation is firstly because 75

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of the cultural sensitivity in the area about an outside male conducting interviews with females, and secondly because men do tend to be more proactive in irrigation management than women and consequently the latter’s under-representation in the sample does not pose a major handicap. Despite due sensitivity, there was an inescapable power differential between the interviewer and the interviewee, and the readers will have to form their own judgments regarding the veracity of the responses based on the evidence.

Power and Access to Irrigation Water and Flood Relief The property and power problematic, as applicable to the analysis, is summarized in Tables 3 and 4 below. This conceptualization draws upon Partha (1982, 1983), Russell (1985), Isaac (1993), Weber (1993 [1920]) and Dahrendorf (1994 [1959]). The discussion of social power in the study villages will be with reference to this formal conceptualization. Each of the empirical types of power – that is, force/violence, socialization and economic resources/property – have their sources in the ability of powerful social actors to carry out their threats of violence, the control over ideologies or over references to tradition, and exclusion from economic resources, respectively. At the conceptually abstract but real structural level, the three empirical types of power emanate from feudal, communal and bourgeoisie modes of power.8 Property holds a central role in defining the structural modes of power. Partha (1983: 317) argues that ‘these modes are distinguished in terms of the basis of specification of the “property” connection (the relations of production) in the ordered and repeated performance of social activities’. Each one of the above modes and types of power, as might be evident, is very closely interlinked, and no one situation can be said to involve one type of power to the exclusion of others. However, as the empirical evidence is presented it will emerge that the distinction between the modes of power is nevertheless a useful one. The feudal mode of power, according to Partha (1983: 317), ‘is characterized fundamentally by sheer superiority of physical force, that is, a relationship of domination’. The dominant feudality not only has 76

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Hydro-Hazardscapes in the Rural Canal Colonies of Pakistan Table 3: Conceptualization of power and property relations Levels of analysis

Power type 1

Power type 2

Power type 3

Empirical type Actual source

naked force or violence

Real modes

feudal

compensatory knowledge economic resources socialization/ (for example, property) tradition/ ideological control bourgeoisie communal

Table 4: Significance of the source of power under each mode/social structure Mode

Force/violence

Economic resources/ property

Socialization/control over ideologies

Feudal Bourgeoisie Communal

high low low

medium high medium

low medium high

Source: Partha, 1982, 1983.

control over the labour process but also has varying degrees of control over the life processes of the peasantry. The bourgeois mode of power, unlike the feudal mode, ensures domination not by control over the life processes of the dominated, but through a more comprehensively articulated system of control over the labour process, primarily through the all-encompassing economic power of the capitalist. Physical force is relatively irrelevant under this mode, but the power of socialization is relatively more important than in the feudal mode, though certainly not as important as in the communal mode. The communal mode of power exists where the power to include, exclude and direct production and accumulation resides not with a single person or a set of persons but with an entire social collectivity. The empirically observable exercise of power, however, may be in the hands of a select few in whom the collectivity has confidence. Compliance is assured through reference to traditional authority or socialization, followed by the possibility of community sanctions with potentially important 77

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economic consequences for the non-complier, and in very rare cases by brute force. At the empirical level one observes manifestations of ‘naked power’ by threat of force; for example, many of the respondents in the villages of Pind Patekhan and Pind Jeerablade reported the threat of being manhandled by the workers of the big landlord as being one of their biggest fears. I personally witnessed instances of poorer farmers being humiliated by being made to rub their noses on the ground, in front of the entire village, by the big landowners in Pind Patekhan for disobeying their orders. In both Pind Patekhan and Pind Jeerablade, the large landowners frequently resorted to physical violence against small farmers and landless tenants for various infractions, such as letting farm animals graze on the large landowners’ lands. The large landowners in the villages of Pind Patekhan and Pind Jeerablade seemed to enjoy supreme judicial and executive power in their villages. Although the survey respondents frequently reported water thefts, everybody in the two villages said that reporting the thefts to the government authorities was virtually impossible: We do not go to the authorities because we cannot move without the bigger landowners’ [in Pind Patekhan] consent. Whoever steals water, we just take away their cotton in return... the watercourse is cleaned by the tenants and the beldars [labourers]. Sometimes they can refuse to offer their labour but then the main landlords will not let them have any water and drag them out of their houses to work in any case... Besides what is the use of being an MNA [Pakistan Member of the National Assembly] or MPA [Member of the Provincial Assembly] if you cannot [illegally] tamper with the moga [water outlet] or steal others’ water? (Large landowner in Pind Jeerablade) We are too small and humble, the big folks would not let us go to the government authorities [to report water thefts or insufficient supplies]. Besides we are too embarrassed to be so small. (Small farmer in Pind Jeerablade) [The reason I do not get sufficient irrigation water is] that my land is surrounded by lands of big landowners who have considerable power and

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Hydro-Hazardscapes in the Rural Canal Colonies of Pakistan influence. They would not let me build the watercourse across their lands up to my lands [even though they legally cannot prevent this]. Therefore I cannot get my share of the irrigation water because there is no channel to carry the water. As far as complaining to the government is concerned, I know that nobody would listen to me. I have tried many times but nobody listens. (Small farmer in Pind Jeerablade, interview)

The state machinery also contributed to the landowners’ naked power. Many of the respondents in Pind Patekhan and Pind Jeerablade reported that one of the main modes of harassment by the large landowners was getting the police to arrest people on flimsy excuses and subject them to torture and extortion. Some respondents in Chak 15-D and Chak 13(lot) also reported this, but they added that it was very rare in their area. The interview respondents in Chak 15-D and Chak 13(lot) reported instances of water thefts and insufficient supplies, but almost all of the respondents said that whenever there is a water theft, there is either a fight or community intervention to resolve the matter. None of the respondents in the two villages reported any instance of a person being able to bully the other farmers in order to steal their water. Naked power based on violence or the threat thereof was relatively less important in the two villages, which were characterized by relatively equal property ownership. The evidence from the interviews did not point to any direct connection between vulnerability to flood hazard and the naked feudal power of the large landowners. The naked power of the large landowners, however, did seem to contribute indirectly to people’s vulnerability by instilling in them a strong sense of helplessness, especially in the two villages of Pind Patekhan and Pind Jeerablade. When people were asked about their adaptations to floods and about their perceived reasons for their vulnerability to flood hazard, they repeatedly said that they felt powerless to do anything about their vulnerability or exposure to floods. The patwari [immigration official] did put down our name among the affectees but we understand that one of the neighbouring landowners had

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Water Resource Management in a Vulnerable World told the patwari to not give any aid to the people who are tenants of our landlord. This time around we did not even get any seed... though in all fairness the local landlord occasionally directs his servants to help us move our stuff during a flood, but almost never do we get any other aid. In fact if the local landlord orders us to work on a dam to protect his lands we have to go even if our own houses are in jeopardy. I guess that is what you get for being poor. (Small farmer in Pind Patekhan)

The large landowners in Pind Patekhan and Pind Jeerablade also exercise considerable compensatory power over their tenants and other small farmers in their villages. The most critical compensatory power of the large landowners was their capacity to allow landless tenants to build their houses on their land. As one of the servants of the landlords in Pind Patekhan said: We do not salute gold, cash, or diamonds, we salute the land... because they can ask us to leave their land any time, and where would one go with one’s children if that were to happen? (Servant of the Pind Patekhan landowners)

The same compensatory power of the large landowners was also at play in influencing people’s adaptation to flood hazard. Most of the houses in the flood plain are built on elevated mounds of mud to keep the flood water from entering the houses (Figure 5). Some of the tenant farmers, however, did not have that feature in their houses. One of the small farmers begged me to ask the landlord to lend him the government-owned bulldozer so that he could also build a mound on which to build his house. Another landless tenant had the following to say: We do not want to invest in tibbis [elevated mounds of mud on which houses are built] because if tomorrow we are chased out, who will account for the cost? We simply practise our skills at collecting pots and pans [during a flood] and getting to the [elevated] ground by the canal distributary. (Tenant farmer in Pind Patekhan)

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Figure 5: An adobe house of a small farmer, on an elevated plinth in the River Ravi flood plain, central Punjab Province, Pakistan.

The other types of compensatory power that the large landowners reportedly enjoy are allowing access to firewood from forest on their land and to water from their tubewell pumps, and occasionally negotiating with the state for the provision of flood-relief supplies or about other matters on the people’s behalf. Exercise of this compensatory power was also observed to have significant impact, both positive and negative, on people’s access to irrigation water: We get the full amount of water that we need because we are tenants of the big landowners in Pind Patekhan. I think others do not get it because they steal each others’ water and the big landowners’ [in Pind Patekhan] servants are in collusion with water thieves. (Female tenant farmer in Pind Patekhan) ... five hours of canal water are stolen by the big landowners from our family but we would not dare pick a fight... we are very scared of the big landowners because they are solid people and we are not... we get fodder for

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Water Resource Management in a Vulnerable World our animals and firewood from the bigger landowners and they would not let us have those if we were to mess with them. (Small farmer in Pind Jeerablade) Before the tenants could not be moved and could petition against it. Now the government does not care... Before we would get a slip from the tehsildar [the revenue officer] that said that we were the cultivators. Since the 70s land reforms the cultivator does not get a slip in his name... The big landowner steals our water and we would not dare complain to the patwari... the upper riparians are tenants of bigger landowners. Their turn is just before us. They get their requirement and we get nothing when it is our turn immediately after them... The landowner does not like us because we would not work for free as servants in his household. (Female tenant farmer in Pind Jeerablade)

The tenant farmers in Pind Patekhan were better off in terms of access to irrigation water than small farmers or tenants in all the other study villages. Their services to the large landowners seemed to be rewarded with greater access to irrigation water, as well as by provision of relief supplies in the aftermath of floods. In Chak 15-D and Chak 13(lot), as there were no local large landowners, the farmers seem to rely largely on dealing with the government either individually or communally. Their interaction was directly with the state and its employees. All of them reported having to pay collectively a set rate adjusted annually per cropping season for each moga (water outlet from the main canal) to the local irrigation department employee to ensure their required irrigation-water supply for the season. People in the two villages felt powerless vis-à-vis the government, which they blamed for being corrupt and indifferent to their plight. The ability of the large landowners to influence the government to curry favours for people is a very critical aspect of their compensatory power. The greater influence of the landowners with the government was perceived to be a major factor in influencing vulnerability to flood hazard. In the two villages of Chak 15-D and Chak 13(lot), which were not under the direct sphere of influence of a big landowner, nobody reported getting any flood relief. However, people did bitterly accuse the landlords in Pind Patekhan of influencing the government to breach the right-bank levees 82

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of the Ravi River in previous floods to save their village downstream from the barrage (Figure 4, page 74). The breaching of the right-bank levees just upstream of Sidhnai Barrage, when the flood flows exceed the safe designed capacity of the structure, is the main cause of flooding of Chak 15-D and Chak 13(lot) (Mustafa, 1998). Also, the breaching of the levees lowers the flood levels downstream of the barrage where the villages of Pind Patekhan and Pind Jeerablade are located. The residents of Chak 15-D and Chak 13(lot) perceived the decision to breach the levees to be a function of intervention by various interested large landowners. The irrigation department staff at the barrage confirmed the general perception that the decision to breach was indeed often heavily influenced by interested powerful groups, and was rarely a purely technical decision. The direct intervention of the landlords at Pind Patekhan, however, could not be confirmed. There were many conflicting accounts of the reasons for the breaching of the levees upstream from Sidhnai Barrage depending on who was the informant. Whereas the irrigation department officials emphasized the technical considerations, the public blamed one political leader or the other for influencing the decision. The overall point is that the geography of exposure to floods is the outcome of a socially determined process of negotiation and conflict, between the government bureaucracy and/or different political leaders, with the vulnerable populations being altogether excluded from the process. In the two villages of Pind Patekhan and Pind Jeerablade, people did report getting some relief aid from the government, thanks to the influence of the large landowners. Many of the respondents, however, complained bitterly about how the relief aid was misdirected by the functionaries of the large landowners: Nobody gives us aid. Names of the affectees are written at the dera [the men’s section of a property where guests are received] of a protégé of the landowners [another interviewee in the sample]. That person does not like us too much and he does not get our name written among the affectees. That is why we generally do not get any aid, though this time around we did get a maund [unit of measure] of wheat from the government. (Small farmer in Pind Patekhan)

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The power of tradition was the weakest type of power exercised by the landowners of Pind Patekhan or Pind Jeerablade. Most of the people seemed to be more scared of the naked violence and of the compensatory power than motivated by any sense of traditional allegiance to the landowners: The elders of the present owners used to help out the very poor, but not any more. The present folks would rather see us dead. (Tenant in Pind Patekhan)

In response to a question about why people in the Pind Jeerablade area do not undertake cooperative water development projects, the response was the following: Because we are not united. We are divided into followers of big landowners, and we divide up our votes. (Small farmer in Pind Jeerablade)

In the two villages of Pind Jeerablade and Pind Patekhan, for every issue, the people suggested that the will of the landowners determined whether things got done. In fact, so great was the sense of powerlessness and alienation in the two villages that some of the respondents started trembling with fear when approached to participate in the interview. Many of them did, however, relax subsequently when they were assured that no coercion was involved in the process, and no retribution was going to follow for their responses. In the case of Chak 15-D and Chak 13(lot), however, the community did seem to exercise greater power over individuals in terms of getting them to conform to social norms. In Chak 15-D, for example, the villagers had banded together with the help of the Pakistan Institute for Environment and Development Action Research (PIEDAR), a nongovernmental organization involved in community-based irrigationchannel improvement, to line one of their watercourses on a self-help basis. Even the residents in the two villages of Pind Patekhan and Pind Jeerablade acknowledged the development that the people in Chak 15-D and Chak 13(lot) had undertaken on a self-help basis: 84

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Hydro-Hazardscapes in the Rural Canal Colonies of Pakistan People in Darkhana [where Chak 15-D and Chak 13(lot) are located] are advanced because they are united. Our landowners would not let us be united here. (Small farmer in Pind Jeerablade) People in Darkhana are brave and solid people, we are not. I was amazed to see the level of development those folks have undertaken when I visited there and the level of bravado they had. (Small farmer in Pind Jeerablade)

The questionnaire survey results further confirmed that people across the four villages had very sophisticated social explanations for their differential access to irrigation water and vulnerability to flood hazard, and in fact there was a convergence among the people who reported limited access to water and also perceived themselves to be more vulnerable to floods. Figure 6 graphically illustrates the results of the log-linear associational

Figure 6: Schematic representation of the log linear analysis and statistically significant associations.

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analysis undertaken for the responses gained from the questionnaire. The associations presented are significant at the 95 per cent confidence level and the λ parameter and its sign indicates the strength and direction of the relationship. According to the above, people who perceived official corruption as a cause of irrigation water scarcity (λ = 0.44) were 1.6 times more likely to blame thefts by upper riparians for irrigation water scarcity. However, the perception of official corruption is negatively associated with powerlessness (λ = –0.16), seepage from the irrigation channel (λ = –0.35) and naturally insufficient supply (λ = –0.33). The negative association between official corruption and powerlessness was surprising but could be explained by the fact the majority of the responses for the sense of powerlessness came from the two feudal-dominated villages of Pind Patekhan and Pind Jeerablade, where people have little direct interaction with officialdom. It is for the same reason that there is a negative association between official corruption and people who report getting more than two-thirds or less than one-third of their required irrigation water. The majority of the farmers who reported getting between one-third and two-thirds of their water needs were from Chak 15-D and Chak 13(lot), where their interaction with officialdom is routine. The other two negative associations indicate that people do not combine a social explanation of official corruption with naturalistic explanations of seepage from the channel and naturally insufficient supply. However, they do strongly associate naturally insufficient supply with location. The key finding of the statistical analysis, however, is the positive association between people who report getting less than two-thirds of their water right and those who report being differentially more vulnerable. Herein is the additional statistical evidence for the key assumption underlying the hazardscape concept that in fact normal life is hazardous and vulnerability indeed emerges from the ordinariness of everyday injustices. As defined earlier, feudal power entails a more comprehensive power over the life processes of those subjected to it. The ownership of large tracts of land lent that power to the landowners, including compensatory power. Given that the large landowners in Pind Patekhan had supreme control over every aspect of life of the smaller farmers and tenants in 86

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the village without any balancing influence of the state, the nature of power in those two villages can be characterized as structurally feudal. Although the compensatory power was quite important, on balance the use of force seemed to be more important in ensuring compliance in the two villages of Pind Patekhan and Pind Jeerablade. In the case of Chak 15-D and Chak 13(lot), however, the overwhelming domination by large landowners or the government was not present. People did feel powerless vis-à-vis the government, and the influence of the landowners through the government, but overall a process of negotiation and conflict among equal protagonists, rather than a case of bullying by powerful people, characterized the process of access to irrigation in the two villages. Based on the field evidence, I characterize the dominant type of power operative in the two villages as structurally communal in nature, even though the level of socialization and compliance was not very high. Comparatively, however, no other type of power seemed too conspicuous, and therefore one can conclude that in the villages of Chak 15-D and Chak 13(lot) communal power is most dominant, with some contribution from other types of power, especially as it related to state water bureaucracies’ behaviour. It is to the discussion of the official perceptions that we turn in the next section.

Structural Characteristics of the Pakistani Water Bureaucracy In the Pakistani government service system, there are two types of bureaucrats: those who are members of the elite civil service, and those who are not. The civil service, in the Pakistani context, does not denote the entirety of employees in the public service as in the American or the British sense. They are a relatively small, elite officer corps (members of the federally recruited Central Superior Services (CSS)) constituting less than 1 per cent of more than 2 million employees in the civilian public sector. Furthermore, there is an important distinction between ‘secretariat’ and ‘line’ officers, with the former commanding greater prestige, power and career prospects. Secretariat/staff officers tend to occupy policy-making centres of power (for example, central government ministries), while line officers tend to work in departments involved with 87

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implementation of those policies (for example, the provincial irrigation departments). As Charles Kennedy (1987) notes: ‘staff officers are the head and line officers are the body’. The officers of the provincial irrigation departments, the main organizations of interest for the present paper, are rarely members of the elite civil service or CSS. A CSS officer, however, sometimes heads these organizations and, almost always, their federal umbrella the Ministry of Water and Power. By virtue of their power and prestige, it is the elite CSS officers who set the tenor for government service in Pakistan. Many scholars of Pakistan have pointed to a gap in power and prestige between the state and the civil society in Pakistan and have described it as a direct outcome of the colonial legacy of the state (Kennedy, 1987; Lieven, 2011). The colonial legacy has been discussed at the general level of the bureaucracy in Pakistan by Malik (1997: 4), who characterizes it as an ‘oligarchic relationship’ between the military, the civil bureaucracy and the feudal elite in Pakistan, characterized particularly in Punjab Province by a ‘hegemonic symbiosis between the landed aristocracy and the services’. It would be useful here to recall the distinction that Gilmartin (1994) draws between ‘science of the empire’ and ‘imperial science’. According to him, the elite civil service of colonial India was the institutional articulation of the science of the empire that ‘defined not simply a structure of domination, but also a distinctly colonial political system linking the colonial state and indigenous elites together in a common political order’ (p.1128). The colonial irrigation department, on the contrary, was the institutional articulation of imperial science that, ‘with its command over environmentally transformative technologies such as irrigation, operated in India within this (science of the empire determined) political framework’ (p.1128). Gilmartin equates modern engineering with his concept of the science of the empire. The provincial irrigation departments in Pakistan are almost wholly staffed by trained engineers at the officer/ management level, and can therefore be described as modern-day carriers of the imperial science discourse. Gilmartin makes the argument that the roots of the present system are found in the political implications of the relationship between the environment and community established in the colonial era. 88

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Voices from the Pakistani Irrigation Bureaucracy In-depth interviews for the research were conducted starting from the lowest level functionaries of the Punjab Irrigation and Drainage Authority (PIDA) all the way up to the head of the authority, and then on to the relevant federal-level state functionaries. The main issues of interest for the research were: the interviewees’ understanding of their organizational missions and of equity and efficiency issues in irrigation and flood management; their views on participatory water and flood management; their understanding of public service; their relationship with civil society; and their job satisfaction. For three of the officers – a Sub-Divisional Canal Officer (SDO), a Chief Engineer (CE) and the Secretary of PIDA – the interviews were supplemented with participant observation, whereby I sat in their offices and observed their routine workings. My interviews with PIDA officials reveal a relatively uniform understanding of their organizational mission. Almost all identified equitable distribution of water to water users according to the letter of the law, and maintenance of the irrigation infrastructure as their main organizational mission, as well as their main priorities. Almost all of them, with the exception of people engaged with irrigation barrages, stated that enforcement of the law took up most of their time, with maintenance of the infrastructure as a secondary function. The overall tenor of the responses to the question about organizational mission was legalistic – that is, concerned with law enforcement – and only secondly engineeringoriented, specifically the maintenance of public infrastructure. Every one of the interviewees admitted that they were trying to enforce an outdated, and therefore unenforceable, law. The Canal and Drainage Act 1873 that the irrigation officials are supposed to enforce provides for 64 per cent cropping, whereas present-day cropping intensities are considerably in excess of that number.9 The respondents at the federal level of water management had a more technocratic and managerial understanding of their organization’s mission, focused on inter-provincial coordination and interaction with the donors. Almost all of the interview respondents were trained engineers. All of them quite explicitly stated that running the system at the technically defined optimum would be an ideal situation, and the issues of equity 89

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in distribution were distractions from that ideal. The engineering bias that came through in the discussions about organizational mission pervaded the interviewees’ responses to the rest of the questions as well, as discussed below. Equity in water resources management implies that water users have a say in water management commensurate with their stake in it (Bates et al., 1993). Haughton (1998) identifies procedural, social and geographical dimensions of equity, and argues that each of the dimensions depends on the other. To the discussions of equity, I will add that equity essentially implies procedural fairness and transparency, equal right to the protection of one’s right regardless of its size and, in the case of water, because of its importance for sustenance of life, the right to meet minimum requirements of livelihood. In the case of flood hazard, I will further add that addressing the interests of the vulnerable populations in flood management will constitute equitable management of the hazard. Conveyance efficiency of water from the head of a watercourse to the tail-end of it was the most common understanding of system efficiency among the interviewees. This understanding is consistent with the interviewees’ engineering and technocratic biases. For the purposes of the following discussion, the efficiency concept is also deemed to include water’s efficiency in terms of its productive use and provision of livelihood for vulnerable populations. The concept of efficiency, therefore, is held to be closely linked to equity. In response to questions about their understanding of equity and efficiency in irrigation and flood management, almost all of the respondents across the PIDA hierarchy spoke of similar themes: Ask us if we are delivering water to the heads of watercourses on the moga [water inlet for a village watercourse], because that is what we are responsible for. Downstream on a village watercourse, water distribution and conveyance efficiency is a social problem over which we have limited control... I admit that there are inefficiencies, but you see 1970 was a watershed year for us. Before that we could get the lower staff and beldars [labourers] to work, because we could hire or fire them at will. Now they have job security and none of them want to work. (Executive Engineer)

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Hydro-Hazardscapes in the Rural Canal Colonies of Pakistan I do believe that equity is an important element of efficiency. Today I admit that miles of lower reaches of watercourses and distributaries are dry. However, today you get the politicians off my back and I can assure you that no tail section would go dry. I would further want to increase the full supply factor, because the present one is not realistic. I think more dams and new developments in the irrigation system are also part of the answer but that too is being hindered by political wrangling, for example, the Kalabagh Dam issue. (Superintending Engineer) I think everything we do is about equity. We are not selling anything, provision of water for irrigation is a public service. If all the farm area gets water we have simultaneously taken care of both efficiency and equity. (Secretary of PIDA)

In terms of flood management, again, the reasons for inequity in distribution of vulnerability to the hazard are laid squarely on the shoulders of powerful politicians whom PIDA functionaries perceive to intervene unfairly in their work. One of the interviewee SDOs says that he personally witnessed a local Pakistan Member of the National Assembly (MNA) telling a CE (Chief Engineer, the highest-ranking line officer in the irrigation hierarchy) that he would throw him in the river if he allowed the levees on the side to be breached to save the barrage. The levee-breaching would have caused damage to the MNA’s lands. Other functionaries repeat similar stories: People with their political connections selfishly want to get flood spurs built in front of their lands to prevent erosion. But the river has its own logic and it has to take its extra water somewhere. So the river starts eroding some other bank, and during floods those spurs accentuate the problem. I believe that there are hundreds of these spurs in Punjab which were built on the basis of political influence... We basically make the forces of nature worse by messing around with them through these spurs which typically have no technical justification. I think that in terms of floods the politicians have disempowered the engineers, whereas engineers should

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Water Resource Management in a Vulnerable World be brought to the top. We violate principles of geomorphology because politicians pressure us to, and the public ends up suffering for that. (Executive Engineer) We lose more money from floods because we have to make the politicians happy. They want to interfere in the operation of the breaching sections. (Superintending Engineer)

In summary, almost all the PIDA functionaries interviewed considered political influence peddling as one of the main impediments to the realization of equity and efficiency in irrigation and flood management. Almost all of the functionaries interpret equity and efficiency in legalistic and technocratic managerialist terms, but even within that technocratic understanding of the twin concepts, there are hints of some recognition of the role of differential power in facilitating access to irrigation water and then exposure to flood hazard. While the experiential hazardscape of the water users has sharp contours of social power, the analytical and managerial hazardscape is locked in a struggle to have its power/ knowledge, based upon superior technical understanding, prevail over the social power of the local political elite. In between, the hydro-hazardscape is characterized by the marginality of the powerless with two opposing power elites, the local and the formal state engaged over a power struggle on defining its contours to their advantage. This is always borne out by observing the day-to-day functioning of the water bureaucrats in Pakistan, who get a steady stream of local dignitaries walking through their offices typically looking for relief on various irrigation-related offences for their constituents, or transfer or reinstatement of low-level irrigation employees. As the Secretary Irrigation of the PIDA tellingly said to a visiting public representative: I am quite aware of the fact that my writ in this department only works down to the Xen [Executive Engineer] level. Below that are your people, and I know that I have no control over them.

The views on participatory management, a potential conduit for a more equitable hazardscape, were quite divergent among the interview 92

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respondents in the PIDA hierarchy, with the junior-level functionaries being generally opposed to it, and the higher-level functionaries being lukewarm to enthusiastic about it: If that [participatory management] happens, the poor will be crushed and the tail enders will be wiped off the face of the earth. It will not work anywhere because people have destructive mentalities; they always want to repress others. I would argue that today 20 per cent of the killings in Pakistan are water related, but if you take the government out and there is participatory management, 80 per cent of the murders in Pakistan will be about water. (Irrigation patwari (lowest-level tax collector and administrator for the department)) This [discussion about decentralized participatory management of the irrigation system] is a non-Muslim conspiracy to destroy us... if farmers could distribute water by themselves, why would they come to us for every single problem? If they cannot amicably distribute water at a watercourse, how can they do it for a canal distributary? (Sub-Divisional Canal Officer)

These two employees are on the revenue collection and management side of the irrigation bureaucracy, and are typically those with the most frequent and intimate interaction with water users. To further illustrate their points and to highlight the role that social power plays in their own workings as well, they stated as follows: I am supposed to change the water turns of watercourses from night to day every week. There is a water user in the neighbouring village, whose turn I have not been able to change for the past two years according to the rules. [He now gets his turn during the day all the time.] I cannot do it because a neighbouring big landlord told me not to. If I were not to do as I was told, he could not get me transferred out because of my association with the [other more influential] landowners, but he could harass me by getting my cow stolen or something. I just want to tread the safe middle path. (Irrigation patwari)

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Water Resource Management in a Vulnerable World Frankly I decide cases based on the importance of the person/politician who writes a reference slip for a supplicant. Whoever has the more important person’s slip typically tends to get a favourable decision. But sometimes these politicians give out those reference slips to both the parties. I try my level best within the circumstances to maintain some semblance of a decision based on merit but it is difficult... But despite all my attempts to accommodate the politicians, I still cannot be completely unjust and therefore I have been transferred about seven times in the past three years. (Sub-Divisional Canal Officer)

Higher-level employees at the federal level also thought that participatory water management is a very bad idea. Most of the people at the federal level, however, consider themselves technocrats who are relatively insulated from the day-to-day workings of the system. Most of them, even from their insulated positions, consider participatory approaches to be unworkable in Pakistan: I think warabandi is a good enough system and it just needs to be applied more strictly. But the problem here is that most of the funding is going towards the social sector, which is non-productive and does not produce any revenues. I think we have basically bought into the global agenda [about participatory water management] of the donors without due regard for our specific needs for more infrastructure. (Water and GIS specialist)

This interview respondent considered himself an engineer and was not about to make any apologies for it. He declared that most of his colleagues agreed with his views but were just too politic to express them as openly as he was. At the policy level, I found his articulation of the issues informative in elucidating the engineering-based management paradigm that is influential in irrigation and flood management. The views of the two most senior employees of PIDA are quite remarkable in terms of their wholehearted acceptance of the principle of participatory management. Both, however, concede that their opinions are in a minority in their organizations: 94

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Hydro-Hazardscapes in the Rural Canal Colonies of Pakistan Farmer participation is a good idea because if we can get the small farmers on our side, people will know who is doing a good job, us or the politicians. (Chief Engineer of PIDA) I wholeheartedly agree with the principle of farmer participation in the [irrigation] system’s management, and I can also tell you that this opinion is not typical in my organization. I am an outsider in this department. But the public has learned to express its opinions and get them heard, and we have to take that into account... [the] bottom line is that we cannot continue to have no client satisfaction orientation in the irrigation department. (Secretary of PIDA)

Possibly, being at the highest level of irrigation hierarchy, the two officials just quoted had become more sensitized to the need for public approval and getting the public on their side in their generally antagonistic relationship with the politicians. Furthermore, these are also the two officials who are most in contact with donors and, therefore, are quite cognizant of the donor and non-governmental organizations’ (NGOs) proposals for participatory irrigation sector reforms. The former Federal Secretary of the Ministry of Water and Power, who I interviewed, went so far as to suggest that the only way the system can be saved from total collapse is through participatory management. The Secretary of PIDA, however, added that, given the level of intellectual and financial corruption in the Pakistani bureaucracy, it is unlikely that the establishment was going to allow that to happen. Some irrigation functionaries, despite their somewhat patronizing attitude towards the local water users, paradoxically seemed to have a fairly sophisticated diagnosis of the management problems besetting the system: Our organizational culture is still colonial. Ideally we should be easily approachable and we should let the public share in our power. But we are motivated more by pursuit of power than by public service... No, I do not think that I am a good public servant. (Sub-Divisional Canal Officer)

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Water Resource Management in a Vulnerable World We are from the public for the public, but many of us pretend to be God. I say that within the circumstances I try to be a good public servant... but if the leadership is not there, how can we change? (Superintending Engineer)

While the conception of a well-functioning system was purely technical and engineering-based, there was a grudging recognition of the social aspects, for which these functionaries did not have training. On the higher level, however, there was also resentment of the international donors and NGOs who seemed to be imposing their agendas on to the irrigation system: Sometimes we get pressure from our sub-contractors to do illegal things. The second problem is imposition of foreign consultants. Those goras (white people) are getting up to US $25,000 per month as consultants, and they are utterly useless... We do not have any role in the conception stage of projects. Typically in this country projects are conceived by the funding agencies and then the project travels down through the government until it reaches us, not the other way around... Nowadays dealing with the NGOs has been made mandatory by the donors, so we have to interact with them, but I think that NGOs are completely useless and that is a typical opinion in my organization. (Water and GIS specialist)

The irrigation hierarchy, despite their power/knowledge based upon its technocratic training, had been made painfully aware of the powerinfused context within which they had to function. They seemed to want to stake out a politically inert space-based flow, conveyance efficiency and irrigation scheduling where their technical competence was at a premium. The water users and the powerful elites, however, locked them in a struggle to mediate local conflicts over water and insert themselves in the messy politics of access to water and flood management, much to their chagrin. We now conclude with some reflections on how the subjectivities of water users and water managers might contribute to the local-level rural hazardscapes.

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Conclusion: Towards Equitable Hydro-Hazardcapes People in the large landowner-dominated villages of Pind Patekhan and Pind Jeerablade tended to have a very strong sense of helplessness, without the patronage of the powerful, with respect to their ability to solve the problems of access to irrigation water and vulnerability to floods. In the case of Chak 15-D and Chak 13(lot), however, the sense of efficacy was much higher, though the people still felt like they were relatively powerless vis-à-vis the state machinery. The pattern of access to irrigation water was relatively equitable within the villages, but collectively the villagers were short of water and were subject to extortion by the irrigation department staff. Individually the residents of Chak 15-D and Chak 13(lot) were subject to the communal mode of power in the village, but collectively they were subject to the compensatory and naked power of the state. The geography of irrigation and flood management at the local level is influenced by the same social structures of power. Indeed, vulnerability to extreme events is deeply embedded within the everyday social activity of access to water among other resources. The issue of state indifference and incompetence at the local level plays a critical role in disempowering the people and therefore is one of the main causes of inequitable outcomes of resource and hazards management. The training of the Pakistani bureaucracy is still along the lines of preparing bureaucrats who are going to govern a colonized population, rather than as public servants who are, in the end, going to be answerable to the public. The explanation for some of the trends reported here, however, must also be sought in the very nature of the public administration enterprise, especially as it pertains to a developing world context like that of Pakistan. As noted earlier, the theory and practice of bureaucratic administration of water were fashioned and crystallized in a colonial and post-colonial political context. The assumptions of a Western scientific modernity, with its accompanying language and habits of the mind, also informed the colonial and post-colonial political context. The water-related bureaucrats’ subjectivities are deeply steeped in modernist technocratic language and assumptions about the efficient management of the irrigation system or flood hazards. The water managers in Pakistan assume that their emphasis on discipline, autonomy, procedural 97

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technicalities and scientific engineering criteria in water resources and hazards management are epistemologically privileged vis-à-vis the public’s emphasis on access, equity and security of livelihood for their families and neighbourhoods. The water managers in Pakistan are not exceptional in terms of this ideational distance from the public that they are supposed to serve. The modernist, post-colonial bureaucracies in almost all of the developing world, and some countries of the developed world, are in a similar situation. The bureaucratic ethos in the irrigation and flood bureaucracy of Pakistan is driven by two parallel yet equally important modernist assumptions: the engineering bias in the case of the line and senior officers of the irrigation and flood bureaucracy; and the general allegiance to science of the empire. That very allegiance makes many of the bureaucrats consider social aspects of their job as vexing distractions rather than an integral part of any resource management paradigm. In the science of the empire paradigm, the notions of distancing oneself from the natives, treating them as irrational and prone to causing trouble, and something to be controlled rather than served, govern the workings of the Pakistani bureaucrats. The opinions about participatory management given by most line bureaucrats above should illustrate the point. In this present environment, therefore, the prospects for successful participatory reforms are limited. The bureaucracy is vulnerable to meddling by powerful political interests, precisely because it has isolated itself from the wider Pakistani civil society and is now in a losing battle against powerful politicians who have used their executive power to reciprocate the hostility of the state functionaries towards the public. The powerful politicians ironically derive part of their power by mediating the interaction between the public and the public servants. If the public felt comfortable and confident enough to approach the government functionaries, the politicians would have a very important aspect of their power undermined. In the absence of any alternative civil society mechanisms for communication between the public and the public servants, it is inevitable that politicians have to take up the role in an atmosphere of mutual hostility. The power-infused contours of the rural hydro-hazardscapes that emerge from this chapter point towards a few important lessons. The 98

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most important one is that the social and ideational distance between the state and the civil society is at least partially responsible for reinforcing inequitable and unjust power relations, which in turn reproduce geographies of differential access and vulnerability. Participatory reforms could be a pathway for more equitable and resilient hazardscapes, but those reforms have to be mindful of geographies of differential power and the nature of that power. In a feudal mode of social power, participatory management structures will legitimize the appropriation of water by powerful interests instead of leading to more equitable outcomes. Therefore, any discussion of participatory reforms will have to be attentive to the particularities of the places and the power relations therein, in order to succeed. Standardized institutional models, such as some of the ones being peddled by multilateral donors, could work in some circumstances and not in others. In others there needs to be strengthening of the state to protect the weak against the powerful instead of becoming an instrument in the hands of the powerful to the disadvantage of the weak. Where there is more communal mode of power, participation can work. Where there is a more feudal and compensatory mode of power, the state has to protect the weak against the strong. The inextricable linkage between place and equitable hazardscapes is the key message of this chapter.

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5

Modernity and Vulnerability in a Pakistani Urban Hazardscape

Technocratic and social modernity continues to shape the discourses of vulnerability to contemporary hazards in a rapidly globalizing world (Harvey, 1989; Pelling, 2003a; Wisner, 2003). This is particularly true in the urban areas of the so-called ‘developing’ world, where the contrast between global modernity and local traditionalism are manifest in urban geographies. Islamabad, the modern planned capital of Pakistan, and its twin city Rawalpindi, are home to more than 2 million people. One of the most pressing ‘natural’ hazards for the conurbation has been periodic flooding in the local stream, the Lai, and its tributaries (Figure 7). I will outline the contours of the Lai urban hazardscape in this chapter to understand the patterns of vulnerability, and the dissonance between the experience of vulnerability and the technocratic perspective and understanding of vulnerability. Vulnerability is understood as the susceptibility of hazard victims to suffer damage from extreme events and their relative inability to recover from those events on account of their social positionality (Dow, 1992; Cutter, 1996). This study of flood hazard in the Lai watershed is an avenue for engaging with many of the intellectual debates synthesized within the hazardscapes concept, as developed in the first chapter. The hazardscape concept in this southern urban context underlines the basic assumption behind the hazardscape concept that the experience of hazards is not just

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Figure 7: Lai flood plain in the Rawalpindi/Islamabad conurbation.

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a function of the material geographies of vulnerability, but also of how those hazardous geographies are viewed, constructed and reproduced by the ‘expert/technocratic’ discourses about them. As in other cities of the world, various physical, social and technological factors intersect to make flood hazard in the Lai a ‘hybrid hazard’ (Wisner, 1995; Mitchell, 1998). Accordingly, the vulnerability and response to floods must be analysed with reference to the material and discursive context influencing those factors. This study establishes how a single hazard in a place is the outcome of interactions of geographical variables operating across spatial scales. Flood hazard in the Lai is endemic for the twin cities. The biggest disaster in the twin cities was, however, when Lai flooded on 24 July 2001, affecting 400,000 residents of the twin cities, mainly people of the poorest class. The death toll from the flood stood at 74, with 64 of the total fatalities in the downstream city of Rawalpindi (United Nations Relief Web, 2003). The official estimate for damage from the flood was Rs. 15 billion (approximately US $250 million), though unofficial estimates have been as high as Rs. 53 billion (approximately US $930 million) – an enormous sum of money for a country with a total official GDP of US $60.5 billion at the time ( JICA, 2003; World Bank, 2003). Three research questions framed the study presented here. 1. What historico-geographical factors, from urban design to class-based segregation, have contributed to the geography of vulnerability to flood hazard in the Lai Basin? 2. What material and discursive factors account for differences between flood plain residents and policy makers in perceptions of the practical range of choice? 3. How does the integrative analysis of the material and discursive aspects of environmental hazards facilitate practical solutions? In addressing these questions I test two propositions. Firstly, modernity, despite its reputation for expanding choice, has in fact limited choice with respect to hazards because of the power of modern institutions to limit debate and discussion. Secondly, engagement with the material and discursive constructs underlying vulnerability and hazards policy can lead to an expanded range of choice and thus beneficial policy solutions. 103

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Contours of the Lai Hazardscape The Lai10 basin drains a total area of 244 km2 south of the Margalla Hills, with 55 per cent of the watershed falling within the Islamabad Capital Territory and the remaining portion within the downstream Rawalpindi municipal and cantonment limits (see Figure 7). The stream has five major tributaries – Saidpur Kas, Kanitanwali Kas, Tenawali Kas, Bedranwali Kas and Niki Lai – in addition to 20 other minor tributaries. The maximum length of the Lai from the beginning to its final confluence with the Soan River does not exceed 45 km, thereby allowing very little time for any flood warning in its middle reaches within the Rawalpindi municipal limits. According to the last census, the Rawalpindi/Islamabad conurbation is the fifth most populous urban area in Pakistan with a combined population of 2.1 million, with 1.5 million of the residents in Rawalpindi and the remaining in Islamabad (GoP, 2000). The conurbation is an important economic and transportation node connecting southern and eastern Pakistan with the northern Areas, Azad Kashmir (Pakistani Administered Kashmir), and the Kyber Pakhtunkhwa (formerly Northwest Frontier) Province. As the capital of Pakistan, Islamabad has all of the administrative structure of the federal government, while Rawalpindi is the headquarters of the Pakistan Army, the most important institution in Pakistan. The history of the twin cities offers some interesting comparisons that are relevant to understanding the geography of exposure and vulnerability to flood hazard in the conurbation. In the pre-independence era, Rawalpindi was the headquarters of the British Indian Army’s Northern Command, the largest of the British Indian Army Commands in United India. The Pakistan Army inherited the site as its headquarters in the postindependence days. The military dominates the social and economic life in the city, with more than 50 per cent of the jobs being associated directly or indirectly with the armed forces. Overall, 64 per cent of those employed in the city hold jobs in the public sector, 36 per cent are in the private sector and 23 per cent are self-employed (JICA, 2003). There are really two cities within the legal boundaries of Rawalpindi city: the Rawalpindi cantonment, administered by the Rawalpindi Cantonment Board (RCB) 104

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under the Ministry of Defence; and the city of Rawalpindi, governed by the provincial civil servants Tehsil Municipal Administration (TMA). The cantonment lies on a higher ridge on the western edge of Rawalpindi city and is relatively safe from Lai floods, except in the southernmost part of the basin (see Figure 7). Rawalpindi city, on the other hand, is highly exposed to flooding from the Lai. The 100-year flood inundation zone of the Lai is primarily occupied by lower middle-class and working-class neighbourhoods. Lying upstream, Islamabad is a pre-planned modern city. Its grid pattern with wide, tree-lined boulevards and relatively low urban density presents a sharp contrast to the mostly curving, narrow streets of its older neighbour, Rawalpindi. The rationalist, militarist urban design of Islamabad symbolizes the military ethos of order and rank hierarchy. Field Marshall M. Ayub Khan, president of Pakistan from 1958 to 1969, commissioned the building of Islamabad to provide a modernist model for the future of Pakistan. A Greek architect, Constantinos A. Doxiadis, designed the city. Doxiadis was trained as an architect and a town planner at the Berlin-Charlottenberg Institute of Technology in the 1930s.11 Doxiadis brought many of the principles of modernist-militarist architecture to his design of Islamabad and to the other towns, university campuses and towns he planned throughout Pakistan and the rest of the world (Spaulding, 1996). According to Spaulding, Doxiadis was an idealist who planned the city based on his conceptions of what an ideal modern city should look like rather than the material reality of how the urban geography of Islamabad might be experienced and lived by its inhabitants. European concepts of social class and distinctions based on civil service rank are written into the Islamabad Master Plan, and manifest themselves poignantly in the geography of the city (Meier, 1985).12 The neighbourhoods in Islamabad are called sectors, which run alphabetically from north-west to south-east and numerically from north-east to south-west (see Figure 7). The E and F sectors are for high-ranking officials, corporate elites and diplomats, and they are separated by a commercial and green area, called the ‘Blue Area’, from the more middle-class G and I sectors. The industrial and agricultural H sectors are sandwiched between the two middle-class G and I sectors. A typical street address in Islamabad has an almost Orwellian ring to it (for example, H 24, St 11, F 8/2, Islamabad!). 105

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Idealistic urban planning did not change social and environmental realities, but rather exacerbated them. Doxiadis projected that the lowest-ranking government servants would reside in working-class neighbourhoods, while the poorest of the poor – garbage collectors, street sweepers, housemaids, beggars and day labourers – did not figure in his plans. Doxiadis’ idealism, played out on sketches, diagrams and scale models, overlooked the impact that local topography had on the social geography of the absolute poor in the city. It is little surprise, then, that wherever the topography dips below the putative plain of human habitation, by the banks of the tributaries of the Lai, one finds unplanned shanty towns or katchi abadis (Spaulding, 1996). The lowest rung of society comprising religious and ethnic minorities lives in these katchi abadis and they are also the only neighbourhoods that have repeatedly suffered damage from floods, especially in 2001. Moreover, the city was designed with very little regard for the hydrology and geomorphology of the basin in which it is located. The physical location of Islamabad creates special problems for Rawalpindi downstream. The decreased water absorption capacity of an expanding Islamabad further accentuates flood peaks downstream, in addition to reducing the groundwater recharge upon which much of Rawalpindi’s poorer population depends for water supply (Malik, 2000). Clearly, from Doxiadis’ reality of a scale model of Islamabad, to the hydrology of the Lai, to the social geography of vulnerability to flood hazard, multiple material and discursive factors go into producing the hazardscape of the Lai watershed. It is to the discursive contours of the contemporary Lai hazardscape that I now turn. The institutional hazardscape of the Lai is characterized by multiple, fragmented jurisdictions. On the macro-scale, the upper basin is under the federally controlled Capital Development Authority (CDA) and its various directorates (for example, for water supply, sanitation and environmental management). The middle basin falls under the Rawalpindi TMA as well as the Rawalpindi Development Authority (RDA). The lower basin is again under federally controlled Rawalpindi and Chaklala Cantonment Boards (RCB and CCB) and their various departments. The assorted stakeholder institutions within the Lai Basin display all the specialized bureaucratic structures and disciplinary backgrounds, from public administrator to civil engineers, particular to a modernist 106

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state apparatus. Where Islamabad’s urban geography may be the poster child for the high modernist ideology inherent to ‘seeing like a state’ (Scott, 1998), the state institutions operating within the Lai Basin also manifest what Dove and Kammen (2001) call the disconnect between the fluid and diverse ‘vernacular models of development’ and the ‘official models of development’. Bureaucratic objectives are disconnected and uncoordinated: the Sanitation Directorate of the CDA is preoccupied with solid and liquid waste disposal, while the Relief Commissioner of Rawalpindi focuses solely on floods. The messy interlinkages between issue areas, although widely recognized, do not and supposedly must not distract the public servants from their assigned tasks. As Agrawal (1995) and Robbins (2000) caution us, the discussion of the Lai hazardscape in the following pages should not be read as a tale of conflict between a modernizing state and indigenous knowledge. The stories of the Lai flood plain residents are not illustrative of the superiority of some romanticized indigenous knowledge of which the Lai flood plain residents are the receptacles. Rather, as Dove (1994), Agrawal (1995) and Agrawal and Sivaramakrishnan (2003) remind us, the stories illustrate the interactions between the differentially powerful epistemic authority of the state formations and the people. Besides, the indigenous label will be hardly appropriate for the urbanized residents of the Lai Basin even if one were to stretch the rather problematic classifications of indigenousness. Discursively, then, Lai has a hazardscape of differential power/knowledge, where attempts at material creation of a controlled modern landscape fail, because even in the urban context of Rawalpindi/Islamabad, the landscape was never modern with neat classifications and predictable reaction to interventions – nor could it be (Robbins, 2001).

Public Discourse and the Range of Choice to Flood Hazard The study presented below is based upon a field study constituting 158 respondents: 80 per cent were from the Rawalpindi municipal area and 50 per cent were women. The sampling frame for the research was the residents of the flood plain of the Lai Basin and most of the questions were in reference to the aftermath of the super flood of 2001. The sampling 107

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technique was based on stratified convenience sampling. Every attempt was made to include a random sample of equal numbers of males and females from nine major localities from the head to the tail reaches of the Lai flood plain. In addition to the household survey, interviews were held with some key officials involved with various projects in the Lai Basin. A workshop was also held where various key players in the Lai Basin, from international donors, state and civil society, were invited to articulate their perspectives on the various problems in the Lai Basin and their possible solutions. Interviews with key officials and the group meeting were complemented by a detailed review of the project documents related to the ongoing and planned projects in the Lai Basin. I shall report the results of the household survey first to provide the backdrop against which the policy discourse on the Lai is undertaken. The average household size of the survey respondents was 7.6, in both extended and nuclear family living situations. The average educational attainment of the most educated person in the survey household was nine years of schooling, with only 11 per cent of the respondents reporting a household member with education beyond the 12-year high school level. The average self-reported household income of the survey participants was Rs. 6,150/month (US $108), while the median was Rs. 5,000 (US $88), ranging between Rs. 20,000 and 1,500/month. The self-reported income confirmed the lower middle-class and working-class social profile of the study area in the Lai Nullah flood plain. The survey respondents hold a multidimensional ‘hazardscape’ view of the problems associated with the Lai, but with important distinctions along gender lines. Various interlinked hazards make the flood plain of the Lai a ‘situational disaster’ for its residents (Wisner, 1995). Survey results confirm this local view of multiple, interrelated hazards, as residents linked everyday environmental problems to the more calamitous flood hazard. Survey respondents identified solid waste disposal as the most pressing issue in the Lai flood plain. The responses were quite consistent with the fact that the Lai serves as the solid and liquid waste dump of the city, spawning a host of diseases, in addition to being an aesthetic, olfactory and social nuisance for the residents of the city. As one female resident of Rawalpindi stated: ‘Lai is just a picnic spot for the junkies. They sit on its banks all day and shoot up.’ 108

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Women, who assume caregiver roles by virtue of the prevalent gender divisions in Pakistani society, were much more attentive to the ongoing health hazard that conditions in the Lai posed to themselves and their families (Figure 8 lists the responses to the question on ‘pressing issues’ disaggregated by gender). This is also probably why 40 per cent of the 85 female respondents could see some advantage to the flooding in the Lai, as opposed to only 7 per cent of the 73 male respondents. The chief benefit of flooding identified by the women respondents was the annual cleaning of the Lai, when the flood waters swept away piles of garbage from the Lai: Floods are beneficial in the sense that they annually clean up all of Rawalpindi and Islamabad, something that would not happen otherwise. (Mrs Malik Muhammad Arshad, female respondent)

Figure 8: Gender-disaggregated responses to the question about the most pressing issues in the Lai flood plain, by the survey respondents.

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There was, however, a class dimension to even this basic benefit of the floods; for example, female residents of a katchi abadi, living in mud houses, had the following to say: There is no benefit to the flooding in the Lai. It is a curse for us poor people, though people with pacca [brick] houses benefit – their environs and neighbourhoods are cleaned up by the floods. (Naseem, female resident of a katchi abadi at the border of Islamabad and Rawalpindi) There is only destruction associated with the Lai. It makes paupers of us every year. Its floods clean the city of garbage as well as of poor folks like us. (Parveen Akhter, female resident of Rawalpindi)

More than 90 per cent of the survey respondents reported suffering a loss of movable property as a result of the 2001 floods, while nearly 50 per cent reported structural damage to their houses, and an additional 30 per cent a loss of livelihood. Close to 45 per cent of the respondents reported receiving material relief aid in the aftermath of the 2001 floods from NGOs, while roughly 20 per cent of the respondents also reported receiving material help from the government, family and friends, private businesses and individuals, and through their elected representatives. NGOs and civil society organizations, however, received the most credit for providing relief aid, highlighting the role of civil society in emergency situations. When asked about any detectable change in the role and activism of the government and any other stakeholder in the aftermath of the devastating floods of 2001, only 19 per cent of the respondents (14 per cent of females and 23 per cent of males) reported any discernible positive change in the government’s attitude; for example: The municipality people who used to work only until 4:00 pm are now on watch 24 hours to look out for flood emergencies. (Haji Ghulam Nabi, male resident of Rawalpindi)

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Most of the survey respondents (81 per cent) were, however, much more likely to blame the government for inactivity or downright malice in the aftermath of the floods; for example: There is no change in [the] government’s attitude. The machinery is parked next to the [Lai] Nullah but no work is being done. (Javed Iqbal, male resident of Rawalpindi) Not much has changed; the officers got their pictures taken and then left. I have not put in any new material in my shop and am just getting rid of the old inventory before I close shop. (Mujeeb-ur-Rehman, male businessman in Rawalpindi)

Both evidently contradictory perceptions about government action may be justified. The official agencies are indeed much more visibly alert during the monsoon season, when it is quite common to see military and municipal workers clearing up debris from under the bridges after the rains. The negative perception arose from the painfully slow progress of the Asian Development Bank (ADB)-funded ‘Lai Nullah Improvement Works’. By all accounts no progress was made on the project during the dry season, but rather suddenly the entire government machinery came to life during the rainy season in the summers of 2002 and 2003. Furthermore, there was considerable confusion regarding the scope of the project as well as resentment about improprieties during the course of the removal of encroachments on the Lai flood plain, and compensation for the demolition of houses. Only 31 per cent of the respondents (34 per cent of females and 26 per cent of males) could describe what the government was doing with the Lai Nullah Improvement Works or any other projects. Clearly the government had done very little to inform, let alone consult, the public about its initiatives with regard to flood management; for example: They [the government] would not contact us or consult us even after a flood event; I have no idea what they are up to. They do, however, scare us by giving frequent flood warnings without telling us what to do. (Rehmat Jaan, female resident of Rawalpindi)

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It is little wonder, then, that only 8 per cent of the respondents thought that the official attempts at flood management were highly effective. Another 28 per cent thought that they were somewhat effective, while 59 per cent thought that they were ineffective. There was no noticeable gender difference in this opinion. With this general confusion and lack of faith in the government’s ability to prevent future flooding, 46 per cent of the respondents thought that they were certain or highly likely to suffer as much damage from future floods as they had in 2001 – even though the 2001 flood, by their own admission as well as official estimates, was an event with more than a 100-year return period. This opinion could also be partially explained by the fact that only 13 per cent of the respondents had relocated to a different house to avoid future flooding, while an equal number had undertaken flood-proofing measures like moving their valuables and possessions to the second storey of their buildings, if they had one. A majority of the flood victims (69 per cent) reported doing nothing to prevent future flood damage because they either could not afford to or were rooted in the place because of professional or family obligations. One of the more important results to emerge from the household survey was that people generally perceived a wide range of choice in the face of flooding. Figure 9 graphically presents the solutions identified by the survey respondents. They often suggested more than one solution. Clearly, some variation on ‘channel improvements’ is the most popular solution. The point, however, is not so much the relative popularity of each of the responses, but rather the range of solutions and choices, including non-structural measures, that people envision. Although many of the men wanted levees for flood prevention, many of the women thought that building a wall along the Lai would prevent people from dumping solid waste into the channel or rebuilding in the flood plain; for example: The Lai should be widened and its banks should be lined and enclosed in high walls. There should be a children’s park and a cricket ground surrounding it [the flood plain]. The park should have fruit trees so that the poor of the city like us could also get to taste fruits every once in a while. (Zeban, female resident of Rawalpindi)

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Figure 9: Gender-disaggregated distribution of solutions identified by survey respondents to address the flood hazard in the Lai flood plain. Lai should be widened and its banks should be lined and enclosed so that the black sheep in the government cannot take bribes from land grabbers who settle poor people illegally on its banks. (Musarrat, female resident of Rawalpindi)

Some of the women also seemed to be much more acutely aware of the role of the society in exposing people to flood hazard in the Lai: If Lai’s flood plain is returned to the Lai [that is, cleared of human encroachment], it will not hurt anybody. [The government] should pay attention to this matter instead of authorizing construction in [Lai flood plain] for the sake of making money. (Reshman, female resident of Rawalpindi)

Some of the men, on the other hand, were more inclined towards heroic, even unrealistic, engineering interventions:

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Water Resource Management in a Vulnerable World The tributaries of the Lai from Islamabad should be diverted. Lai should be deepened, lined and then covered with a concrete roof. People should be allowed to build shops and businesses on top of the concrete roof. Seems to me that will keep the floods from happening again. (Muhammad Akbar, male respondent in Rawalpindi)

Not all engineering-based solutions were, however, as potentially expensive and creative as the above: Lai should be deepened and widened. Roads should be built on its both sides so that garbage-collecting machines could travel on its banks and scoop up the waste. Illegal construction on either side of the Lai should be eliminated. I think it is a good thing that the government is removing the encroachments in the Lai, even though I am one of the victims of the government’s anti-encroachment drive. I have about 3.5 marlas [1,756 m2] of land with a legally sanctioned building. I have been paying property tax on the building but they are going to destroy it. (Amin, male businessman in Rawalpindi)

The above quotation brings up the issue of the ADB-funded Lai Nullah improvement works in 2002–5, especially the aspect of the project that entailed destruction of certain buildings in the flood plain. The removal of human encroachments on the Lai was one of the important centrepieces of the ADB-funded project, but reportedly the least well executed of the project components. I will elaborate on this later, but the point here is that like the above quoted respondent, an overwhelming 88 per cent of the female respondents and 73 per cent of the male respondents approved of the removal of encroachments from the flood plain (even though many of the respondents were in fear of losing their houses in the anti-encroachment drive). The support for the measure was not unqualified, however. Some thought that although it was a good step in principle, either it was being implemented unfairly or arbitrarily, or it was neglecting the context in which people were forced to live in the flood plain. The following quotes illustrate the arbitrariness of the process: 114

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In addition to the above procedural types of qualifications, many of the respondents were very concerned about the context of poverty, lack of affordable housing and connections to social and economic networks, which were being neglected in the anti-encroachment drive. Some were downright hostile to the prospect of the demolition of building and neighbourhoods in the Lai: This is not a good step. We are powerless poor people – otherwise can anybody imagine living right next to a flood-prone stream? If we are given an alternate location, we will be happy. We are also citizens of this country but we are powerless. (Orangzeb, male resident of Islamabad)

However, others, despite the importance of social networks and livelihood opportunities at their existing locations, were willing to consider relocation: It is a good thing to demolish illegal structures in the Lai, but it is very bad for us. My children go to school here, I work in people’s houses here in Islamabad; my husband also works in the city [as a taxi driver]. I do not know where we will go. But still we are willing to make the sacrifice for the future generations. (Anwar, female resident of a katchi abadi at the border of Islamabad and Rawalpindi)

As the government found out in cases where it did offer to move people to alternate locations, due diligence and distance from livelihood opportunities were key to successful relocation. In one such locality, people bitterly complained that even though they had been promised alternate land outside of the city, the bureaucratic red tape was giving them the runaround to no avail. Even where people had secured the alternate 115

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housing sites, the distance of new settlements from the city made relocation difficult: It is a good step to demolish illegal buildings. They are asking us to relocate to Alipur Firash [about 15 km outside of Rawalpindi]. How can we afford the daily Rs. 50 fare to come to Islamabad to our jobs from there? They need to think about such matters; how can we get to our jobs on time from so far away? (Barkat Masih, male resident of Islamabad)

Others blamed the government for their residence in the flood plain and in katchi abadis: People have suffered enormously because of this ongoing demolition of buildings. People bought the land from land grabbers [who were in cahoots with the government], who are now sitting pretty in their houses in fancy neighbourhoods. Poor people are suffering because the floods devastated them last year and they are being devastated by the government this year. (Kaneez Fatima, female resident of Rawalpindi) It is a good step, but it is earning the government the curses of the poor. Where was the government when these same people were given registries for their houses and were provided with electricity and gas connections? (Kausar, female resident of Rawalpindi)

The above responses hint at how the dynamics of urban housing for the poor in a country like Pakistan are so closely related to the dynamics of land grabbing and government corruption. The process of shanty town development and the role of the land-grabbing mafia in Pakistan has been documented in some detail by Hasan (2002). In Pakistan, businessmen with criminal underworld connections and political backing often advertise fake housing schemes on government land. Often either the municipal authorities are bribed or individual functionaries are made shareholders in the real estate development enterprises. One of the first developments on the ground once everybody has been paid off is the 116

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construction of a mosque, to pander to religious sensibilities against the demolition of a mosque, should some government agency or functionary try to halt the illegal development. As people, including the original investors, buy plots of land and build houses, municipal authorities are again bribed into providing utilities. Most of the housing is typically rented out to multiple families, mostly recent rural-to-urban migrants (Hasan, 2002). Over many years the houses change hands many times based on fake registries, until such time that the government (for one reason or another, including public projects) wakes up and tries to reclaim the illegally occupied land as in the case of the Lai flood plain. The ethnographic data presented here confirms that people living in shanty towns and marginal settlements are more victims of powerful land mafias rather than perpetrators of land grabbing. The picture that emerges from analysis of ethnographic data is that people are quite aware of the multiple factors that contribute to their exposure and vulnerability to hazards as well as the range of choice open to them to address those hazards, just the same as in the case of the rural populations discussed in Chapter 3. Survey respondents often expressed bemusement when asked what they proposed to do with the Lai. Frequently, they prefaced their answers with conditional statements, such as: ‘Not that anybody cares what we think, but...’ Yet despite their equivocations, respondents demonstrated a sophisticated and a multifaceted view of the Lai’s hazardscape. Engineers and technocrats are not the only ones who see the hazardscape from an analytical lens – the people do too. However, residents see the Lai hazardscape – their living space – through lenses of gender, social and economic justice, class differences, empowerment, environmental quality and the well-being of future generations. In the few collective meetings that were conducted with the flood plain residents, it did not take long for people to move beyond expensive and dubious ideas to arrive at very sensible, low-cost solutions. So the question arises: if a pragmatic epistemology indicates that democracy, public dialogue and scientific reason comprise the means of arriving at the widest possible range of choice, why do policy makers not take a wider range of choice into account in the Lai hazardscape? To answer this question, we will have to understand the technocratic decision-making process in the Lai’s hazardscape from both realist and ‘socio-nature’ perspectives. 117

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Vulnerabilities from Modernity Technocratic managerialism is one of the hallmarks of modern-day environmental management, and this is particularly so for natural hazards management (Hewitt, 1983, 1997; Torgerson, 1999). The Lai watershed is no exception; in fact, managers and administrators here may be more strongly committed to technical solutions than their Western counterparts. Flood hazard in the Lai has attracted the attention of city managers since colonial times, starting in 1944 when British engineers proposed blasting the rock fall at the extreme southern end of the stream before its confluence with the Soan River. The project was later shelved because of potential danger that the blasting posed to the foundations of the nearby railway bridges. Since that time, 21 different proposals were launched by various government agencies to address the flooding problem in the Lai Basin. Most recently, these development plans include the ‘Lai Nullah Improvement Works’ by the RDA and the ‘The Study on Comprehensive Flood Mitigation and Environmental Improvement Plan of Lai Nullah Basin’ by the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) (LEAD Pakistan, 1999). Almost all of the 21 proposals were heavily based on engineering solutions, ranging from complete diversion to turning the Lai channel into a concrete tunnel. The two exceptions comprised a proposal by the RDA for tree planting along the channel to prevent soil erosion and a proposal by the Rawalpindi Cantonment Board (RCB) in 1998 for solid waste management and encroachment removal. Not one of the proposals was ever implemented fully or even partially, until the two most recent ones. I will discuss the most recent projects on the Lai to highlight the technocratic view of the Lai’s hazardscape. The Lai’s misfortunes as an aquatic system start from the very nomenclature used to refer to it. Lai or Leh in the local Pothwari dialect of the Punjabi language means a river or a stream. The British, when they established their presence in the northern Punjab, like all good imperialists, immediately set about the task of mapping and naming the places that were under their control. Many of the second-tier streams like the Lai got the term ‘nullah’ attached to them in the Ordnance Survey maps of India. This word, and its variation naala in many South Asian 118

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languages (including the local Pothwari dialect of Punjabi), means a drain. Progressively the term ‘nullah’ has become a shorthand way of referring to the Lai. This simple semantic shift seems to anchor the technocrats’ discourse on the Lai. ‘Nullah’ has extremely negative connotations in the local languages because its feminine naali essentially means a street or sewage drain, while the masculine nullah implies a larger drain carrying sewage, or an inundation stream. Lai ‘Nullah’, however, is a perennial stream, and therefore the term nullah should not strictly apply to it. Many environmentalists and local citizens perceive some type of government conspiracy in the official insistence on using the term Lai Nullah, since it legitimizes treating the stream like a sewage drain.13 The construction of the Lai as a dirty drain, not only in the official and public discourse, but also in material reality by virtue of poor liquid and solid waste management, holds the key to us understanding the technocratic attitude towards it. By declaring it a drain, the official technocratic discourse has deprived the Lai of any environmental or ecological defence against their manipulations of its river regime.14 I will elaborate on this theme below with reference to the two most recent projects in the Lai flood plain, both of which are heavily biased towards ‘river improvement works’ rather than non-structural measures.

Lai Nullah Improvement Works The Lai Nullah Improvement Works, funded by a US $6.8 million ADB loan, was initiated in the immediate aftermath of the 2001 floods as part of an ongoing, ADB-funded urban water supply and sanitation project in Rawalpindi. Some of the salient features of the programme include: 1. increasing overall channel capacity to accommodate floods with a 25year return period, by increasing the channel capacity from 600 to 1,000 m3/s; 2. redesigning and rebuilding damaged bridges to withstand 100-year floods; 3. so-called ‘channel improvements’ that include widening, deepening and partially lining the Lai channel along its 18 km stretch through Rawalpindi; and 119

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4. relocation of residents along the banks of the Lai channel with due compensation. High-ranking officers in the ‘Project Management Unit’ (PMU) of the RDA, the agency responsible for conceptualizing and implementing the project, often assume aloof and autocratic attitudes about their work: We basically took the common components of all the prior studies that had been done on the Lai and in our soldierly fashion just went ahead with implementing the project. We did involve all the relevant government agencies as well as the Zila Nazim [mayor of Rawalpindi at the time] in formulating the project. Some civilians had different ideas, for example, making the Lai underground, but we were not going to waste time on just talking. The engineering component was paramount and we proceeded with that. I believe that the non-engineering part is being addressed as well. I concede that the media is creating considerable doubts in the people’s minds about the project, but then again, you see, rumour-mongering is part of our culture in Pakistan. (PMU-RDA operative)

This interviewee, like most officials in the higher echelons of the PMU, RDA and Rawalpindi Water and Sanitation Authority (WASA), was an ex-military man from the Pakistan Army Corps of Engineers. The concern with engineering solutions and somewhat imperial disregard for public opinion is something that has been pointed to in the previous chapter as well. The interviewee in this case coupled the bureaucratic ethos with soldierly aggression and eloquently argued that the military-dominated administration was at least doing something instead of making paper planes. I also spoke to the chief engineering consultant for the overall project who represented Sir Mott McDonald and Co. (an international engineering firm). He too argued very strongly that the channel improvements being implemented were based on scientific hydraulic models. He was, however, quite vague on the specifics of the hydrologic studies that had been conducted. Most physical geographers are quite suspicious of any claims to a perfect river manipulation scheme, as the engineers and the head 120

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of the PMU claimed (Dunne and Leopold, 1978). Most streams are likely simply to nullify any one-time human manipulations of channel geometry in the absence of expensive corrective maintenance in the long run. Streams tend to erode during high flow and deposit during low flow. Elimination of meanders simply serves to increase the overall slope of a stream, with the stream eroding upstream and depositing downstream to regain its sediment balance. Photographic evidence demonstrates the dissonance between engineering plans and these inexorable hydrological dynamics. Figures 10, 11 and 12 present a view of the Lai before and after the project (2000, 2003 and then at 2011) in the upper reaches of the Lai about 1 km after it enters the Rawalpindi municipal limits. The site is marked as F45&7 on Figure 7. Predictably, despite dredging during the project, the Lai is beginning to deposit silt on the inside of its meander, just as it had before. Figure 13 shows the banks of the Lai in the immediate aftermath of the demolition of some structures. The few feet of cleared land do not seem to provide any substantial additional right-of-way to the Lai.

Figure 10: Pre-2001 floods; upstream view from the Dhok Naju Bridge on the Lai.

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Figure 11: Post-project upstream view from the Dhok Naju Bridge. Notice that the deposition is ongoing on the inner loop of the meander.

Figure 12: After the project view of the meander in 2011, where it seems to have returned to its pre-project shape and configuration. (Photo by Imran Khan)

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Figure 13: Bank of the Lai in the aftermath of the demolition of some structures to remove encroachments from the flood plain.

Another example of project activities is the Dhok Naju Bridge foundations (Figure 14, also F45&7 on Figure 7), which were evidently excavated in the name of channel deepening with obvious results. The foundations seem to be floating in the air above the water line, because the dredging around the foundation has allowed the stream to undercut the concrete protection for the foundation pillar. Figure 15 (F9 on Figure 7) presents the view of a meander that was eliminated and straightened, while Figure 16 presents a view of the channel downstream from the straightened channel (F10 on Figure 7). The straightened channel is clearly facilitating the rapid flow of water out of the city, but just downstream from the straightened channel (F11 on Figure 7), the water is depositing heavily and trying to reclaim its meandering course. The engineering interventions have clearly not been effective and in fact may even be nullified over the long run. The removal of encroachments from the Lai flood plain was a more promising aspect of the project and, had it been done correctly, could have compensated for the failures of the engineering interventions. However, inadequate understanding of social context crippled the encroachment 123

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Figure 14: Foundations of the Dhok Naju Bridge in the aftermath of the channel dredging.

Figure 15: The straightened meander of the Lai near Liaqat Bagh in Rawalpindi.

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Figure 16: Upstream view of the Lai from Chaklala Bridge, downstream from Liaqat Bagh.

removal aspect, just as inadequate understanding of the Lai’s dynamic hydrology and geomorphology confounded engineering interventions. A PMU operative had the following to say, regarding recurring criticism in the press of the anti-encroachment drive: At least we have chased out the people who used to get flooded all the time. Even if the design of the project is flawless, as I would argue that it is, the implementation may not be flawless. (PMU-RDA operative)

Implementation of the anti-encroachment and compensation programmes was deeply flawed because officials ignored the land tenure situation in the flood plain. A sizeable number of people who were thrown out of their homes did not own them, but rather rented from the notorious land grabbers. In certain neighbourhoods where I conducted my interviews, up to 75 per cent of the residents, according to the local property dealers and councillors, were tenant occupants. According to the rules of the project, compensation could only be granted to those who could produce legal papers in support of their claim to the property. Consequently, landlords 125

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collected the compensation that was meant to assist those made homeless by the anti-encroachment programme. The katchi abadi residents – the poorest of the poor – rarely received compensation. Members of the land mafia, which may have defrauded the people by settling them in the Lai flood zone, were the main beneficiaries of the compensation programme, because they held the titles to people’s properties in the legal labyrinth of the Pakistani land records system. In addition, total compensation paid was reduced considerably from what had been projected: the RDA originally earmarked Rs. 880 million (US $15.2 million) for compensation to the victims, but only disbursed about half of that amount – Rs. 445 million (US $7.7 million) (Khan, 2004). Of the total 1,200 households that were affected by the project, 200 were not paid any compensation at all, because they were located on government land in the channel of the Lai. Yet some of these people had been living in the flood plain for more than 30 years. The so-called ‘natural hazard’ of the Lai flood plain is actually a consequence of a state and social structure that systematically excludes the poor from participation in the management of their living spaces, reposes power in a bureaucracy distant and hostile to the civil society, and facilitates alliances between the bureaucracy and the economically powerful land mafias to the detriment of the poor and the powerless. Causal explanations, however, cannot simply stop at corrupt and incompetent bureaucrats or poorly kept land records. The constructed reality of officebound technocrats and consultants makes as little allowance for the river’s hydrology as it does for the social reality of power differentials and micro-level structures of crony capitalism. Both the physical and social reality frustrates technocratic attempts at neat solutions. The later JICAfunded project further illustrates the technocratic production of the Lai hazardscape.

The JICA Funded Comprehensive Flood Mitigation and Environmental Improvement Plan The comprehensive flood mitigation plan, funded and implemented by JICA, is much bigger than the project funded by the Asian Development Bank. I analysed the interim report of the plan and conducted interviews with the Japanese and Pakistani implementation officers. The plan lists a 126

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number of structural and non-structural measures for addressing the flood hazard in the Lai, including: 1. construction of a 20 m-high check dam in Islamabad to lower flood peaks; 2. a flood control dam on the westernmost tributary of the Lai; 3. channel deepening and straightening in greater Rawalpindi city; 4. provision of a telemetric flood monitoring system on the Lai; and 5. a channel to divert water flows from three of the tributaries of the Lai to the eastern Korang River (see Figure 7). Of these structural measures, the ‘flood retarding pond’ or check dam, ‘channel improvements’ and the strengthening of flood forecasting and warning systems were designated as urgent projects to be funded, though only the flood warning component was ever implemented. The report briefly mentions the dimensions of solid and liquid waste management, land use control and institutional integration for the integrated management of the Lai, but those issues are not explored in as much detail as the urgent projects, nor is there any indication that JICA may fund those aspects. The Lai hazardscape in the report is viewed through the lens of aerial photographs, engineering designs, digital maps and computer hydraulic models. There is a section on the social and environmental conditions, but it is a cut-and-paste presentation from a consultant’s report (NEC, 2002). The bulk of the chapter is taken up by tables detailing what types of changes the people consider possible to address the problems with the Lai, without any discussion or elaboration. The tables were derived by the consultants from the results of 100 questionnaires and a joint workshop, where they had invited residents ‘who were active, confident, creative, could easily communicate and capable of understanding and presenting the problems and solutions clearly according to the objectives of the workshop’ (National Engineering Corporation, 2002: 21, emphasis added). In other words, people whom the consultants liked were included in the workshop to inform the ‘Comprehensive Flood Mitigation and Environmental Improvement Plan’. The plan is very heavily biased towards engineering solutions and therefore its neglect 127

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of the social aspects of the Lai hazardscape is hardly surprising. What is surprising, however, is the self-assured and unproblematic treatment of the Lai’s hydrology and geomorphology as an inert system, which will behave in predictable ways to human manipulations. The report is redolent with the modernist arrogance of the technocratic mind. Both the ADB- and JICA-funded projects demonstrate that a technocratic hazardscape is incongruent with the lived hazardscape of the flood victims in the Lai flood plain. The lived hazardscape of the Lai has a dynamic stream, with its cycles of deposition and erosion, that technocrats overlook to the detriment of their own schemes. The stream is almost certain to undo any channel deepening in a very short period of time, as it is likely to fill in the 20 m check dam on Tenawali Kas with deposition. Surprisingly, in the designs of the check dam, I was not able to find any discussion of possible sediment loads that may enter the storage structure and shorten its operational life. Furthermore, with increasing uncertainty of future precipitation and flow parameters associated with climate change, rigid structural measures need to be treated with additional caution, which is not the case in this intervention. It appeared that even the most basic scientific research on the hydrology, geomorphology and future climate uncertainty of the Lai is lacking from the proposal. In addition, the proposal entails a fragmented view of the Lai’s hazardscape where flood control considerations operate independently of larger urban development initiatives. Many of the engineering solutions are driven by the explicit assumption in the report that removal of people from the plain is impossible, even though the survey results indicate that it is a well-known and acceptable option if done correctly; that is, after just compensation and with due regard to cushioning the social and economic stress of relocation. The technocratically mediated hazardscape of the Lai cost the Japanese taxpayers millions of yen and the Pakistani taxpayers millions of rupees, while the residents in that hazardscape remain as vulnerable as ever.

Conclusion: Pragmatic Pathways to Social Justice and Resilience The Lai hazardscape is produced by the convergence of multiple material processes and ideologies governing official and public views 128

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of the hazardscape. The large rural-to-urban migration driven by rural poverty and urban industrialization creates armies of urban poor living on marginal low-lying areas of Rawalpindi and Islamabad. Official corruption and indifference creates the land-grabbing mafias, who cash in on the desperation of the poor for housing by creating neighbourhoods on marginal lands exposed to multiple hazards. The policy makers, depending upon their institutional biases, view a single hazard at a time – ranging from waterborne diseases to flooding – instead of multiple, interrelated hazards. Furthermore, the solutions to hazards rarely involve meaningful public participation or consultation, but are rather driven by donor agendas and deeply modernist assumptions about controlling and manipulating physical systems. The production of the Lai hazardscape and its geography of vulnerability is therefore the outcome of the many interrelated factors. Firstly, the social structures of local crony capitalism in the real estate sector differentially expose the poorest segments of the population to flood hazard. Illegal settlements in the Lai lack basic sanitation and municipal services and further accentuate the flood peaks. Secondly, the modernist urban geography of Islamabad, again, differentially exposes the poorest of its residents to floods and other hazards associated with the Lai. Islamabad’s urban design, furthermore, did not take into account the hydrological consequences of urbanizing the Lai’s headwaters, thereby contributing to increased flood peaks in downstream Rawalpindi. Thirdly, the policy makers, because of their institutional limitations and modernist biases, stress engineering solutions directed towards subduing nature, instead of recognizing and addressing the multiple social and physical interlinkages that spawn the myriad hazards for the Lai flood plain residents. Lastly, climate uncertainty doesn’t even seem to feature in the plans as far as the Lai is concerned. The last point bears emphasis here. The point with climate change is not so much to find the scientifically credible scenario for the basin, but rather to plan around greater uncertainty, taking into account people’s subjectivity and adaptation potential, as discussed in the first chapter. No such luck here. The practical range of choice in the face of flood hazard is limited by the differential power of the modern engineering knowledge compared to the experiential knowledge gained from day-to-day living with the various 129

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hazards in the Lai. Knowledge and solutions offered by the Lai residents are not necessarily ‘unscientific’ or ‘pre-modern’; they are insights into the Lai’s lived hazardscape. The Lai’s urban hazardscape is the locus of the everyday struggles of its residents to be heard and be efficacious in the management of their living spaces. Power/knowledge dynamics are therefore an integral part of the Lai hazardscape. How those dynamics are concretized in space will be mediated by the interactions between the state and civil society. The practical range of choice is limited firstly by poor scientific understanding of the dynamic hydrological and geomorphological processes of the Lai in the design of engineering interventions – not to mention neglect of future uncertainty that climate change will entail. Secondly, the power/knowledge dynamic between policy and popular epistemologies in the Lai hazardscape prevents development of a more democratic hazardscape view, thereby limiting the range of choice in the face of a climatically uncertain future. Lastly, lack of popular input in flood hazard management ensures that there is a continuous dissonance between the technocratic construction and lived reality of the Lai’s hazardscape. It therefore follows that the practical range of choice could be expanded if policy discourse could draw upon the lived experience of the Lai hazardscape in addition to modern engineering knowledge. The hazardscape concept combines concerns with how analytical perspectives assert power over social spaces and how the contestation over and in those spaces produces the material geographies of vulnerability. The question of legitimacy and effectiveness of various analytical perspectives informing hazardscape can only be addressed in conjunction with concerns about differential social power and power/knowledge dynamics within a society. In the Lai hazardscape, the modernist technocratic view focuses on the flood hazard, and asserts power by trying to evict flood plain residents and create a hydrologically controlled stream. The lived experiential hazardscape view focuses on multiple hazards and resists (actively or passively) the technocratic gaze. It does so by withstanding attempts at encroachment removal, either through non-compliance, bribing of low-level functionaries or using community networks to change micro-details of engineering projects. The residents contest the singlehazard view of the Lai hazardscape by trying to draw the attention of the authorities to multiple hazards (for example, solid and liquid waste). 130

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Admittedly, the contestation over and in the Lai hazardscape is between differentially powerful social actors and discourses, as discussed in the case study. Therefore, the government’s flood managers are much more efficacious in asserting power over the Lai hazardscape than its residents are. The hazardscape view nevertheless provides a pathway for expanding the range of choice by engaging and expanding the parameters of debate and discussion defined by modernity and its institutional forms. The knowledge of these larger truths notwithstanding, is there a pragmatic pathway to promote social justice and resilience in the Lai Nullah basin? I contend that a deeper understanding of the factors governing Lai’s hazardscape facilitates the pragmatic concern with finding solutions to the problem. Recognizing a wide practical range of choice in the face of multiple hazards will be a lynchpin of a pragmatic engagement with the Lai’s hazardscape. Removal of human habitation from the flood plain is a desirable and practical option among others. An attractive choice would be to replace the present-day slums of the Lai with a riverside recreational area along the banks of the Lai. The recreational area should help restore the riparian environments of the Lai and lower its flood peaks. The question of low income housing, however, must be addressed before any appropriation of property in the Lai flood plain goes forward. The government will need to invest in culturally appropriate and conveniently located low-income housing to lessen the trauma of the move and retain the social ties that sustain a community. Citizen groups’ involvement in the move will be essential for the success of such a measure, and doing it by force is guaranteed to fail. Additionally, the Islamabad Master Plan needs to be critically re-evaluated, especially with an eye towards its neglect of the issues of social justice and environmental quality. Furthermore, solid and liquid waste management should be priority investments for the government, where the emphasis should be on effective service delivery above cost recovery, which is the focus right now. Along with recognition of a wider range of choice must also come an understanding of why that choice is circumscribed by social structures and discourses – not as an afterthought but as an integral part of the range of choice expansion. Lack of public debate and input into the Lai watershed’s management is part of the problem. A useful model for citizen participation 131

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in the Lai could be the emerging citizen-based watershed movements in the United States.15 A watershed movement could highlight the individual and collective perceptions of the Lai’s hazardscape. Training and sensitization of public servants to power/knowledge issues and encouragement of reflexivity about their own subject and epistemic position will, however, be an important prerequisite for useful public–private partnerships. These trainings must go beyond the traditional participatory methods popular in development circles. The point is for the trainees to look critically at the ontological assumptions that underlie their own policy prescriptions. The Lai is a river and not just a sewage or storm drain. Its ecology needs the same attention and respect as that of a river. Poor or absent scientific understanding is partially to blame for the engineering interventions in the Lai; for example, the ongoing channel improvements are expensive but least effective, unless there is a large commitment of resources to maintaining channel manipulations over the long run. More research by geomorphologists and hydrologists, and public sharing of the scientific results, could fruitfully inform public policy. Scientifically informed and socially responsible hazard management in the Lai will be most effective in an integrated watershed management regime. The Lai watershed, however, is presently fragmented among multiple jurisdictions, with little possibility for their replacement with a fully integrated watershed management regime. It is nevertheless proposed that the water supply, drainage and sanitation functions of the jurisdictions of the RDA, Rawalpindi TMA, the RCB and the CDA could be integrated into a single institutional entity, without replacing the entrenched entities with a single super entity. The hydro-hazardscape perspective here is helpful in teasing out pragmatic implications for a real world problem. Recognizing and engaging the multiple material and discursive factors governing the production of various hazardscapes, regardless of the theoretical labels, is a pragmatic necessity. Without using the post-structuralist social nature insights to understand the policy makers’ and the residents’ subjectivities, the pragmatic prescriptions are likely to be ineffective. Without understanding the structural causes of the geography of vulnerability, practical policy prescriptions are likely to be incomplete. The search for higher truths does not preclude engagements with more tangible problems. 132

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6

Resilience Versus Growth as Groundwater Development Objectives in the Arid Realm

Introduction Water resources management is a social practice around which communities and societies build networks, norms of reciprocity, exchange and social behaviour – in short, social capital. Social scientists have been attentive to the social aspects of water resources management in the global South not only because of water’s importance for basic survival, material wealth generation and environmental quality, but progressively also for social and political stability (Gleick, 1993, 2001; Homer-Dixon, 1999). In this chapter, I will review evidence from case studies in management and restoration of an ancient groundwater tapping technology called karez in Balochistan and Azerbaijan. While the Balochistan case study will highlight the consequences of karez decline on social cohesion and the karez communities’ resilience to environmental extremes, the Azerbaijan case will illustrate the prospects for saving the ancient technique under pressure from modern groundwater pumping technologies as well as changes in the wider political economy. Resilience has simply been defined as the capacity of an ecosystem to withstand stress and disturbances without changing its fundamental characteristics (see Resilience Alliance; Folke et al., 2002; Walker et al., 2004). Moench (2005) cautions against ignoring the dynamic aspect of

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socio-ecological systems and argues for the possibility that change and even structural transformation can be integral to resilience. Following Moench (2005), for the purposes of this chapter resilience is defined as the capacity of a socio-ecological system (which may yet be undergoing fundamental transformation) to absorb sudden shocks, environmental and/or socioeconomic stress without causing major declines in production, distribution of resources or access to resources and/or losses of key environmental values. In other words, if in a socio-ecological system environmental or social stress causes increases in poverty and long-term environmental degradation, then the system will not be considered resilient. This discussion of resilience, especially when coupled with the discussion of climate change and hazardscapes in the first chapter, will frame the following discussion on groundwater management in two semi-arid regions of the world.

Karez System in the Context of Balochistan and Nakhchivan, Azerbaijan Karez irrigation is an ancient system of underground water channels where water flows by gravity from the ‘mother well’ dug into the water table (Figure 17). The water channel is underground for a distance of a few hundred metres to a few kilometres before it emerges from the ground at the ‘daylight point’. The underground channel has a series of wells for maintenance purposes. Water can be used for irrigation and other purposes only from the daylight point onwards. The slope of the karez canals is less than the surrounding land and the water table, and one of the main advantages of the system is that it significantly reduces the otherwise high evaporation losses. The karez system, also called qanat in West Asia, galeria in Spain and foggara/khattera in North Africa, is prevalent as far north as Central Asia, west as Morocco and east as Japan. Some karez-like irrigation systems are also operative in Latin America (Lightfoot, 1996a). Because the karez system depends on passive tapping of groundwater, the water supply from it varies with changes in groundwater levels and does not pose a threat to the natural water balance. The system is under threat from modern tubewell pumps in Balochistan (van Steenbergen and Oliemans, 2002), just the same as it is in steady retreat in most of the other places where it is 134

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Figure 17: Schematic diagram of the structure of a karez.

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practised (Beaumont et al., 1989; Lightfoot, 1996a, 1996b). The tubewell pumping has excessively drawn down the water table in Balochistan, as it has in Azerbaijan, where the Soviet authorities were particularly aggressive in promoting electric tubewells, resulting in the drying up of most karezes. Researchers have studied various aspects of karez-like systems, mostly in the Middle East and North Africa. For example, Beaumont (1968) surveys the karez irrigation system in the Varamin Plain of Iran, and explains how tubewell irrigation is leading to their decline. Lightfoot (1996a and 1996b) similarly investigates the causes for the decline of qanat (karez) irrigation in Morocco and Syria, and the loss of local control over water resources, unsustainable water use and environmental consequences that have resulted from the decline. Lightfoot and Miller (1996) explain the role played by qanat irrigation in the historical geography of a region in Morocco. Lightfoot (1996b) furthermore traces the ancient history of qanats in Syria, tracing back their existence, for example, to pre-Roman times. But beyond being an irrigation technology, karezes or qanats have also been the locus of complex systems of social organization, particularly in Balochistan. In Azerbaijan, however, the karezes, having gone dry (sometimes for decades), are now being resurrected with almost phoenixlike effect of the re-emergence of long-dormant social systems that had worked in tandem with the technology. The physical geography of Balochistan is characterized by semiarid highlands in the north-west part of the province and arid desert environment in the south and south-east of the province. The mainstay of the rural economy of Balochistan is transhumance-based animal husbandry, mostly sheep and goats. In addition, settled agriculture is also practised at valley bottoms using flood harvesting, spate irrigation, dug wells, karezes and, increasingly, groundwater pumping using electric or diesel tubewells (van Steenbergen, 1995, 1997b). In the karez irrigated regions in the Balochistan highlands, the transition from karez to tubewell irrigation has been ongoing since the 1970s as more rural areas are being electrified, and government has continued its policy of imposing a flat fee for tubewell electricity use in the province, much the same as in neighbouring India, the largest groundwater user in the world (Scott and Shah, 2004). There is ongoing discussion to remove the subsidy on electricity for tubewells, but so far not much has changed on the ground. 136

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In the 1990s the trend of tubewell installation accelerated in Balochistan as it coincided with a drought in the second half of the 1990s, which abated only in 2005. Furthermore, the availability of cheap Afghan refugee labour in Balochistan in the 1990s allowed for expansion of fruit orchards, providing further impetus for tubewell expansion. In 2005 there were approximately 14,400 tubewells in Balochistan receiving an annual subsidy of Rs. 7 billion (US $117 million) on electricity alone (Secretary Irrigation, Government of Balochistan; personal communication). The case study presented in this chapter is based upon fieldwork constituting 147 questionnaires to men and women and five participatory rural appraisals (PRAs) in seven villages – Karez Noth, Kunghar, Bangi Karez and Chakul Kalozai in the Mastung district, and Pesha Morezai, Yaqub Karez and Soghai Allahdadzai in the Qilla Saifullah district of Balochistan (Figure 18). Both the districts lie in the highlands of

Figure 18: Map of Balochistan with the study villages indicated.

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north-western Balochistan with cool and dry summers, and intensely cold and moister winters. Mastung district is dominated by Persian-speaking Dehwar people, while Qilla Saifullah has Pushto-speaking Pashtun/ Pathan people dominating the cultural landscape. The Dehwar region of Mastung is closer culturally to the other Balochi- and Brahvi-speaking ethnic groups in Balochistan, while Qilla Saifullah is the heartland of Pashtun culture in Balochistan. The social set-up of Balochistan is quite conservative, requiring (among other things) strict segregation between the sexes. This was more so in

Figure 19: A wall calendar in one of the study villages in Qilla Saifullah. The large text from the top states: ‘two storms of two countries: Mullah Umar and Fazul-ur-Rehman’ (the leader of the opposition in Pakistan’s national assembly and head of the ruling party in Balochistan); ‘Long live Tehrik-e-Islami Taliban’. Above the American flag it says ‘America’. At the bottom it states: ‘We are not afraid of America. I am on a mission to free the Islamic world from the clutches of America. Nobody can stop me. Osama bin-Laden.’ The poster was printed in Sargodha under the auspices of Jamiat-e-Ulama-e-Pakistan and Jamiat-e-Tulaba-e-Islam.

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the Pashtun-dominated areas like the Qilla Saifullah district where the research team, especially its female enumerators, had tremendous difficulty in conducting their work. The research team was repeatedly refused cooperation by local leaders in village after village. Although the team was eventually able to find three villages in the Pashtun areas where the village leadership was willing to extend cooperation to the research team, in one of the villages – Soghai Allahdadzai – the cooperation was withdrawn once the local mullah (religious leader) found out about the presence of the female enumerators. In another village – Yaqub Karez – the female enumerator was harassed by local Islamist elements for doing her job. This rise in hostility towards outside researchers may be seen as a relatively recent phenomenon related to a variety of factors including the American presence in neighbouring Afghanistan, increased Talibanization of Pashtun areas, and anti-non-governmental organization (NGO) and anti-Western rhetoric of the local religious leadership and Islamist parties (Figure 19). The Azerbaijan case study is based upon fieldwork conducted in five communities: Toyanak Kahriz, Khaji Ahmed Kahriz, Sinag Kahriz, Gasim Gaybali and Kalba Alekbar Kahriz of the Nakhchivan Autonomous Region (Figure 20). The physical geography of the Nakhchivan region is very similar to that of Balochistan, but the human geography has been transformed as a result of more than 70 years of Soviet rule. There is very little agro-partoralism, though small-scale sedentary agricultural communities persist. Most people are employed either in the public sector or have family members who either have emigrated to Russia or Turkey, or work in the energy industry in Baku and mainland Azerbaijan. As we discuss social aspects of karez irrigation in Balochistan, they must be borne in mind for comparison with the case of Azerbaijan.

Power and Social Capital in Karez Communities in Balochistan The karez system has been the locus of social organization in the semiarid environment of Balochistan. Very well-established rules of collective management, water distribution and conflict resolution have evolved around karez management. A select person, or a group of persons, are responsible for rule enforcement, as well as organizing karez maintenance, 139

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Figure 20: Map of Nakhchivan Autonomous Region in Azerbaijan.

expansion and other water-related issues including enforcement of the harim rule (an exclusion zone of 1,500 ft from the karez where no additional karez wells or tubewells can be constructed). In Balochistan, the person responsible is known as mir-e-aab (water leader) or Rais. The institution of mir-e-aab closely parallels the office of mayordomo in the Hispanic water communities of the south-western United States and Mexico. The mir-e-aab is part of the village elite and occasionally the village head himself. The comparable office of zovar is organically being resurrected in Azerbaijan as the karezes (locally pronounced kahriz) are being resurrected by a UN International Organization for Migration (IOM)-managed restoration project. His (and the person is invariably male) source of authority and standing in the community is with regard 140

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to water management, the basis of village economic life in semi-arid Balochistan and to a lesser extent in Azerbaijan. Karez water is perpetually flowing and it is distributed among the shareholders on a fixed-time rotational system. A cycle of water distribution typically ranges from 12 to 22 shabanas (24-hour cycles). The shabanas are further subdivided into three-hour increments locally known as pass. The largest shareholder in the sample owned two shabanas, while smaller shareholders owned a pass or even up to half a pass of water. In one of the karezes in the sample, Kunghar Karez, four shabanas were held in reserve and annually auctioned for up to Rs. 190,000 (US $3,200 approximately) in 2006/07, which go towards karez maintenance in addition to the annual cash contributions of the shareholders, and occasional grants by the government towards the upkeep of the karez. This is a very sizeable amount of money in the Pakistani context, with the result that Kunghar Karez was the only viable karez running in the sample of seven villages. The karez shares are well established and well known, with the result that conflict over karez water share is virtually unknown. With increasing scarcity of karez water, however, particularly in the villages where the karezes had very low flows – for example, Bangi Karez and Chakul Kalozai – or had been supplemented or replaced with tubewell water – for example, in Yakub Karez and Karez Noth – there was increasing conflict over nonpayment of annual dues for karez maintenance as well as over distribution of water from communally-owned tubewells. The conflict over communally-owned tubewells was particularly pronounced in the two villages where they were most prominent, Karez Noth and Yakub Karez. In Karez Noth the karez had been abandoned and in its place the main source of irrigation for the village was a communallyowned tubewell installed in the motherwell of the abandoned karez, as well as two privately-owned tubewells. The village had transposed the karez shares and the management system on the communal tubewell, with the assumption that the tubewell will be operated on a 24-hour basis, much like the karez. In reality, frequent power failures of up to six hours per day meant that certain shareholders who could not take their turn because of power failures or breakdown of the tubewell got into conflict with other shareholders who came after them, because according to the rules it was their turn regardless of whether the earlier irrigator had been 141

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able to draw water. This in the case of Karez Noth meant more intense negotiations among water users and greater stress on the water management mechanisms; for example: Water was perpetual with a karez and there were fewer restrictions. We used to hear about a water-related meeting in [terms of ] years. Nowadays they have a water meeting almost monthly and sometimes weekly. (Razia, Karez Noth)

A similar situation persisted with the diesel-operated tubewell in Yakub Karez, as the following quote illustrates: Sometimes there is conflict on tubewell water, for example, if today is our turn to irrigate from the tubewell, but we do not have the money for the diesel or the tubewell is not working, we cannot irrigate. The following day when it is another member’s turn to irrigate, we would argue that since we did not get water on our turn, we should get the water today. And this becomes the cause for conflict. (Bibi Amna, Yakub Karez)

Tubewell installation was a source of friction not only in intra-community relations but also in inter-community relations. In Chakul Kalozai, people were resentful when a more prosperous farmer tried to install a tubewell in the karez channel. Although the tubewell was eventually unsuccessful, there was lingering resentment in the village because of that episode. In Soghai Allahdadzai the community was in an ongoing conflict with a neighbouring tribe because of tubewell installation by the neighbouring tribe near Soghai’s karez: There is never conflict on karez water. There is conflict on communal land use and tubewell installation near the karez, for example, the other tribe’s tubewell is close to our karez and therefore there is conflict. (Daza Gul, Soghai Allahdadzai)

In many of the villages, particularly in the Pashtun areas, people had pooled and spent funds ranging from Rs. 80,000 in Yakub Karez to 142

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Figure 21: Distribution of responses to the question on reasons for continued survival of karez irrigation in study communities.

Rs. 120,000 in Pesha Morezai to rehabilitate their karezes. One of the main reasons that they cited for continued interest in rehabilitating karezes, instead of abandoning them and going for tubewell irrigation, was communal harmony. Figure 21 lists the responses to the question about the reasons for survival of karezes, even in diminished form, in some of the communities despite wholesale abandonment of karezes and the switch to tubewells in most other villages. The other main reasons of community interest and well-protected water rights similarly point to the role of karez irrigation in sustaining the social capital within those communities in addition to the economic reason for the availability of water when required. The value of karez irrigation in promoting collective action was a theme which frequently featured in the ethnographic surveys, as the following illustrates: I do not see a future for karezes. Drought has affected the entire area... uncontrolled installation of tubewells has weakened our centuries-old traditions. Karezes, which were a time-honoured and traditional platform for collective action, are becoming extinct. (Rais Nobat Khan, Kunghar)

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An important aspect of sustaining cooperative social organization and strengthening social capital is ensuring equity in distribution of rewards from cooperative activity commensurate with individual effort. In karez-based irrigation, shareholders’ contribution in cash or labour to karez maintenance is commensurate with the size of their share in the karez. Furthermore, every shareholder in a karez has land parcels in the head, middle and tail reaches of the water channel, thereby ensuring equitable interests of the shareholders across the length of the karez channel. This was confirmed for all the study villages during the PRA exercises. One of the important aspects of the introduction of collectively owned, as well as the more ubiquitous privately-owned, tubewells is to accentuate further economic power differentials in the rural society of Balochistan: With the unlimited growth of tubewells, the karezes have gone dry which hurts the smaller shareholders, the bazgars [tenants], and the poor. The larger shareholders have of course benefited, because they could install personal or shared tubewells. (Zangeen Khan, Kunghar) Wherever a tubewell is installed next to a karez the karez shareholders lose out. The tubewell owner wins out with higher profits. But a tubewell is owned by an individual from which two or three people are earning their living, but a karez is communally owned from which 500–1,000 people may be earning their living. So you figure out that when a tubewell gives an individual benefit, how many lose out. (M. Ismael, Bangi Karez) [The tubewell] has benefited the big landowners and hurt the smaller poorer farmers. There are many people who share in the diesel pump but they cannot use their share of water because of poverty [because they do not have the money for the diesel to extract their share]. (Amanullah, Yakub Karez)

Each of the above quotes is representative of the themes that were repeated throughout the household survey. Karez irrigation beyond a means of sustaining agriculture was also a mode of providing livelihoods for the poorer segments of rural society and thereby keeping them integrated in the 144

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Figure 22: Distribution of responses to the question about disadvantages of tubewell irrigation in study communities.

communities. Now, increasingly, the poorer people either have to migrate to cities or have to work locally as day labourers with greater integration into the wider cash economy and more precarious livelihoods. Even when a tubewell is collectively owned, there can be conflict because poorer shareholders do not have the option of contributing with labour to the maintenance of the tubewell, which requires specialist labour and cash. Figure 22 lists the disadvantages of tubewell irrigation as reported by the survey respondents. The figure confirms the concern about high Operations and Management (O&M) costs and its environmental impacts. On the advantages side the most widely reported benefit was an expanded cultivated area by less than 25 per cent of the respondents, with about 17 per cent also reporting higher productivity from tubewell irrigation – not a very resounding endorsement of the technique. In fact, in one of the small farmer-dominated villages, Pesha Morezai, no tubewell has been installed because the locals perceive a negative benefit/cost ratio of tubewell irrigation for small farmers, despite the heavy subsidy; for example: If there is a private tubewell in our village then we will object. If it is for the whole village then we have little objection. Also, the land parcels are

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Water Resource Management in a Vulnerable World small and one landowner could not afford a private tubewell anyway. The productivity is less compared to the cost. (Abdul Matin, Pesha Morezai) I do not have the money to install a tubewell. Even if I had the money, I would still do it by obtaining the villagers’ consent. But my land parcel is too small and there would be no advantage to boring a tubewell. (Muhibullah, Pesha Morezai)

The social capital spawned by karezes has not entirely disappeared despite the stresses imposed on it as a result of the decreasing water flows in existing karezes and their complete abandonment in other cases. As mentioned earlier, much of the management system associated with karezes has been transposed on to at least the collectively-owned tubewells. However, privately-owned tubewells, while impacting the output of the karezes and other tubewells, have also removed the incentive for the owners of private tubewells to participate in community mechanisms for water management (for example, 12 per cent of the respondents reported social freedom as one of the advantages of tubewell irrigation). Almost all of these respondents were the more affluent farmers. As the private tubewell owners are also the most affluent and influential members of the community, their withdrawal from community participation is imposing tremendous stress on the rural social capital in Balochistan. The introduction of tubewells and their ongoing diffusion was not just an accident or inevitable outcome of rural electrification. Government policies and planning was actively involved in the promotion of tubewell irrigation in Balochistan. It is to the discussion of the policy and developmental context of technological transition in water management in Balochistan that I now turn.

Participation, Development and Social Capital in Water Resources Development in Balochistan Balochistan Province in Pakistan, much like the rest of the country and the global South, has been a venue for development praxis. Development as 146

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modernization, increased economic productivity and social transformation is a dominant feature of the water resources policy discourse and practice (Wescoat et al., 2000; Shah et al., 2003). As early as the 1970s, Western management consultants and Pakistani water engineers identified the karez system as an overly wasteful water management system and technology, because of the apparent wastage of constantly flowing water in the karezes without any productive or high value use outside of the summer growing season (van Steenbergen and Oliemans, 2002). It was the same motivation earlier for the Soviet planners in Azerbaijan, who through their promotion of modern tubewells hastened the demise of karez irrigation in Azerbaijan. This perspective did not take into account the other uses of the flowing channel particularly for domestic water use by women and farm animals, as documented by Meinzen-Dick and van der Hoek (2001). Furthermore, the nationwide emphasis in groundwater management was to promote tubewell installation through soft loans, and mostly through subsidized electricity. In the case of Balochistan, flat rate electricity charges were levied on tubewells regardless of the length of use. The Pakistan government’s attempts at promoting groundwater exploitation with electric tubewells were successful beyond expectations. The subsidies on tubewell installation and electricity were largely withdrawn or cut in the three other provinces of Pakistan in the 1990s, except in Balochistan, where they continue to this day. The promotion of tubewell irrigation in Balochistan is deemed to be part of the larger project of modernizing and hence developing agriculture in rural Balochistan. Even the local water users are quite cognizant of the modernist and modernizing underpinnings of tubewell diffusion: Our elders tell us that in olden times there was so much water in the karez that people working far away in the fields would receive their midday meals through the karez. The women folk would put food in a buoyant sealed container called Danko, and put it in the karez near them. The karez would then take the containers to the farmers working downstream. Now those were the days! Nowadays times have changed, new technology is coming in, with new machines, and new people who like latest machines. The traditional irrigation is progressively being forgotten. (Khaliqdad, Kunghar, emphasis added)

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Water Resource Management in a Vulnerable World More land was irrigated with karez. Now it is modern times, with new machines. People prefer tubewells, so they can save time and increase income. (Haji Mehrbaan, Karez Noth)

For others who had no personal experience with tubewells beyond observing their more affluent neighbours’ lifestyles, which they suspected to be the outcome of their use of tubewells, the connection between development, prosperity and tubewells was quite firm. This is illustrated by the following quote from a female respondent in a non-tubewell village: Farmers who have tubewells get high productivity, their economic situation is better. Their children are educated and do not have to work in early childhood. They [tubewell owners] can provide for their children and they own motor vehicles. The karez shareholders have lost out because tubewells have reduced the karez water. Also people with livestock have lost because fodder is much more expensive than in the karez days. (Sahib Khatoon, Bangi Karez)

Some tubewell owners shared the optimistic outlook on the tubewells: With the tubewell I plant new types of crops. I have given bazgari [tenancy] to people and people have gotten jobs. There was no bazgar on my lands, now there are five families settled on it. My interaction with the village increased, so did the productivity and the cropped area. (Abdul Malik, Soghai Allahdadzai)

However, most shareholders in tubewells were generally not so sanguine about tubewell irrigation: Karez was better because it was natural without electricity or motors. Tubewell is just a perpetual problem with erratic electricity, and maintenance expenses. (Haji Mehrbaan, Karez Noth)

The perceived equation between development, modernization and tubewell irrigation on the part of the water users was not entirely misplaced. Many of the policy makers who were interviewed either explicitly or implicitly expressed a propensity towards using technical interventions to improve 148

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water management in the province – tubewell irrigation being a small but presently unpopular part of that overall technical bias. The tubewells have fallen from favour because of the very well-known decline in water tables and wasteful water use practices in place because of perpetual operation of the tubewells. Furthermore, the increasing prominence of environmental concerns, particularly among the donor and NGO communities, has made tubewells relatively unpopular. Three categories of policy makers were interviewed for the research – the governments of Pakistan (GoP) and Balochistan (GoB), NGOs and donor agency functionaries. Among the government servants, a few were aware of the unique social capital around karez irrigation, and the need for its preservation. The policy emphases, however, were more on infrastructural projects, hydrological research and the introduction of water-efficient irrigation technologies (for example, drip irrigation). They also conceded that the government policies were largely responsible for the decline of the karez system in Balochistan: Tubewells benefit individuals, karez benefits society and binds community together. Karez was also a mechanism for conflict resolution, though there is no future for it. Contradictory government policies and bias towards tubewells is to blame for it... This is by the way an atypical perception [in my department]. You see we in the government are into tangibles, for example, how much money spent and tubewells installed. (Assistant Director, GoB Agriculture Department)

The head of the irrigation department for the GoB mentioned that there were Rs. 60 billion (approximately US $1 billion) worth of water-related projects planned for Balochistan, of which Rs. 3.2 billion (US $53 million) worth of projects were high priority. Almost all of the high-priority projects were engineering based; for example, construction of Mirani Dam, delay action dams16 and irrigation canals from the Indus. The Secretary also mentioned that rehabilitation of 1,000 karezes was part of the new ADBfunded Drought Relief Project. Other government functionaries who were interviewed, however, conceded that there was practically no karezrelated technical expertise available with the government, or even with the local private engineering firms or NGOs. The ongoing interventions 149

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with karezes were limited to funding cleaning of some karezes based on political patronage, and even then with substantial leakage of funds and the construction of delay action dams (Secretary Irrigation GoB, personal communication). Many of the delay action dams, by the admission of the government functionaries, had turned more into evaporation ponds than groundwater recharge conduits as originally intended. The GoB has been mindful of groundwater draw down as a result of rampant development of tubewells, and its passing of the Balochistan Groundwater Rights Administration Ordinance 1978 to outline a procedure for licensing tubewell development in the province was an attempt at tackling the problem. The licensing of tubewells was supposed to be based on area-specific guidelines to be sanctioned by area water boards. Unfortunately, the area-specific guidelines were never formulated and the ordinance had minimal impact on groundwater management in the province. There were instances of communities mobilizing to institute self-regulating groundwater management in Mastung district and the southern district of the province. After some successful initial community initiatives at widening and stricter enforcement of the harim rule to stem the tide of dugwell and tubewell development in the 1970s in Mastung, the self-regulatory regime eventually fell apart under the stress of the drought in the 1990s and the capacity of the larger farmers to exploit the loopholes within the management regime. In Panjgur, however, thanks to remittances from the expatriate workers in the Gulf States, there was an infusion of capital for further irrigation development coupled with the diminishing relative power of the feudal elites. The communities in Panjgur, having witnessed the devastation that tubewells had brought to the neighbouring districts, chose to expand existing karezes and develop new ones, with strict rules forbidding tubewell and dugwell development. The district is one of the last remaining bastions of continuing dominance of karez irrigation in Balochistan (van Steenbergen and Oliemans, 2002; GoB Secretary Agriculture, personal communication). Many of the government and donor agency functionaries tended to speak of water issues in Balochistan in terms of modernist spatial and sectoral aggregates, instead of focusing on the local cultural, social and economic consequences of the ongoing transition from karez to tubewell irrigation. The dissonance between the modernist hazardscapes of the 150

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water managers and the contextual, place-based hazardscapes of the water users was quite stark in this instance: Karez is gone and there is no use to talk about it – besides the labour that used to dig and maintain karezes is no longer available either... the issue [for us] is not to save the karez but rather the profitability of irrigated agriculture in Pakistan. (Pakistan Agriculture Research Council (PARC) researcher) Karez rehabilitation is a site-specific issue; our priorities are groundwater recharge watershed management and clearly and equitably defined water rights. (World Bank Pakistan office functionary)

In fact, despite the overwhelmingly politicized nature of water management and policy in Balochistan, some of the government functionaries continued to insist upon an idealized notion of technically-based water management, much the same as in the case of the Punjab discussed in the earlier chapters: All resources should be directed to government departments instead of politicians. Expert opinion should direct projects without political interference. We need to have autonomy with appropriate monitoring and evaluation in the irrigation department. (Secretary Irrigation, GoB)

The NGO functionaries, on the other hand, were much more attentive to the social aspects of water management, but their opinions were more informed by theoretical participatory nomenclature rather than any empirically grounded understanding of social reality in Balochistan. Too often during my conversations with the NGO representatives, terms like ‘participation’, ‘integrated development’, ‘community mobilization’ and ‘sustainable development’ were used by the interviewees without giving any sense to how these terms were to be operationalized in Balochistan’s context. Some of the government employees were also quick to point this out: 151

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Water Resource Management in a Vulnerable World The NGOs have tried to superimpose [participatory] committee structures and theoretical participation on villages without trying to understand the local social structures and their participatory mechanisms. (Assistant Director, Agriculture Department, GoB)

This observation was borne out by the interviews of NGO representatives in Balochistan; for example, representatives of the Balochistan Rural Support Programme (BRSP) claimed to be undertaking social mobilization and forming village organizations (VO) to undertake cooperative irrigation management. When asked why there was a need to superimpose a new organizational structure over communities which are already highly organized around karez irrigation, the answer was a repetition of a series of terms on participation and social change, without addressing the question. The representatives of other NGOs (for example, World Conservation Union (IUCN), Oxfam, Taraqqi Foundation, United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), Mercy Corp International (MCI) and Pakistan Poverty Alleviation Fund (PPAF)), expressed variations on the same theme about raising people’s awareness regarding water, introducing modern drip irrigation, changes in cropping pattern, integrated watershed management and of course a call for the elimination of a flat rate on tubewell electricity. I repeatedly asked the NGO representatives why they were not using existing modes of social organization, and suggested to them that the water users were more aware of water scarcity and quality issues than most. The answers to the questions, however, continued to be vague. Perhaps the urbanbased Western educational background of the NGO functionaries contributed to their viewing of the hazardscape in Balochistan through the lens of donor-based and to a lesser extent academic developmental discourse rather than place-based realities of Balochistan: We need more watershed management, and community education regarding wastage of water from tubewells, as well as conservation techniques. We need to reduce tubewell subsidies and channel funds to drip and trickle irrigation. Also we should license tubewell use, but the farmer lobby would not let it happen. (MCI representative)

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Resilience Versus Growth We require communities to have a community organization with at least 15 per cent of the village households as members and 20 per cent cash contribution to the potential cost of community projects that we fund... we have a substantial technical contribution [in the Balochistan water sector] in terms of reservoir design and introduction of water-efficient technologies... though despite rehabilitation of some [karezes] and other water systems, a lot of water is still being wasted with the water flowing unproductively. (PPAF representative)

Overall, the government and the non-governmental sector representatives were somewhat politely in favour of saving the karez system, but did not think that the system had much of a future or could be a major part of the future water management scenario in Balochistan. Part of the reason for this less than sanguine perspective on karezes, besides their obvious contemporary decline, was the more profound intellectual equation they made between development and modernization. Karezes being not modern were not quite part of the rather modernist vision for the hazardscapes in Balochistan for the government and NGO people that I interviewed. The above discussion is in sharp contrast to the evidence from the household survey. The household survey painted a picture of a populace with a very well-developed social capital with a high degree of awareness regarding the social, cultural, environmental and economic role of karezes and tubewell irrigation in their lived hazardscapes. The government, donor and NGO survey, on the other hand, reveals varying degrees of technocratic bias, and with a few exceptions a discursive construction of the irrigators in Balochistan as unorganized and unaware of the consequences of the transformations going on in Balochistan. The contrast has larger implications for the development enterprise in Balochistan, which I will outline following the discussion of the Azerbaijan experience below.

Phoenix-like Return of the Karez-based Institutions in Azerbaijan After my work in Balochistan, I was convinced of the efficacy of the karez system in ensuring social cohesion and sustainable livelihoods to rural communities in the arid realm. I was, however, also not very optimistic 153

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about the prospect for the resurrection of the karez system in Balochistan or elsewhere, and was reluctantly resigned to its steady decline into extinction. In 2008, however, I was approached by the IOM Azerbaijan to work on their project on karez rehabilitation in Azerbaijan. The research undertaken in Azerbaijan gives some confidence that in situations where the karezes had altogether gone into extinction they can indeed be resurrected, with the communities almost organically resurrecting the accompanying institutional arrangements. The karez system in Azerbaijan in general, and the Nakhchivan Autonomous Republic in particular, underwent considerable decline during Soviet times, partially because of the state focus on electric water pumps as the preferred technology to tap groundwater, and partially because of the social upheaval associated with nationalization and collectivization. The collectivization process removed much of the motivation for devoting resources and labour towards karez maintenance, particularly because the substitute electric tubewells with subsidized electricity and maintenance fulfilled local water demand. In addition, the collectivization process resulted in the removal of water rights17 from individuals, who had little reason to contribute towards karez maintenance in the absence of a personal stake in them. The karez system is now being resurrected by a UN IOM-managed and Swiss government-funded project to strengthen place-based livelihoods to local communities. The project’s initial focus had been primarily on the civil works and infrastructural improvements of the karez tunnels and channels. But, as the project progressed through the late 2000s, it has come to recognize the social/institutional aspects of karez rehabilitation as much more critical than it had initially envisaged. The pre-Soviet karez management systems closely matched water distribution regimes and institutions prevalent in many karez systems in many other parts of the world including Balochistan, as detailed above. As many of the karezes are being rehabilitated, many communities are enacting water distribution regimes based on a fortnightly fixed-time rotational water distribution schedule, where individual shares are proportional to the amount of land owned by individual community members (for example, in the case of Toyanak Kahriz). But since the Soviet rule and later decollectivization in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union ensured that almost everybody had equal parcels of land, the water rights 154

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attached to the land are pretty much equal. In other karezes, however, the communities are dividing up water in proportion to the community members’ contributions to the karez rehabilitation fund rather than the landownership; for example, the Khaji Ahmed Kahriz in Ordubad, a region which is discussed in greater detail below. The water distribution system, although resurrected in modern times, is (according to some communities) an attempt at balancing the customary water distribution regime with the modern reality of newer members and a post-Soviet landownership pattern. The point is that the customary water distribution system has not gone completely extinct in Azerbaijan, as the historical memory of it is very much alive and is relevant to communities as they negotiate new water distribution systems on rehabilitated karezes. One of the community members in Sinag Kahriz reported that even in the military more than a decade ago: I would at times wake up on Saturday nights wondering if my brothers or somebody in my house back in the village was on time to open the water inlet on my fields to claim our share of the kahriz water. (Farman)

There is also some memory of the zone of exclusion (harim rule) around the motherwell of a karez; that is, no tubewells are allowed within a specified distance of the motherwell, as well as extraction of water directly upstream from the exit point. The rule is particularly important in terms of maintaining water quality by preventing activities that may pollute the groundwater, in addition to preventing well-head interference by other tubewells. Because of abandonment during Soviet times, many people have come to live around and over karez wells. In some cases people have karez maintenance wells in their backyards and in some cases they have started pumping water directly from those wells. Since the water rights on a karez are invariably adjudicated downstream from the exit point, extraction of water directly from the maintenance wells is tantamount to stealing water from all the shareholders in a karez. I shall detail below how some communities have negotiated these challenges. There are only unconfirmed reports of water markets along karezes in Nakhchivan. In Sinag Kahriz, for example, some community meeting participants mentioned that if small landowners could not make use of 155

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their water share, they should sell them or lease them for the season to other water users. The community leader in the karez, however, insisted that karez water is tied to the land and nobody is allowed to sell one without the other. There are, however, consistent reports of the existence of a strong moral economy of water sharing and lending to needy community members as and when they may need access to additional water for whatever reasons, across all the communities that I interacted with. In some karezes (for example, in Toyanak Kahriz), the community members were holding 21 hours of water in reserve to give an additional share to somebody who may need it temporarily and also if new families come to live in the village. The experience of karez rehabilitation and subsequent rules and norms formation around water management is not consistent across the Nakhchivan region. The following brief rendition of karez infrastructural and institutional restoration is illustrative of the variety of experiences.

Khaji Ahmed Kahriz: A Study in Successful Community Mobilization and Institutional Resurrection In Khaji Ahmed Kahriz, the karez has recently been renovated by the IOM. It was originally started in 1872 and functioned well enough with all the accompanying management systems until 1925, when as a result of Soviet rule the management systems surrounding the karez underwent a considerable amount of stress. In 1935, with the collectivization drive in full swing, the local social system around the karez finally started to disintegrate. Although there was a memory of historic water rights on the part of the community members, the new water distribution scheme was decided by four respectable community members. The community members have elected a local leader who collects AZN18 2 per household per month for the maintenance fund. This local leader could be considered a resurrection of the historic institution of the zovar in the village. Earlier the community had pooled AZN 1,820 for their share of the karez rehabilitation, with households contributing anywhere from AZN 20 to AZN 140 towards the fund at the rate of AZN 10 per hour of watershare. Although the landholdings are comparable, the watershares are not, which might be a function of the contribution from individual households towards karez rehabilitation (Table 5). 156

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Resilience Versus Growth Table 5: Water distribution schedule in Khaji Ahmed Kahriz, Ordubad city First week First day 1. Miratayev Mirmahammad Third day 1. Ismayilov Ilham 2. Valiyev Movlan 3. Ismayilov Matlab 4. Mammadov Ajdar 5. Mammadov Ajdar Fifth day 1. Mammadov Seyran 2. Mammadov Mehman 3. Mammadov Eldar 4. Mammadov Ehtibar 5. Mammadov Ashraf 6. Karimov Nazim 7. Ibrahimov Mubariz 8. Heydarov Tahir 9. Huseyinov Zeynalabdin 10. Guliyev Ali 11. Seyidov Ilham 12. Asgarov Tofiq Seventh day 1. Ismayilov Gadir 2. Ismayilov Zakir 3. Aliyev Ali 4. Ahmadov Novruz

12ºº–14ºº

24ºº–04ºº 04ºº–11ºº 11ºº–17ºº 17ºº–23ºº 23ºº–24ºº 24ºº–02ºº 02ºº–04ºº 04ºº–06ºº 06ºº–08ºº 08ºº–10ºº 10ºº–11ºº 11ºº–14ºº 14ºº–16ºº 16ºº–18ºº 18ºº–22ºº 22ºº–23ºº 23ºº–24ºº

Second day 1. Valiyev Vuqar 2. Ismayilov Ilham Fourth day 1. Mammadov Ajdar

Sixth day 1. Asgarov Tofiq 2. Safaraliyev Masum 3. Musayev Huseyinqulu 4. Musayev Huseyinqulu 5. Asgarov Malik 6. Maharamova Sakina 7. Maharramov Huseyin 8. Ismayilov Gadir

14ºº–21³º 21ºº–24³º 24ºº–05ºº

24ºº–10ºº 10ºº–13ºº 13ºº–24ºº 24ºº–01ºº 01ºº–03ºº 03ºº–13ºº 13ºº–20ºº 20ºº–24ºº

24ºº–02ºº 02ºº–08ºº 08ºº–14ºº 14ºº–24ºº Second week

First day Imanov Shaban Aliyev Abulfaz Ganbarov Ali

24ºº–04ºº 04ºº–14ºº 14ºº–24ºº

Second day Ganbarov Ali Hasanov Gurban

24ºº–04ºº 04ºº–18ºº

The average landholding in the village is about 0.05 hectares with the biggest landowner having 0.07 hectares of land. The land is primarily used for market gardening for mostly domestic consumption and some surplus marketing. This can become one of the biggest threats to the long-term 157

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sustainability of the karez, because as long as karez water is not put to highvalue productive use, there may not be sufficient incentive for community members to invest in the karez. This is in addition to the fact that almost all the young people in the community are working out of the village, either in Baku or in Moscow. Therefore, there is a paucity of labour for productive agriculture, even if the land parcels were big enough for commercial farming. The water is nevertheless critical for domestic supply and presumably the more influential community members with higher water rights will be motivated enough to lead the community to maintain the karez. The community had had some conflict with a neighbouring water user who had a private water pump near the source of the karez water. The community had tried to invoke tradition to get that person to remove his pump, but ultimately they had to also get a certification from the state geological institute to convince the person to stop pumping water. Besides that individual tubewell user, the Ordubad region communities had not allowed the drilling of an additional area in the area for seven years before 2008. It appears that the customary harim rule prevalent in other parts of the world, dictating a zone of exclusion around the karez, is being resurrected out of necessity to keep the karezes viable. The community had also successfully influenced the karez members to dismantle water pumps installed in the karez wells once it had been rehabilitated. They did make exceptions to allow manual extraction of water for domestic use only, if the maintenance well was on the property and the household was dependent upon water from the well. Khaji Ahmed Kahriz is an example of a community that has successfully managed to resurrect its karez and is supported by inherited traditional water rights for sharing its water and setting up management systems for its operations and maintenance.

Gasim Gaybali: A Study in the Failure to Organize for Karez Rehabilitation The social impact that a karez can have becomes evident in communities which are unable to organize and contribute towards the karez maintenance. In the village of Gasim Gaybali, for example, the karez is situated within the village and is very important for the community. Of the 22 water users in the karez, eight use it as their source of potable water, whereas others also 158

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Figure 23: A contentious community meeting in Gasim Gaybali, Nakhchivan.

depend on it for irrigation. The community, despite repeated interactions with the IOM team, has been unable to organize and agree on the payment. This problem has three sources: the water distribution system; distrust in the community leadership; and community contribution estimates for karez rehabilitation. Indeed, some of the community members were quite bitter that the zovar of the village had not respected the traditional water sharing system, which ensured that everyone had a fair share of water, in the past year. As a result they do not trust him to implement a fair distribution in the future. Secondly, the community leadership is not trusted by the community members, who claim that the money they had contributed earlier towards the karez maintenance was misappropriated by the community leader, who is also the zovar. In addition, people complained that the water distribution per household estimate contribution is unaffordable for many and hence they are not going to pay. The community was unanimous that they needed the karez rehabilitated, but they did not trust each other and most of all do not trust the community leader with water-related affairs in the future. The 159

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community seems to have considerable distrust and conflict between them, as was evident in the community meetings (Figure 23); these are precisely the things that can be fatal to a karez, as they are in this particular case.

Kalba Alekbar: The Challenge of Inventing a Karez Management System Without the Benefit of Historical Memory In the neighbouring village to Gasim Gaybali, the community drawing upon the Kalba Alekbar karez was settled in Soviet times. The families gradually settled in the village of Givrag over the last 40 years and therefore have no historical memory of customary water distribution. Prior to karez rehabilitation, they had decided on an equal distribution of water between community members amounting to 12 hours of water per household, which became now insufficient because the discharge from the karez was reduced considerably, due to a lack of maintenance. The karez is in the process of being rehabilitated by the IOM project, and the community is planning on putting a new water distribution system in place. This new system will try to be proportional to the amount of land owned by the water user. Along the same lines, then, the contribution of the water users to the karez rehabilitation fund will be proportionate to the land owned. Some larger landowners are not in a position to pay a higher fee, as many of them are elderly women with their men having emigrated to Moscow or Baku, and would prefer an equal contribution and a distribution. There is thus still a debate continuing within the community regarding both the water distribution and the community contribution distribution. However, the community members did profess to trust each other to find a solution prior to the completion of karez rehabilitation. This is a good example of a community which has to organize itself and rebuild a water-sharing system from scratch without the support of inherited traditional water rights. Overall, the above three case studies outline the social significance of the karez system in the various communities of Nakhchivan. The key insights to emerge from the three case studies, with respect to prospects for successful karez rehabilitation, are the following: 1. communal harmony is an important prerequisite for maintenance of a karez in the long term, and a karez can stimulate a community towards better communal harmony and social organization; 160

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2. water distribution mechanisms are too fluid at the moment (that is, proportional to land versus contribution to the karez rehabilitation). A hybrid system taking account of both is prevalent in most places; 3. the zone of exclusion rule for water pumps is being resurrected organically and negotiated in most communities as it is a prerequisite for the survival of the karez system; 4. there is some historical memory of water markets, but at the moment the moral economy of water with voluntary free sharing of water periodically is the rule; 5. migration and small landholdings preventing productive use of karez water might be a long-term threat to the sustainability of karezes; 6. strong and trustworthy leadership can compensate for economic incentives and labour limitations to sustain the karez system.

Accumulation Versus Resilience as Objectives of Water Development in the Arid Realm Karez irrigation, an ancient ecologically sustainable system, has been the locus of community life and the social capital within it in rural Balochistan, Pakistan, as well as an emerging social capital in Nakhchivan, Azerbaijan. The modernist transformation in the case of Balochistan documented above had important consequences in the Baloch hazardscape characterized by a long history of droughts, the most recent one being between 1998 and 2008 (Chaudhry et al., 2001). The Baloch agricultural communities, with their dual emphasis on transhumance animal husbandry, karez-based agriculture and use of drought-resistant crops, had evolved highly effective coping mechanisms to drought. The drought since 1998, however, arrived as Balochistan was forging forward towards more ‘developed’ and modern agriculture. The widespread introduction of tubewells on the one hand facilitated coping by preventing the meteorological drought from becoming a full-fledged agricultural drought (Dr Abdul Majeed; personal communication). At the same time in other places, according to some evidence, tubewells further accentuated the hydrological consequences of the meteorological drought. 161

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All over the field area in Balochistan, there was a distinct geography of relative prosperity and desolation from 2004 to 2008. Wherever the communities had enough political patronage to secure a governmentfunded tubewell as in Karez Noth, or individual farmers had sufficient financial means and good luck to have successful tubewell bores, there were lush fruit orchards and grape vineyards. On the other hand, within less than 5 km from the same communities lay the abandoned houses of the communities who had lost their karezes, partly because of the drought and partly because of the proliferation of tubewells in close proximity to the karezes. Although no systematic studies have been undertaken of the impact of tubewell proliferation on mitigating or accentuating the impacts of the most recent drought, it is almost certain that there was a distinct geography to its impact in mitigating the agricultural drought in some places and accentuating the hydrological drought in others. The focus of ‘developmental’ efforts in the agricultural sector in Balochistan has been on increasing productivity and encouraging the switch to high-value crops, which was the case in Azerbaijan in Soviet times. The large-scale switch from lower-value corn, apricots, wheat, grapes and sheep herding to higher-value and more water-demanding fruits – primarily apples – is partially the outcome of the government’s attempts at ‘developing’ the agricultural sector in Balochistan. Along the way, many farmers in the province have become very prosperous as mentioned above, but with enormous environmental costs and serious implications for social equity, as karez shareholders and smaller farmers lost out in the new competitive and accumulative agricultural economy. In fact, 58 per cent of the survey respondents perceived small farmers and animals herders to have lost out in the transition from karez to tubewell, while 40 per cent perceived large farmers to be the winners in the transition.

Conclusion The above narrative brings into sharp relief the question of accumulation versus social and ecological sustainability as the objectives of developmental praxis in Balochistan. The modernization-driven developmental discourse in Balochistan has led to large-scale irrigation development projects, as 162

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well as a subsidized expansion of tubewell irrigation with an eye towards increasing agricultural productivity. In the arid and semi-arid physical environment of Balochistan, accumulative development strategies can tax the marginal environment to its limits and can lead to a general collapse of communities, as was witnessed during the 1998–2005 drought. For the long-term ecological and social sustainability of Balochistan, resilience will have to replace accumulation as the top priority of developmental initiatives. Saving the karez irrigation technique will be an integral component of any resilience to an enhancement-oriented rural development strategy in Balochistan. In the case of Azerbaijan, the karez system is an integral part of the history and culture of Nakhchivan. It continues to be a source of civic pride, local identity and historic imagination of the communities in Nakhchivan. Very often it was mentioned that people wanted the karezes to work because beyond the economic and functional benefits, it was an essential part of their history and identity that they wanted to resurrect and maintain. Beyond being a source of livelihood, karezes can bind com-munities in cooperative relationships that can spawn social capital, which can be used for developmental ends. In addition, given the uncertainty that climate change and modernist development engenders, the system because of its low environmental impact has the potential of sustaining community life and livelihoods in the face of potentially increased environmental stress. An even balance between community cohesion and governmental action for the provision of credit, technical support and even some modern technologies, such as check dams and drilling and surveying tools, can help build a more synergistic relationship between the national and the local levels in rural Azerbaijan and Balochistan. If sustainable livelihoods can be found at the local level, and community cohesion and bonds are strengthened by the technique, push factors for migration will be mitigated and there will be little reason that older people and women have to work hard in the fields or suffer separation from their children working in faraway Moscow, Baku, Istanbul, Karachi or Dubai. National and international attention to restoration and preservation of the karez and other similar systems in the world will have to begin with greater research on the engineering, hydrological, economic and social 163

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aspects of karez irrigation with an eye towards building a pool of technical experts on the technique. The research and the technical expertise will of necessity have to dispense with some of the modernist biases about ‘newer is better’, and instead adopt an attitude of active learning from the karez communities and the traditional karez constructors (a tribe called Ghilzis in Balochistan and Kankans in Azerbaijan). Karez maintenance and construction could be financially viable for a non-profit organization or even a business, which could be a source of technical and financial resources for communities. Such organizations will probably need international and national donor support in the short run, but they could be self-sustaining in the long run. In Balochistan most karezes have water distributed over 12–22-day cycles. Water markets on karezes are well developed and quite transparent with very low transaction costs. Any organization could easily insert itself into those markets to recoup costs, plus possibly even a reasonable profit if it can generate demand for its technical and financial services through efficient and responsive service delivery. One way of inserting an outsider into karez markets could be to negotiate with the communities the expansion of the water cycle by a shabana (24-hour cycle) or two and transferring those shabanas to the organization performing the services. The biannual auction of the organization’s water right to local water users could raise enough money to keep the organization financially viable and continue to provide periodic maintenance services for the karezes. More sophisticated financial analysis of the viability of the above proposal could be useful for international donors interested in supporting arid zone irrigation management. In light of the evidence presented above, it should be clear that karez is not a technological anachronism, but rather a viable irrigation system, which has lasted two millennia and can be relevant to the future of Balochistan, Nakhchivan and other arid regions in the world, given the right policy choices. The destruction of the karez system will not only have ecological and economic consequences, but because of the social capital constructed around the technique, it will have unanticipated and most likely negative social consequences as well. Therefore, international donor and local and national policy attention should be directed towards restoration and preservation of this wonderful system.

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7

Globalization and Water Privatization in Belize

Introduction Through most of the twentieth century, except for the last two decades, provision of urban water supply was deemed to be one of the core elements of the social contract between the state and its populace. The trend of increasingly private-sector control of water supply networks in urban areas in the 1990s and early 2000s is not unprecedented (Swyngedouw et al., 2002). Some of the earliest urban water supply networks (for example, in London in the early eighteenth century) were indeed also privately owned. What is unique about the recent round of water supply privatization is the global scale of capital interests acquiring water supply networks both in the global North and South (Swyngedouw et al., 2002; Bakker, 2003a). But just by its very unique biophysical nature and the multiple values that societies attach to it, in addition to its obvious life-sustaining qualities, water is proving to be the slipperiest customer for neoliberalism, or what Bakker (2003b) calls an ‘uncooperative commodity’. In fact, the experience of water privatization is creating spaces for the most intense and bitter contestation of neoliberalism’s triumphant diffusion under globalization. Water commodification and commercialization has very material economic and equity-related impacts, but beyond those there are also important symbolic consequences that this chapter will highlight. Through

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ethnographic research, I seek to articulate water users’ subjectivities and experience of commodified water, and thereby apprehend the lived hydrohazardscape of access to domestic water supply in a newer post-colonial context. Commodification is defined by McDonald and Ruiters (2005: 20) as ‘any act, practice or policy that promotes or treats a good or service as an article of commerce to be bought, sold, or traded through market transactions’. In this chapter, accordingly, I present the results of ethnographic and questionnaire-based research on the failed water privatization in Belize City, Belize. I argue that people’s subjectivities about privatized water in Belize City are not formed in isolation from Belize’s geographical context as a Caribbean country. The Caribbean region, with its relatively recent experience of colonialism, and post-colonial dominance by former colonial powers, has special issues of unstable post-colonial identities and notions of national sovereignty, which are part of the public discourse on water privatization in Belize. Many in the Belizean hydro-hazardscape, already bitter over the poor state of the economy, corruption and dilapidated infrastructure, have started to see privatization as colonialism through other means. As one of our survey respondents said: ‘People [are] all that is left to privatize for the politicians to make more money.’ The sub-tropical country of Belize was known as British Honduras until 1973 (Figure 24). The present territory of Belize had been under British influence since the early seventeenth century, but it was not until 1862 that it was declared a crown colony. The country officially gained its independence from Britain on 21 September 1981. The British armed forces, however, have maintained a substantial presence in the country. This presence has been the guarantor of relative stability in the country, in a very turbulent region, while at the same time serving as a reminder of the country’s very recent colonial past. These relationships frame much of the Belizeans’ social discourse on water privatization, as will be demonstrated below. The total population of Belize according to the 2005 census was 291,800, evenly split between the rural and urban areas of the country. Belize City is the largest of the urban areas in the country, and is home to almost 70,000 people, close to 25 per cent of the total population of Belize. As Figure 25 illustrates, the survey households were located across a spatially diverse cross-section of Belize City. The city is, however, plagued with many disadvantages. It is built on low-lying reclaimed land that is less 166

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Figure 24: Map of Belize.

than 1 m above sea level, making drainage difficult. Fresh water is piped for several miles to reach the city. The city is exposed to hurricanes and flooding, and is surrounded by an insect-infested swamp. The destruction of Belize City by two hurricanes within a span of 30 years in the midtwentieth century prompted the shift of the capital to the pre-planned 167

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Figure 25: Distribution of survey respondents in Belize City.

city of Belmopan further inland. Belize City, however, continues to be the cultural and economic hub of the country. To administer water supply and sanitation, primarily in the urban areas of the country, the Belize Water and Sewerage Authority (WASA) was established in 1970, and charged with the responsibility for the 168

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development, operation, maintenance, marketing and control of water supply and sewerage systems throughout Belize. It was a quasi-governmental agency established by the Water and Sewerage Ordinance, under the Water and Sewerage Act (Maza and Flowers, 2000). The Belize Water Services Limited (BWSL) was incorporated by the Anglo-Dutch multinational CASCAL (BV) in January 2001 and took over management control of water supply and sanitation systems in Belize in March 2001. This new company operated on a 25-year exclusive licence to provide water and sewerage services in the major municipalities of Belize. The analyses of the ethnographic study in Belize City below treat access to clean water supply as a human right, and consider geographies of access to safe and reliable domestic water supply services an outcome of geographies of social power, across national and global spatial scales. Furthermore, following Newstead’s (2005) discussion of the rescaling of the Caribbean countries’ (in)dependence in the face of decolonization and neoliberalist globalization, the following analyses are also attentive to the discursive role of water supply privatization in the Belizeans’ sense of their national and regional identity, and the relationship with the colonial past and the uncertain post-colonial present. Newstead (2005) argues that the complex and ambivalent production of scales from local, national to regional in the Caribbean context can also be viewed as a cultural enterprise of identity formation in the face of apparently disempowering historic experience of colonialism and contemporary globalization. As McDonald and Ruiters (2005) describe commodification, particularly of water, as a systematic and comprehensive transformation of material life, it is little wonder that such a transformation would also bear upon the social discursive formations. Public discourse on water and sanitation services’ privatization in Belize accordingly also stands as an exemplar of how Belizeans negotiate their identities and sense of national sovereignty in the face of globalization.

Policy-Level Discourse on Water Privatization CASCAL BV operated BWSL for over four years, but in August 2005 the Government of Belize (GoB) signed a re-purchase agreement with 169

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CASCAL to buy BWSL. A press release issued by the Government’s Press Office on 12 August 2005 (GoB, 2005) stated that the government, ‘under the Share Purchase Agreement signed between Government and CASCAL BV, will re-purchase CASCAL’s shareholding for the original price of US $24.8 million at the rate of BZ $1.50 per share’, adding that the completion of the Share Purchase Agreement will take place on or before Monday 3 October 2005, when the Government will pay CASCAL the down payment of US $14.9 million and CASCAL will formally transfer its shares to the government and relinquish the management and control of the company (GoB, 2005). The press release further stated that at the completion date, the agreement also brings to an end the current dispute between the parties. That dispute stems from the legal recourse that BWSL had sought to get their 12 per cent guaranteed return on investment that the government legislated for CASCAL BV, which according to them has not been received. More tangibly, CASCAL BV was asking for a 32 per cent increase in the water tariff, while the Public Utilities Commission (PUC), the main GoB regulatory body, was willing to concede only a 17 per cent increase based on an independent consultant’s report (Hern, 2004). Problems between CASCAL BV and the Belize Government started very early after privatization. CASCAL protested that it had been cheated by the fine print in the privatization contract and had been handed a ‘puss eena beg’, meaning they had been handed an overvalued company with more long-term debt than they had known about. CASCAL consequently went back on its commitment to invest at least BZ $140 million (US $70 million) in infrastructure improvement (King, 2001). The dispute on tariffs that culminated in the termination of the contract was the outcome of this long process of disputes that started relatively early after privatization. During my interviews with water users and decision makers, many reflected back on the process of privatization and said that, at the time, there was a sense of inevitability to the process (the same as documented for Buenos Aires water privatization by Loftus and McDonald, 2001). Some even made a very strong connection between privatization and globalization, saying that they were aware that globalization was ongoing, and privatization of government assets was part of a worldwide trend,

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which Belize was inevitably going to follow – for example, a water user said the following: I was taught in school that privatization is because of globalization and it is for the development of the country. I thought people with more money will spend money to make it [the water supply system] better. But they have not done anything. It is just the same as before. (Interview respondent B15, 19 May 2005)

Similar sentiments were expressed by an official of the Belizean Public Utilities Commission (PUC) when reflecting back on the process of privatization: The workers’ unions were very sceptical about the privatization, but they accepted it as inevitable. We also expected more efficiency... Some people thought that WASA operations were not fair, for example, political appointments. So they thought that privatization would level the playing field... It did not because we never got to find out. They had so many layoffs that almost everybody who worked there is no longer there. (PUC official, 10 June 2005)

The head of the PUC and other functionaries also mentioned that pressure from international donors for rapid privatization, in addition to biases on the part of some of the government ministers at the time, was also part of the reason for the decision to privatize. This was further confirmed by the country assistance strategy of the World Bank for Belize that calls for private sector participation in the water supply sector (World Bank, 2000). Laying off workers in the interest of financial efficiency and profitability is a standard practice with corporate entities, which is what BWSL did by laying off about a third of the staff of its predecessor in the first year of its operations (PUC, 2003). An exception may be urban water supply delivery because of the nature of its complex monopolistic integrated network, its relatively inelastic demand, the lack of substitutes, its importance for health and sanitation, and the particular susceptibility of the networks to leakages, tampering and contamination, which all require

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high labour inputs for operation and maintenance. As one of the former employees of BWSL stated: BWSL has always maintained that water theft is the main problem and not system leakages. Besides when staff is reduced by a third, the system maintenance inevitably suffers. They [BWSL] have introduced red tape [in the name of efficiency] that keeps people from doing anything in a timely fashion, for example, PVC pipe procurement for repairs. Someone has to go evaluate the stock, write reports to the management and then perhaps something gets done. (Ex-employee of WASA and BWSL, 19 May 2005)

This was a classic situation, where BWSL blamed water wastage on criminal behaviour (for example, tampered meters, illegal water connections, etc.), whereas the government regulators were focused on the lack of strategic investments in the infrastructure, particularly in terms of expanding the network or improving the conveyance efficiency and reliability of the network. In fact, in public hearings many knowledgeable stakeholders bitterly contested BWSL’s contention that water theft was the main cause of system losses, and instead drew attention to the higher salary outlay of the firm despite massive layoffs and lack of investment in infrastructure (PUC, 2003). When posed the same question about lack of promised investment in the infrastructure, a BWSL functionary made the following very revealing remarks: From a management perspective the gathering of data is better and monitoring is leading to a better, more efficient service. In the area of nonrevenue water, the loss has been reduced to 35–40 per cent by replacing the old meters. In terms of infrastructure investment, the yard-to-yard connections have been eliminated, now the [water] main is on the public street and we give connections from there. So that, and changing the water meter, are investments. (Middle manager at BWSL, 12 June 2005)

As this quote illustrates, the emphasis of corporate water utility is on cost saving and streamlining of management systems. Yard-to-yard connections are where water subdivides into smaller pipes and is impossible to 172

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distinguish by user and meter. Consequently, the first priority of BWSL was to make all connections from the water main so that they could be easily metered. The infrastructural investments (that is, water meters and elimination of yard-to-yard connections), have direct short-term linkages to revenue maximization and not to longer-term strategic expansion of the system, and only partially to improvements in the network in terms of conveyance efficiency or quality. Cost recovery and revenue maximization, in the short to medium term, are core values of corporate capitalism that are inconsistent with the Belizean public’s value of water as a human right to which all need reliable and equitable access. BWSL did, after all, have a contractual obligation to its shareholders for a 12 per cent annual return on their shares, in addition to debt servicing, which was their core argument for a tariff increase to the PUC (PUC, 2003). Cost recovery is fair enough, but in the perception of the water utility regulators, the emphasis in BWSL’s tariff policies was more on ‘front loading’ the revenue without any comparable long-term strategic investment, or even planning to give confidence to the government and the people that they were there for the long term. Another PUC employee, however, commenting on the revenue generation ethos of the BWSL, said that in a way BWSL had done a favour to the Belizean people by making them realize that water is not free but an economic resource to be used wisely. Beyond this comment, though, there were not too many positives mentioned about privatization by any of the policy makers at the PUC. As all of the policy makers pointed out, the government has to pay for water supply expansion and then BWSL charges depreciation on the infrastructure put in place at the government’s expense to the customers (PUC, 2003). Furthermore, as is the norm in other places as well, water access from public pipes on which much of the poorer residents of Belize City depend is paid for by the government according to PUC functionaries. BWSL only took over when private connections were made from the water main. So water access from public taps, which is the norm for many poor not just in Belize City but in most of the developing world, is not and can not be provided by corporate entities with their focus on revenue maximization. Belize was not the only nation that broke ties with CASCAL BV or its parent company Biwater in 2005. Biwater was ‘kicked out’ of a 173

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controversial water privatization by the Government of Tanzania, just two years into a ten-year contract, after Tanzania claimed the company was making less than half the required investment and failing to improve services in the commercial capital Dar es Salaam (WDM, 2005). According to the Government of Tanzania, City Water (the joint venture company involving Biwater) was to have invested US $8.5 million during the first two years of the contract, but in reality only invested US $4.1 million. Peter Hardstaff, Head of Policy for the Government of Tanzania, said: ‘This case provides yet another example that the central claim made by supporters of water privatization, that it is the only way to get the necessary investment, is a myth’ (WDM, 2005). This was a comparable situation in Belize, where the company claimed to have invested BZ $40 million during the first three years of its operations but mostly on completing the projects that its predecessor had initiated and replacing some older pipes. It had not increased its customer base from what it had inherited, and it was not bound to pay according to the terms of the initial agreement for infrastructure expansion (PUC, 2003). Belize is something of an anomaly in Central America in that it has had a parliamentary democracy with two political parties throughout its existence. Some of the most important voting blocks (for example, the National Trade Union Congress of Belize and the parliamentary opposition) were active in voicing their opposition to the proposed rate hikes by BWSL (PUC, 2003). The tariff dispute that finally reversed the privatization was based on the government’s realization that given the already high water tariffs, if they conceded the 32 per cent tariff increase as BWSL was demanding, in the words of the PUC chairman ‘there would be a revolution’ – not a welcome prospect for any sitting government.

Public Perceptions on Water Privatization Although Belize City is typical of a poorer Central American city, more than 82 per cent of the survey respondents19 reported having a proper water connection with indoor plumbing. The remaining 18 per cent of the respondents from the poorest parts of the city had assorted sources of domestic water including public taps, neighbours, street pipes and most commonly a vat for storing rainwater, in addition to bottled water 174

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for drinking purposes. Many of the people with water connections still maintained vats for storing rainwater to supplement water supply from BWSL. Although the coverage of the water supply system was quite impressive by developing world standards, the survey respondents had split opinions on water quality and reliability. Figure 26 shows the distribution of responses to the question about reliability and water quality. Of the 167 responses to this question, 54 per cent of the respondents considered the water supply to be safe, while 44 per cent considered it unsafe, with the remaining 2 per cent not having access to piped water; 25 per cent did not answer the question and indicated that they had no opinion on the matter. One of the key concerns for the questionnaire survey was to understand people’s perception of changes that had come about as a result of the privatization of the water utility in Belize City. The survey respondents were generally long-term residents of the City, with 41 per cent having lived in their present location for longer than ten years, 44 per cent having lived there between three and ten years, while only 15 per cent were newcomers with less than three years of residency at the present location. Consequently, most of the respondents had a very good basis for comparing their relative access to domestic water supply pre-March 2001, when the

Figure 26: Distribution of responses to questions about water quality and reliability by the survey respondents in Belize City.

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water utility was privatized, and the post-privatization situation. Of the survey respondents, 31 per cent thought that their access to water was better today than five years ago, while 42 per cent and 27 per cent of the respondents thought it was either the same or much worse than five years ago, respectively. On the water quality issue, however, only 17 per cent of the respondents thought that it had improved significantly compared to five years ago; 55 per cent perceived the water quality to be the same, while 29 per cent thought that it had deteriorated significantly. In the poorer neighbourhoods in particular, there were very strong complaints against water access and quality, as the following quotes illustrate: The water is brown at times, and yes they do sell the five-gallon water for drinking but we can’t afford it, we are poor. I try to get water bottles for the children, they are sold for BZ $0.25, but one night the shop was already closed and my son was very thirsty and I was forced to give him the pipe water but I boiled it first. He got very sick and was sent home from school with vomiting. I took him to the doctor and the doctor asked me what he ate and I told the doctor that I know it is the water that got him sick, because I had no purified water to give him when he was thirsty. (Focus group participant, 10 June 2005) I go to the water pump and carry my water from there. I don’t have enough money and connections are expensive. In the Jane Usher Blvd. area [the] majority of people don’t have water access and use the public pipe. (Focus group participant, 10 June 2005)

The affordability of water, however, seemed to have deteriorated most substantially since privatization. An overwhelming 84 per cent of the respondents thought that it was less affordable than before, while a very small 5 per cent thought that it was more affordable and 11 per cent thought it was just as affordable as before. In fact, 12 per cent of the respondents reported that their water bill was more than one-third of their total household budget, whereas international research indicates that water should not be more than 2 per cent and at most 7 per cent of the household budget (Baroudy et al., 2005). Table 6 gives the basic water tariffs for governmentcontrolled WASA in 1995 and the privatized BWSL in 2005. The WASA tariffs were the same until March 2001 (USAID, 1995; BWSL, 2005). 176

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Globalization and Water Privatization Table 6: Basic water tariff comparison between WASA and BWSL (2005 US $) Category Minimum fee up to   1,000 gallons Connection fee Reconnection fee Sewerage connection fee

Tariff (2005 US $) WASA 1995

BWSL 2005 per US gallon

4.45 per imperial gallon = US $5.6

4.62

25.00 = $30.6 5.00 = $6.12 25.00 = $30.6

42.50 12.50 847.50

Note: 1 imperial gallon = 1.201 US gallons.

According to Howard and Bartram (2003), the low health-risk intermediate level of water access is between 50 l/p/d (litres per person per day) and the very low-risk optimal level of water access from indoor plumbing is at least 100 l/p/d. By the higher standard, the average sample household size of 5.3 in our survey will translate into a water requirement of 15,900 litres per month and 7,950 litres by the lower standard.20 The average household in our sample under WASA tariffs accordingly would have had to pay monthly US $12.26 and US $27.76 in 2005 dollars for intermediate and optimal levels of access, respectively. Under the BWSL tariff structure for the same levels of consumption, the water users would have had to pay (2005) US $13.42 and US $32.40 per month respectively for intermediate and optimal levels of access.21 Water users in Belize were having to pay 9 per cent more in real terms for intermediate levels of access and 18 per cent more in real terms for optimal levels of access. This is all assuming that there were no leakages or incorrect billing, which is something that many respondents frequently complained about. It is little wonder then that 64 per cent reported that although the bill was less than one-third of their total budget, it was still a significant portion of the budget. The water rate increases would have been somewhat reasonable if they had been accompanied by improvements in service delivery and reliability, which was unfortunately not the case. It is therefore not surprising that only 24 per cent of the respondents deemed their water bill or expenses on water procurement as insignificant. To gain a better understanding of the role of water in the household budget, we also asked the respondents if their water expenses were equal to 177

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Figure 27: Proportions of people who spend as much or more on domestic water supply than on the other household expenses.

or exceeded their expenses for food, clothing, education, medical expenses and electricity. More than 55 per cent of the total 225 respondents reported that they spent more on water than one or more of the above five household budget items (Figure 27). This fact alone speaks to the unreasonable strain that water is becoming for the poorer segments of the Belizean population. As it is, sometimes poorer households can spend up to half of their household budgets on food according to international research on poverty and poor households (Lancaster et al., 1999), and the price of water in Belize can impart considerable sacrifice on the poorer consumers, as the following quotations illustrate: Nowadays, you have to run to pay your bills and stay without food to pay the bill because reconnections are so high and rather than being disconnected and having more to pay, you just hurry [to] pay. (Focus group participant, 10 June 2005) Privatization causes rates to go up. For a small country people can’t afford it. The utility must be more lenient so the poor side of town could develop. It is hard for people having to pay for their bill that is so high when someone can barely afford food. (Interview respondent B49, 3 June 2005)

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Beyond the quality, quantity, accessibility and affordability issues, most of the survey respondents were not very positive about improvements in the responsiveness of BWSL to their complaints and concerns. Customer service is often deemed to be a major advantage that the private sector enjoys over the public sector, but that was not the case with BWSL. Only 17 per cent of the survey respondents reported that the water utility was more responsive to their concerns since privatization, while 61 per cent rated the privatized BWSL’s customer service as worse than its publiclyowned predecessor. The remaining 22 per cent of the respondents said that they had not experienced any change in the quality of customer service in the transition from WASA to BWSL. Some of the respondents did concede that BWSL had more professional-looking bills and nicer offices, but the actual service was generally considered unsatisfactory; for example: We report leaks on the streets, they are not addressed quick enough. Main pipelines that are burst aren’t fixed right away. You make several call[s] reporting and they just take their time... I often hear complaints of customer service at BWSL. It is not what you say, but how you say it. It is very important to treat people well... Complaints are not addressed with greatest concern. Instead they chant, ‘That’s your business, you waste the water.’ If you can’t afford to pay your bill, you suffer... I went to BWSL to query the conditions of the water, I was very concerned because I have seven children and I really can’t afford purified water. I was told I need to speak to the manager about the complaints and that I needed to make an appointment to see him. But they don’t need no appointment to disconnect us, they just come and do so. (Focus group participant, 10 June 2005) The neighbour’s house is too close to mine. BWSL thinks it’s a [vacant] lot. We showed them our land papers, proof of two different properties, but they insist we pay the neighbour’s bill. Until I do so we can’t get water. (Interview respondent B67, 7 June 2005)

By BWSL’s own admission, their disconnection rates during their first three years in business were a whopping 113 per cent of their customer base, with some of the customers getting disconnected repeatedly. Of the 40,000 customers that BWSL had disconnected, it had reconnected water to about 179

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32,000 customers (PUC, 2003). Clearly lack of affordability was a major factor in the disconnection rates, especially for repeated disconnections. The above outline of field research data paints a highly unsatisfactory picture of the domestic water supply situation in the post-privatization era in Belize City. Practically all the expectations that advocates of privatization have cultivated in favour of privatized utility services, particularly water, are challenged by the evidence presented above (for example, see World Bank, 2004). The CASCAL-owned BWSL made very inconsistent or nonexistent improvements in water quality, quantity and customer service, while increasing the cost to the customers significantly, the same as the experience of privatized water in Argentina (Loftus and McDonald, 2001). The geographically inconsistent level of water supply services has been one of the consistent critiques of publicly-owned water distribution systems. There is little evidence that BWSL had effected any improvements to enhance geographical equity in water supply or even expand the system (PUC, 2003). The water supply privatization experience does not stand in isolation in the public discourse and consciousness in Belize. Because of the nature of the resource – water – involved, and the history of the country and society of Belize, the privatization of water supply and its control by a multinational corporation from the former colonial power resonates with issues of national identity and social justice in Belizean society. It is to that discussion that I now turn.

Water Supply as a Conduit of Identity and Social Justice in Belize City As mentioned earlier, Belize was the last country in Central America and the Caribbean to formally gain its independence (1981). That very recent experience of colonialism, along with a parliamentary democratic system, a sizeable tourist economy and stark contrasts of poverty and affluence, have spawned very ambivalent notions of national identity, globalization and ethnic politics between the Creole, Mestizo and other ethnicities in the country. The deep resentment felt by many Belizeans at the life of extreme poverty and crime that much of the population, particularly in Belize City, live is well expressed by the following verses by the popular Belizean poet, Leroy Young: 180

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Globalization and Water Privatization With the same script And a different cast What more can I say Same shit different day Take a look around What you see going down After a while, here’s what I have found Every five years, the same circus Comes to town The only thing new they bring A different set of clown Taking us for a set of jackass With the same script Different cast. (Poem handed to one of the authors by the poet at a recital in Belize City, circa June 2005)

In the restaurants, bars and public places of Belize City during the author’s stay there, frequent recitals by poets like Young seemed to draw enthusiastic applause from a large number of Belizeans. The same sense of being exploited and used expressed in the verses above was a frequent theme in conversations with survey respondents in Belize City. In the context of water privatization, there were three types of what I call popular privatization narratives (PPNs) that emerge from the ethnographic data collected during our research. The first and more common PPN was anchored in the popular perceptions of government corruption and the propensity of the politicians to forfeit the interest of the people to line their own pockets. In the context of the survey question about what they thought was the primary reason for privatization, the following responses are illustrative of the corruptionbased PPN: The reason for privatizing the water utility was] to relieve government of responsibility to the public and for the private companies and government to make more money. (Interview respondent K2, 5 May 2005)

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Water Resource Management in a Vulnerable World Water is more expensive. The government sold it to their cronies so that people can’t say that government raised the prices. [Privatization was] to rape the country. Yes they take advantage of us. No benefit to the Belizean people. (Interview respondent K14, 19 May 2005) They must have been out of their mind to privatize it [water]. They probably needed money, for their personal benefit. So they sold off the [people’s] assets to foreigners. No advantages – not one... The ordinary people don’t know what’s happening. The higher-uppers know but won’t do anything about it. Belize is heading down the road that Jamaica has gone down. The more affluent people will move out because of the devaluation shadow hanging over Belize. (Interview respondent K23, 25 May 2005)

Along the lines of the last quote, the second PPN is anchored in the angst about loss of national assets to foreigners, thereby denying the Belizean people the benefits of owning their own infrastructure as well as the advantage of holding the utilities accountable. The following quotes illustrate this second type of popular privatization narrative: I don’t understand why [they] privatized the water. It is essential to life – Belizeans should own it. (Interview respondent K33, 29 May 2005) [Privatization causes] disadvantage to the country because the money does not stay in the country. (Interview respondent D11, 19 May 2005) [The reason] was to rip off the people. They keep selling our assets. We see no advantages at all from the privatization. As a people we have access to nothing now. (Interview respondent K35, 31 May 2005, emphasis added) The government should stop spending our [stolen] money in other countries and use it on infrastructure. Fix all the drains, not only the ones on their [the politicians’] streets. (Interview respondent B12, 19 May 2005)

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Globalization and Water Privatization The government isn’t thinking clearly. They are selling all of our assets. These utilities are vital for our survival. If the government didn’t sell them we would have profited. The poor aren’t getting anywhere. (Interview respondent B45, 3 June 2005, emphasis added) We could have afforded to handle the water utility. All we needed was good management. The country is not profiting from the privatization. All the money is going to another man’s country. I do not approve of it. (Interview respondent B49, 3 June 2005)

The above quotes illustrate the emerging nationalistic sense of ownership that Belizeans feel about their country. Water as an essential resource in this popular privatization narrative is an inherently Belizean resource, which ought to be in Belizeans’ hands instead of benefiting foreigners. The second PPN echoes the findings of Page (2005) in Cameroon where the local community by withdrawing itself from the national water entity was in a way refusing to participate in the national project, and was instead reproducing its social relations and identity at the local level. On a different geographical scale here, the Belizeans were expressing their angst about having to participate in a global project of integration through neoliberal capitalism. Just as the citizens of Tombel in Cameroon expressed their preference for a local scale of politics over a national scale, by withdrawing from a national water entity (Page, 2005, 2003), the Belizeans are expressing their preference for a national scale of politics over a global scale. Closely linked to the whole issue of national identity is the third PPN, anchored in the understanding of privatization and its consequences as a systemic phenomenon echoing the prevailing discourse on globalization in the literature, and even in the Belizean policy circles as pointed out in the previous section. The following quotes are a sampling of the flavour of the narrative: They just like to sell. They sold all our assets. If it were possible they would have sold our Barrier Reef. (Interview respondent B37, 2 June 2005)

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Water Resource Management in a Vulnerable World Only the government knows [why they privatized the water utility]. They wanted money to pay for money they borrowed from other countries. (Interview respondent B34, 26 May 2005) The investors would have profited the government more because of taxes. The government was afraid to raise rates. They didn’t want to become unpopular. (Interview respondent B47, 2 June 2005)

The above quotes illustrate the opacity of the process of privatization in the public mind. But beyond a sense of bewilderment at the decision to privatize is the understanding that there were systemic compulsions like foreign debt, the need for politicians to curry favour with the public and bring in new tax revenue that led to the decision to privatize an ostensibly critical resource like the water supply system. In terms of the consequences though, the following quote illustrates an understanding on the part of the water users of the essential need of a corporate business to recover costs and bring in profits, regardless of the interests of the consumer: The government privatized the company, the management changed. The company is trying to make back the money they bought the water utility for. They are holding the consumer at ransom. The government really messed up. (Interview respondent B14, 19 May 2005)

Clearly under the popular privatization narrative anchored in the systemic nature of the process, there is an acute understanding of the consequences based on an understanding of the institutional nature of the corporate entity managing the water resource. Each of the above PPNs has interlinked and cross-cutting thematic elements. Financial corruption in the government and among the decision makers, in the minds of the people, puts the country in a situation where the sovereignty of its people is compromised. In order to perpetuate the corruption, or to escape from its consequences, the powerful elements in the society get into deals which are disadvantageous for the general 184

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population and to the advantage of the more powerful foreign elements. But by way of the third type of popular privatization narrative, the process is not just an outcome of the contingent elements of corruption and the power of the foreigners, but also of an opaque systemic process, which seems to have its own logic. This process, also called globalization, involves linkages with the broader world, where the government has to balance its international obligations with its domestic compulsions. Privatization is one way that the Government of Belize tried to balance the same, but in the process left corporate capitalism (albeit temporarily in this case) in charge of the most important of the resources – water. The institutional logic of corporate capitalism according to the popular privatization narrative is unlikely to distribute this life-giving resource – and hence perhaps life – fairly or equitably. It is little wonder then that through many interviews and focus group discussion, quotes similar to the following one recurred quite frequently: If it were left to them they would have sold us. (Interview respondent B59, 7 June 2005, emphasis added)

Conclusion The failed experiment of privatization of the water utility in Belize holds important lessons for similar prospective, or ongoing experiments elsewhere. Firstly, the motivation for undertaking the privatization was partially the acceptance on the part of the Belizean decision-making elite, and to a lesser extent the populace of the benefits and perhaps even inevitability of the globalization discourse of neoliberalism and concomitant privatization. The decision was partially also the outcome of the advice/pressure that the Government of Belize was getting from multilateral donors. Secondly, the actual experience of service delivery from privatization was much more mixed than is often touted by apologists of neoliberalism. Many of the expected benefits of privatization, in terms of better quantity and quality, did not materialize for the vast majority of the survey respondents in Belize City. Thirdly, the decrease in the affordability of water supply was unreasonable for most Belizeans, thereby rendering 185

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the lack of improvement, or at times worsening of accessibility and quality, all the more painful. Lastly, the customer service improvements, deemed to be one of the main strengths of corporate service delivery, did not materialize and in fact were perceived to be worse by the majority of the survey respondents. Beyond the direct impact of privatization on access to water and water quality were the implications of water privatization for Belizean popular discourse on identity, nationalism and good governance. The three popular privatization narratives outlined in this chapter point to the emblematic nature of water privatization towards Belizeans’ sense of nationalism, identity, good governance and their place within a supposedly globalized world. The narratives outlined point to the Belizeans’ sense of resentment and recognition of the interlinkages between national and global power structures that impact their everyday lives, or their lived hazardscapes. For a population with a historical memory of the worst type of human degradation – slavery – the rhetorical refrain that ‘people are all that is left to privatize’ or sell is particularly poignant and political. In the Belizean hydro-hazardscape then, privatization was the key strategy of the powerful on the national and global scales, which was successfully contested by the weak, to reaffirm their sets of multiple values and meaning that they attached to water. Unlike many developing countries, Belize does have a two-party democracy where public opinion does matter. Beyond the occasional riots over water and other utility rates in May 2005, the tariff dispute between the PUC and CASCAL finally caused the roll-back of the privatization. The Belizean PUC, being aware of how far they could go, had to break off the contract given CASCAL’s position on water rates. Even the imperfect Belizean democracy mattered and worked in this case. What that victory means for the material issue of safe and reliable access to water, and the broader context within which this resource is accessed and consumed, remains to be seen. The challenge in outright privatization of water utilities will continue to be how to bridge the discursive and practical divide between water users as citizens and water users as customers, as well as between water as an economic good and a human right.

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8

Thou Shalt Not Optimize or Share: A Critical View of the Prior Appropriation Doctrine in the American West

Introduction The 18 states of the arid and semi-arid western United States may be located in the world’s most affluent and technologically advanced society, but the challenges and conflicts surrounding water use and distribution are nevertheless comparable with poorer South Asia and the rest of the arid realm (Figure 28). The western United States is particularly relevant to the hydro-hazardscape approach insofar as it features many of the aspirational legal, infrastructural and discursive geographies that the dominant water elites in the global South would like to actualize in their own contexts. The hydro-hazardscape approach, with its critical engagement with the discursive constructs of the powerful and the powerless, and inherent suspicion of ‘normal’ and ‘average’ trends-based constructions of reality, is a useful lens to apprehend the complex water resources geographies in the western United States. In this chapter, I will critically examine the key legal doctrine of ‘prior appropriation’ that governs water management in the western United States. By examining the overall cultural and economic changes in the western United States and drawing upon the examples of the Colorado and Snake Rivers, and acequia and Native American communities in the south-western United States, I will critique the prior appropriation

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Figure 28: Major river basins of the western United States and key storage infrastructure.

Thou Shalt Not Optimize or Share

doctrine in terms of its relationship to water for environmental quality, community and culture, and negotiating uneven power relationships. The point of this chapter, however, is not just to critique but, drawing upon the pragmatic aspect of hazardscape approach, also to explore ways forward in a climate change future for the western United States and highlight useful lessons for water managers in other parts of the world, especially South Asia. The area covered by this chapter includes all the states of the United States whose entire area is west of the Mississippi River. The region can climatically be classified as mostly highly arid, as in the south-west, to semi-arid through most of the rest of the region, with the exception of the moist belt along the Pacific Northwest. Most of the region became part of the United States as a result of the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, while the Pacific Northwest and the south-western States did not join the United States until cession by England in 1846 and by Mexico in 1848, respectively (Bates et al., 1993). But even prior to joining the United States the region had some extensive fishing communities in the Columbia and Sacramento River Basins, as well as along inland lakes such as Pyramid Lake. In addition there were sophisticated irrigation cultures such as the ancient Anasazi in the Four Corners area, and Hohokam in the Salt River Valley in Arizona, whose irrigation infrastructure rivalled modern engineers’ creations. The Pueblo Indians in the Rio Grande Valley, the Tohono O’odhams of the Sonoran Desert and the Paiutes of the Owens Valley practised flood irrigation and flood harvesting techniques to get a harvest in a very dry and hostile environment (Worster, 1985; Bates et al., 1993). Spanish missionaries from Mexico were the first to establish permanent colonial settlements in the south-western United States. The settlers brought new crops such as wheat, barley, chickpeas, oats, citrus, apples, carrots, radishes and onions. These crops, unlike the droughtresistant crops used by the Pueblos such as squashes, corn and beans, required considerable additional water resources beyond what was naturally available. The new settlers built irrigation ditches to irrigate their crops and these irrigation ditches came to be locally known as acequias. These required considerable human effort for their construction and maintenance, and the social capital that was required to organize that 189

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human effort became the enduring basis for the acequia communities in the south-western United States, which still exist to this day (Worster, 1985; Brown and Ingram, 1987; Bates et al., 1993; Rodriguez, 2007; Arnold, 2008). The strong sense of community from and through cooperative water development and management was to be replicated by the Mormon communities moving into the intermontane West during the middle of the nineteenth century, and the utopian Union colony in Colorado. While the earliest Anglo visionary on settlement in the West, the pioneer, geologist and soldier, John Wesley Powell (who wrote the influential 1878 Report on the Lands of the Arid Regions) recognized the importance of cooperative colonies for the settlement of the West, the subsequent Anglo initiatives for settlement in the West were decidedly less communal and utopian, and more profit-driven (Reisner, 1993; Worster, 2001). The contemporary western United States water geographies were ushered in as a result of the gold rush and the mining boom of the mid- to late-nineteenth century, and then the late nineteenth-century homesteading movement. Following the passing of the Reclamation Act of 1902 that provided for the formation of the Federal Bureau of Reclamation (BuRec), the US federal government, the biggest landlord in the West, firmly established itself as the biggest interest in water development and management in the region. The juxtaposition of the Native American, Hispanic and Anglo water and resource use traditions, the varying power levels between the three ethnic groups, and then class and professional grouping within the ethnic groups, forms the mosaic of water resources geography in the American West. I will outline the dominant Anglo legal doctrine of prior appropriation in the next section and discuss its implications for a socially and economically changing western United States. The discussion in the next section will set up the backdrop for the analysis of acequia communities as well as Native American water rights in the West. The penultimate and concluding sections will offer insights on possible ways forward in a climate change context for the West, and possible points of comparison and crossfertilization of ideas between the western United States and the global South in general and South Asia in particular.

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Prior Appropriation: The Placelessness of First in Time, First in Right The first mass Anglo-American (a shorthand I will use for non-Hispanic Europeans) migration to the Rocky Mountain West and beyond started in earnest in the middle of the nineteenth century. The initial wave of settlement was by miners, prospecting for gold, and homesteaders from the east. In the arid West the location of mines and farmlands did not always match the location of the relatively scarce water sources, and hence diversion of water became the norm from its source. This was particularly true of water use by the economically dominant mining enterprises in the region. Given the arid geography, with water sources few and far between, the traditional riparian doctrine prevalent in the eastern United States and most of Europe, whereby only lands abutting water sources had a water right attached to them, was not very practical. With many water users seeking to divert from the same limited water source at a given time, the question of who has a priority right at what time came to the fore and was resolved by the principle of ‘first in time, first in right’. What started off as a geographically enforced innovation was given the force of the law by the Mining Act of 1866 and subsequently the 1870 amendment to the Mining Act, whereby prior appropriation (first in time, first in right) became the dominant legal doctrine in the American West. Prior appropriation was possible in the western United States because almost all the land there was federal land, by virtue of the Louisiana Purchase. The Desert Land Act (1877) provided that water from all non-navigable water sources on public lands (which was almost all of the western United States) was available for appropriation for beneficial use (Getches, 1997). The prior appropriation doctrine has some of the following features (Getches, 1997; Huffaker et al., 2000): 1. first in time, first in right; 2. water to be diverted (instream use generally not recognized under prior appropriation); 3. a water right can be sold/conveyed separately from the appurtenant land and is not attached to it as in the riparian doctrine; 191

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4. water to be diverted for beneficial use (historically defined as agricultural, mining and municipal use, with considerable ambivalence on the definition of beneficial beyond these uses); 5. instream water is generally only allowed by state agencies; 6. establishing intent to divert water and then doing due diligence in perfecting the water right (intent established in Colorado by a physical action, while in most other states through an application for a permit to divert); 7. a usufructuary (to enjoy without possessing) right and not a possessive right (all water being public property in which only usufructuary right can be obtained); 8. inter-basin transfers of water are allowed; 9. no-injury rule, whereby change of the point or time of diversion, or use of water, or even enhanced efficiency, must not adversely affect other, even junior appropriators, who may have developed water rights from the return flows from the appropriation of the more senior appropriator. The no-injury rule does not address harm to ecology, economy or future use in an area – only to individual appropriators; 10. water conserved through more efficient techniques may not be used on additional land or for another purpose from the one for which it was originally appropriated (for example, industrial instead of agriculture, or recreational instead of agricultural); 11. appropriators have a right to use but not to waste or to appropriate water for speculative purposes; 12. water must be used or will be deemed to have been forfeited through non-use, something that is unusual; 13. appropriators have a right of easement for conveyance of water over intervening private property that may lie between the water source and the land for which the water is intended. Just reading through the above salient features of the prior appropriation doctrine should convey its deep linkages to the historico-geographical context within which it emerged and the geographical imaginations that it encapsulated, just the same as the Canal and Drainage Act 1873 discussed in Chapter 3. I have already discussed the conceptual basis of critical legal studies in Chapter 3 and they do not merit repeating here, but they must 192

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be borne in mind as we proceed to discuss the dissonance between the contemporary social reality and hydro-politics in the western United States and the legal framework that governs water management. While water management is a state subject in the USA, it is also deemed to be an article of interstate commerce and hence states are not allowed to prohibit reasonable conveyance of water for beneficial use across state lines. Also, since interstate commerce is within the jurisdiction of the US federal government, the US Congress has the legal standing to insert itself in mega water projects, especially if they happen to be across state lines and/or on navigable waterways, which are again under federal jurisdiction. These legal doctrines, coupled with the cultural constructs of ‘manifest destiny’, ‘great and growing cities’, heroic control over nature and sanctity of property, were, in a largely arid land, to prove an incredible engine for construction of very expensive and at times almost monumental waterworks such as the Hoover, Glen Canyon, Shasta, Grand Coulee Dams and the Central Arizona Project to name a few (Worster, 1985; Reisner, 1993). To date, the Federal Bureau of Reclamation has built more than 600 storage and diversion dams with a combined capacity to store 134 MAF of water that is delivered through 15,000 miles of canals and 37,000 miles of lateral canals, to about 20 per cent of the land in 17 states in the western United States (Bates et al., 1993). Under the prior appropriation doctrine, the property right in water and the commodification of it divorced from place of use and geography is perfected to one of the highest degrees and on the biggest scales witnessed historically (Wescoat, 1993). Bakker (2003b) called water an uncooperative commodity, but in the West it has been tamed by the socially powerful as private property. But the American West has changed from a land of homesteaders and miners to a land of urban sprawl, lucrative leisure, recreation and high-tech industries. The values of the Western populations have also undergone a change from being anchored in nineteenth-century modernist belief in dominance over nature towards concerns for environmental quality, ecological health of the waterways and the rights of the previously neglected Hispanic and Native American communities. There is a marked dissonance between the expectations and values of substantial segments of the populations of the western United States and those of the entrenched property interests in water through prior appropriation (Miller, 2000). 193

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As things stand, when it comes to managing water infrastructure in the West, or dam operations, there is a singular criterion to which everything else is subservient (that is, fulfilment of the property claims in water). In the eastern United States as in the rest of the world, water regulation structures and dams can be operated to include multiple criteria for optimal solutions. In the West, the over-appropriation of most waterways – the Colorado River Basin being an extreme case – dictates that optimization cannot happen. In the case of the Colorado River, for example, by the virtue of the 1922 Colorado River Compact the Colorado River was apportioned almost equally between the four upper-basin states and the three lower-basin states, based upon the assumption that the river had 18 MAF of water in it. The calculation as it turned out was wrong and, in fact, less than 14 MAF was closer to the average annual flow of the river. On top of this, the US Government agreed to deliver 1.5 MAF of water to Mexico in 1944 as its share of the river – a share that could simply not be in the river, once all the states had staked a claim to the river. The result is that the Colorado gets diverted from its very origins to quench the thirst of the communities on the eastern slope of the Rockies (Denver Water, 2011). From there on it is dammed by the Glen Canyon Dam, diverted by the Central Arizona Project, and dammed again by the Hoover and Parker Dams where in the latter about 4.4 MAF are diverted towards southern California. It is little wonder then that most years the river does not make it to the sea and that its delta and Native American communities that depended on it have been devastated over the past many decades. Delinking of water from its place of origin to its place of use has formed the social geography of water in the West. It is to the discussion of water’s role in community and culture, which are inherently place-based, that we turn next to establish the dissonance between the legal regime governing water and the multiple values of water.

Beyond Property, Water for Community and Culture Before the dominant white Anglo settlers started reaching the southwestern United States in the nineteenth century, Spanish settlers had made their way northwards from Mexico and had set up the first 194

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permanent European settlement in present-day New Mexico by the end of the sixteenth century. The Spaniards, by virtue of their long historical association with Arab rule in Spain from 711 ad to its final end in 1492, were well versed in Arab water management traditions. In the southwestern United States they came across the same type of climatic conditions within which many of the Arab water management techniques, especially of the karez/qanat/foggara system discussed in Chapter 6, were devised. In the case of the south-western United States though, the new settlers dug surface irrigation ditches called acequias to transport water from stream channels to agricultural fields. Over the following two centuries, the Spanish/Hispanic settlers would build scores of new acequias premised not upon individual ownership of water, but rather on communal ownership and a management ethos, which were not so distant from the prevalent community view of water by the native Paiute and Pueblo Indian societies (Brown and Ingram, 1987; Bates et al., 1993; Rodriguez, 2007). Acequia water law is known to be a synthesis of the Arabic, Spanish, Roman and Pueblo Indian sources (Hicks and Pena, 2003). Despite the ascendancy of the dominant prior appropriation doctrine around them, and the cultural and economic changes, the acequia communities of the south-western United States have remained remarkably resilient. In fact, research by Brown and Ingram (1987) and then again by Rodriguez (2007) and Arnold (2008) document how the key guiding principle of acequia communities is equity, where everybody has an obligation towards maintenance of the irrigation infrastructure, and in turn has a right to share in the bounty of water from the infrastructure during wet years and to an equitable burden of sharing the water scarcity during lean years. It is not just that the members of acequias are engaged in a transactional relationship – in fact, if anything there is an identity and sense of community that crystallizes around the water resource and its management (Arnold, 2008). The mayordomo, who is comparable to the mir-e-aab as discussed in Chapter 6, is the community leader for managing the water distribution, adjudicating conflict and ensuring that everybody’s rights and responsibilities are observed within the community. Acequia’s ethos of shared scarcity and surplus runs counter to the individualistic ethos of the prior appropriation doctrine. Under prior appropriation, the senior appropriator can shut down the junior 195

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appropriators to realize their own share. Legally the acequias were only recognized in the state of Colorado, for example, in 2009; prior to that only individual rights of the acequia shareholders were legally recognized, and their sharing and subscribing to the acequia norm of sharing scarcity instead of shutting down junior appropriators was purely voluntary (Hicks and Pena, 2012). Also legally problematic was the acequia norm of ‘one farmer, one vote’ instead of having voting rights weighted proportional to water right. Furthermore, while the prior appropriation system has a very narrow definition of beneficial use – typically involving direct agricultural or industrial productivity – the acequia communities also have been documented to recognize explicitly the more intangible value of water in terms of cultural and community coherence and ecosystem services. A classic example is the often-repeated conflict between state and federal agricultural authorities and acequia communities regarding the lining of the traditional earthen ditches for water conveyance. The state authorities have typically deemed seepage losses from unlined ditches in San Luis Valley in southern Colorado, for example, as a waste and have asked the communities to line them as a precondition of providing agricultural extension services or even enforcing their water right. The communities, however, have resisted those moves on the plea that, in fact, seepage from the channels provides valuable groundwater recharge and formation of ecologically significant wetlands, which are important to the overall health of the agro-ecological systems that they operate within (Hicks and Pena, 2003). With the ascendancy of more ecological thinking in the society at large, and even within state and federal government agencies, there is now greater sympathy to acequia’s traditional irrigation technology. The acequia communities not only have formed into networks of associations within San Luis Valley, but have leveraged their moral economy to assimilate successive waves of new immigrants such that they maintain a ‘sense of attachment and mutual obligation by which they recognize themselves as members of a community’ (Arnold, 2008: 41). In addition, that very same moral economy helps them negotiate and protect themselves against new institutions and sophisticated water appropriators. For example, the attempted export of groundwater by the American Water Development Inc. (AWDI), a corporate entity to export groundwater from the San Luis aquifer to the densely populated front range (eastern slope 196

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of the Rockies) cities in the state of Colorado, was successfully opposed by a coalition of acequia and civil society actors through litigation and political mobilization over eight years between 1986 and 1994 (Nichols et al., 2001; Romero, 2002). The judicial and legislative defeat of water transfers by the AWDI was also a setback for the basic principle of prior appropriation, which does not put any limits on the place of use of water within state boundaries. The notion of the protection of local watersheds and regions and place-specific geographies of water is being rediscovered as a result of environmental and civil society activism (Wescoat, 1993). Along the same lines as that of the acequia communities, the Native American communities have also had a productive, cultural and social relationship with water, which is not well accounted for under prior appropriation. Thanks to the landmark case of Winters vs. the United States (Supreme Court, decision 1908), the Supreme Court of the United States held that the Native American tribes had a priority dating from the time of the establishment of the reservation. Since most reservations were established before mass Anglo migration to the West happened, the decision meant that the Indian tribes had a senior water right to most white settlers. Subsequent case law – for example, Arizona vs. California (Supreme Court, decision 1963) – further clarified the water quantity issue by enunciating the principle of practically irrigable acreage; that is, the amount of water required to irrigate the possible arable land, not just at present but in the future. This principle along with the priority date means that the Native American tribes have vast amounts of senior-most rights in the western United States. On paper the situation seems very favourable to the Indians, except that the Indian tribes have historically not had the financial or technical resources, nor the legal resources, to enforce their paper claim into a wet claim by litigating against other appropriators and diverting water. Native American reservations are deemed to be wards of the US Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Indian Affairs. It is also the Department of the Interior that through the Bureau of Reclamation has undertaken to develop water projects that have appropriated and diverted theoretically Indian water for the agricultural, mining, industrial and municipal use for the benefit of the dominant white communities (Bates et al., 1993; Getches, 1997; Miller, 2000). Therefore, the Department of the Interior finds itself in a position of protecting Native American tribes 197

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against more than a century of legal and infrastructural development and against constituencies that are its main beneficiaries. Consequently, the results for Native Americans in terms of realizing their water rights have not been as favourable as might appear from just looking at the law. One of the signature issues with the Native American tribes is that they often prefer to have instream uses of their water right for fishing, recreation, and cultural and spiritual continuity. A classic case in point is the Soshone and Arapaho Indians in the Wind River in the state of Wyoming. After more than a decade and a half of litigation between the Native American tribes and the state of Wyoming, the state Supreme Court with a 3–2 majority rejected the Native Americans’ plea to prevent state water permit holders from withdrawing water from the Wind River that the tribes had dedicated to instream flows. The tribe had considered a stretch of river an important tribal fishery which they wanted to protect against withdrawals from agricultural users. The state of Wyoming Supreme Court, while acknowledging the senior and substantive water right of the tribes, held that their instream use of water right did not qualify as beneficial use according to the state of Wyoming’s definition, and therefore their future water rights were limited to agricultural use (Collins and Thunder, 2000). Furthermore, according to Wyoming law, just the same as most Western states, only a state agency and no nonstate actor including tribal nations can own instream rights and claim beneficial use. A comparable story unfolded through the twentieth century, though on a much grander scale, in the Columbia and Snake River Basins. Columbia River Basin draining the Pacific Northwest saw some of the greatest salmon runs in the world, with an estimated 10–16 million steelhead salmon runs before the white settlers arrived. Today the salmon runs, thanks to 19 mainstream dams and 128 hydropower and other projects, are about 2.5 million, only a quarter of which are native stocks (Bates et al., 1993). The salmon have their allies mainly among the Native American tribes – the Umatilla, Warm Springs, Nez Perce and Yakima – for whom salmon runs were the locus of their cultural and spiritual life before they virtually disappeared from most reaches of the river basin. These tribes had ceded most of the territories of Washington state, Idaho and Oregon according to the treaty of Walla Walla in 1855, in return 198

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for an undertaking by the US Government to let them fish and hunt in the ‘usual and accustomed places’. The original treaty obligation by the US Government is deemed to have been breached by many in the Native American leadership in the area because of competition from white-owned fisheries, and the reduction in salmon runs because of dam construction and water withdrawals (Barker, 1999; Larmer, 2000). Thanks to alliances between the environmentalists and Native Americans, previously unthinkable proposals about dam removal on the Snake and Columbia are today part of the legitimate discourse in the river basins. But for now, expensive technological solutions, such as barging and trucking of salmon smolts downriver from the dams and construction of fish ladders, are preventing the salmon runs from disappearing altogether. The point of the above is that a convergence of social power of the white farmers, ranchers, shipping interests and the encoding of their power, historical experience, mode of production and cultural outlook in the prior appropriation system not only impoverishes and strains non-white communities, but also has deleterious consequences for the ecology of the West. The ecological consequences more than the social are getting more and more attention from the progressively influential environmental lobby within the dominant white cultural set-up. But even non-white communities are also learning better ways of articulating their subjectivities and fighting for their rights, and therein lies the hope for progressive change in the American West. This is something to which I turn in the next section, in the context of the challenges of climate change.

Hydro-Hazardscapes of Climate Change and a Changing American West Drought and consequent ruin have been part of the Western consciousness ever since the northern European white settlers came to the arid and semiarid American West. More so in the American West than other parts of the world, though, the legal water management regime has been complicit in producing the cognitive geographies that reproduce the hazardscapes of the American West. The following quote from Romero (2002: 542–3) helps illustrate the point: 199

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Water Resource Management in a Vulnerable World Not surprisingly, the precarious relationship that Coloradans had with their water rights has contributed to an often fatalistic vision of the semi-arid and arid lands of the state. For example, In the late 1860s, Elizabeth Custer found an abandoned ranch in eastern Colorado. Its owner left a crude sign that with minor rewording could have spoken for thousands of [Coloradans] knocked to their knees during hard times: ‘Toughed it out here two years. Result: Stock on hand, five towhead and seven yaller dogs. Two hundred and fifty feet down to water. Fifty miles to wood and grass. Hell all around. God Bless Our Home.’ ...   The pattern was repeated over and over, in the calamitous droughts of the 1890s, the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, and the great witherings of the 1950s. Although Colorado water law did not cause these droughts, the prior appropriation doctrine left little room for sharing water in times of shortage and in turn exacerbated the perilous conditions that many Coloradans faced. The property nature of the water right made sharing an unthinkable option... In invoking terms of religion and war [in its rulings] in relation to the water right, the Colorado Supreme Court revealed the extent to which Colorado’s doctrine of prior appropriation may have pitted Coloradans against one another.

The key issue as discussed above, and clarified by the following quote by Hicks and Pena (in press, 2012: 2) with regard to the conflict between the dominant prior appropriation in the Hispanic water tradition, is the notion of water as a placeless item subject to absolute property right in the dominant view: The acequia farmers live in a social and legal landscape defined by competing understandings of water. On the one hand, water is a privatized commodity under state law, saleable, and potentially uncoupled from locality. On the other hand, water is an in-place resource, created by the labour of acequia parciantes [members], and allocated among them on the basis of need and equitable sharing, consistent with the older Hispanic law and with current acequia norms.

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The American West’s hazardscape accordingly is defined by this tension between the dominant view of water as property detached from place, and an experience of water on the part of the ethnic minorities and environmental quality-oriented groups as a shared amenity whose multiple values to society are intrinsic to the place of use. This tension becomes functionally urgent, especially when future climate change is also considered besides water’s existing problematic geography discussed above. Shinker et al. (2010), using multiple data sources from contemporary stream gauge and temperatures to paleoclimatic data, argue that there is a record of much greater variability and longer more severe droughts than have been recorded during historical times in the North Platt River Basin draining the states of Wyoming, Nebraska and Colorado. They accordingly argue that possible ephemeral river flows, and much lower groundwater levels under climate change, could put severe strains on the energy production, agricultural and municipal uses of water in the North Platt. The arid south-western United States has seen some of the highest rates of urban growth over 1990s and the first decade of the twenty-first century. Work by Bolin et al. (2010) charts the vulnerability of various segments of the Phoenix metropolitan area inhabited by 4 million people and projected to hold 11 million by 2050. They find that almost all climate scenarios project substantially dryer conditions for the region. The outer-lying suburbs of Phoenix, which are almost entirely dependent upon groundwater, are likely to be most vulnerable to such changes. Analyzing the complexity of a cross-border climate adaptation on the US–Mexico border in the Sonoran Desert in Arizona, Wilder et al. (2010) point to social learning, shared data and shared production of climate knowledge as the pathways that hold the maximum adaptive potential in the fractured institutional landscape characteristic of the US–Mexico borderlands. All of the above climate studies, however, guarantee that business as usual will have very painful consequences, and that conservation, social justice and democratic knowledge production on climate are the key pathways to successful adaptation and perhaps even mitigation of the climate challenge in the western and south-western United States – something that is consistent with the hydro-hazardscape framework of this book. But, beyond the pious principles of democracy and social justice, what are the prospects for meaningful change in the legal/institutional 201

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landscape of the West which will inevitably mediate any technical and material interventions? The historic experience of hydro-climatic stress, as has been pointed out earlier, cannot be viewed in isolation from a system that treats water as property and completely deprives some of water during lean years, instead of encouraging any collective social action to address scarcity. Relatively earlier on, Wescoat (1985) took a more sanguine view of the prospects for evolutionary reforms in Western water law. Undertaking an extensive view of water-related case law, he identified the following opportunities for reform in the prior appropriation doctrine: 1. more precise definitions of concepts like beneficial use, waste and duty of water (the requisite amount of water to irrigate an acre of land); 2. improved administration of water in terms of record keeping and analysis of water; and 3. change in organizational structures to reduce the transaction cost of realizing benefits of saved water from conservation. The last point particularly bears explanation, because in Western water law, water saved from conservation efforts is difficult to make use of because of the no-injury rule or prohibition against the change in water right. The key point here is that although the prior appropriation doctrine on the face of it does not seem very progressive, case law seems to indicate that courts have not been very keen to penalize water users for efficiency as they might have, or to enforce historic understandings of waste. There is too much money and power invested in the prior appropriation doctrine to predict its demise any time soon. But with the force of societal changes that are already taking place and the additional spectre of climate change looming in the West, there are smaller changes all around that are whittling away at some of the more regressive aspects of the doctrine. Thanks to the Endangered Species Act and expanding definitions of the Public Trust Doctrine, increasingly federal and state actions are being curtailed because of equity, ecology and socially beneficial use considerations instead of sticking to the older definitions of beneficial use. The hydro-hazardscape approach outlined in this book provides a conceptual framework within which to engage with the water geographies in a post-industrial affluent society like the United States. Remarkably, the 202

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strength of the property interest under the prior appropriation doctrine in the American West is one of the biggest impediments to its equitable and ecologically sound use. While the bureaucratic water management in the Indus Basin deserves critique on many counts – as outlined in Chapters 2, 3, 4 and 5 – there do seem to be greater prospects for progressive change and institutional flexibility for realizing multiple objectives in the future than seems to be the case with prior appropriation in the American West. This is primarily because property right in water is not as well developed and perfected as it was in the American West. Even in the Indus, however, there is considerable institutional and political inertia that only considered water stored and then diverted for agricultural, municipal and industrial uses as beneficial. Much of the international, sub-national and even local conflict over water in the Indus is premised upon that understanding, as pointed out in earlier chapters. The geographies of power and privilege in the Indus are very much locationbased in terms of difference between upstream and downstream riparians, and the head and tail-end water users. This is unlike the West, where such geographies are temporally inflected by virtue of first in time, first in use. Place-based hydro-politics, with due consideration for the cycles of hazards such as floods and droughts, instead of a fixation on mean conditions, coupled with emphasis on participatory democracy as per the hazardscapes approach, have the potential to usher in more equitable water geographies in the Indus and the American West than is the case at this time. Hopefully this chapter when read in contrast with the examples from the Indus will help clarify the debate regarding property versus collective, equity versus efficiency and different definitions of beneficial use. Greater democracy for defining what constitutes socially beneficial use and how to account for multiple values of water, however, continues to be the key challenge for both regions on different sides of the world.

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9

Conclusion: Mapping the Contours of Hydro-hazardscapes in a Climate change Future

So what is a hydro-hazardscape and what does it do? To recap, hazardscape was defined as simultaneously a perspective and a social practice, the perspective being of the powerful – drawing legitimacy from the use of science and rationality, and explaining reality in an analytical mode. As a social practice, the powerful in a hazardscape do not just explain reality, but from their panopticon (in the Foucauldian sense) they also produce and reproduce spaces within which geographies of vulnerability actualize. In a hazardscape, the powerful’s capacity to mould spatial relations, however, does not go uncontested. The ones with less power too deploy assorted ideational and material/spatial strategies to undermine the spatial practices of the powerful. The emergent geographies of vulnerability are the outcome of this dynamic between world views and spatial practices of the powerful and the powerless. Hydro-hazardscape is a special case of a hazardscape where water as a locus of resources use, hazards and accompanying social relations provides a topically delimited arena within which to apprehend the question of what hazardscape – or, more importantly, hydro-hazardscape – really does. Water as a non-substitutable resource, essential for all life and ecological sustainability, resistant to tidy commodification and retaining multiple social values for societies, is an ideal medium through which hazardscapes and their functionality can be understood.

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The hydro-hazardscape denotes a place-based concept and practice. The post-structuralist genesis of the term ensure that the boundaries between material and ideational, and theory and practice, are amorphous at best and notionally non-existent most of the time. The concern with multiple places and spaces in this book means that we really have been dealing with the plural hydro-hazardscapes, which is how the term has been mostly used in the book. Hydro-hazardscapes, just as the places with which they are constituted and are constitutive, can be the outcome of cross-scalar material processes and power relations. Consequently, the physical boundaries of a hazardscape are congruent with the place and scale with which it is formed. The discussion of basin scale hydro-politics in Chapter 2, and how those hydro-politics spawn international and subnational conflict, is one example of a hydro-hazardscape traversing the meso-sub-national and macro-basin/international scale. This is parallel to the power-infused local-scale hydro-hazardscape outlined in Chapter 4, where the coercive and compensatory capacity of the more powerful led to differential vulnerability and access to water. On the local scale the nature of power at work was dependent upon place-based social geographies. In large farmer-dominated areas the mode of power was coercive or compensatory, while in small farmer-dominated areas it was of the power/knowledge type. Are these basin and local-scale hydrohazardscapes a purely conceptual construct? In a manner of speaking, yes – but that concept has a reality in terms of describing the mechanisms through which water conflict is negotiated on the basin scale and how exercise of power leads to differential vulnerability. Abnormality and hazardousness in human–environment interactions is a central tenet of the hydro-hazardscape approach. It is consequently attentive to multiple hazards in a place and how those multiple hazards and perceptions interact to spawn geographies of vulnerability. From the hazardscape perspective, abnormal is normal, and much of the damage and suffering associated with hazards is in fact an outcome of the conceptual, cultural and analytical marginalization of hazards to the periphery of human–environment relations. Climate change as discussed in the very introduction to this book is the mega uncertainty phenomenon of our times. And given the centrality of uncertainty and abnormality as normal, climate change is perhaps the central concern for the hydro-hazardscape 206

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approach (for example, see also Yamane, 2009). As in Chapter 5, the technocracy focused on the singular hazard of floods was ineffective because of its neglect of the multiple interacting hazards that made the flood plain residents vulnerable. The flood plain residents split along gender lines viewed the ‘normal’ state of pollution, solid waste, crime and poverty as parts of the picture of why floods were damaging and sometimes beneficial, and to whom. The singular hazard was a hazard in the context of the normal life of the residents of the Lai flood plain in Pakistan in this case. The climate change future for Rawalpindi/Islamabad, just as for many urban flood plains in the world (especially in the global South), will bring enhanced challenges and newer combinations of hazards. A hydro-hazardscape approach would be key to untangling the patterns of complex vulnerabilities that will emerge as a result. Who has power? How and by what right? To what effect? These are the central questions from a hazardscape perspective. Although the theme of power runs through all the chapters, its less obvious aspects are also highlighted in this book. Power can be propagated and its effect mediated, for example, by technology, as in the case of Balochistan and Azerbaijan in Chapter 6, where the replacement of traditional karez irrigation by modern tubewell water pumps has had negative consequences for equity and vulnerability for the poor. Power can also be legitimized and mediated through the legal regimes and the geographical imaginaries imbricated in those legal regimes; for example, the Canal and Drainage Act 1873 discussed in Chapter 3, and the prior appropriation doctrine discussed in Chapter 8. The state apparatus enabled by the legal doctrines can also be an instrument of power, as discussed in the case of the water bureaucracy in the Indus Basin in Chapter 4. The hydro-hazardscape approach is by definition attentive to multiple values of water. This is not just out of a pious commitment to cultural and perceptual diversity, but rather a function of partial genesis of the concept in the pragmatic philosophical tradition. Recall that pragmatism puts a premium on multiple perceptions and democratic rational discourse as a pathway to reaching a shared reality. The hydro-hazardscape approach does not necessarily put its complete faith in rational discourse as a problem-solving mechanism, as its other intellectual headsprings – socionature and critical realism – caution against ignoring the material and 207

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discursive power structures that may prevent precisely such a democratic discourse from happening. The socio-nature thesis in particular would critique rationality as yet another problematic discursive power structure that does not necessarily lead to the most progressive or emancipatory outcomes. But such intellectual reservations notwithstanding, even from a socio-nature perspective the values one attaches to water will be integral to what one does with water and how its material geographies actualize. Accordingly then, water’s value for community, spirituality, aesthetics, identity and culture are as valuable as its value for livelihoods and economic gain. And even within livelihoods, the hydro-hazardscape approach would insist upon attention to multiple modes of livelihood generation from fishing as in the case of Native American communities in the US Pacific Northwest, for example, as well as from agriculture and hydro-power generation in the same region. The case of Belize detailed in Chapter 7 and of Balochistan and Azerbaijan detailed in Chapter 6 are illustrative of the intense alternate sets of values that societies attach to water and how they at times trump the commonly understood value of water as a simple resource. Water privatization in Belize did not just have adverse consequences in terms of access and affordability of domestic water, but also in terms of people’s sense of identity and nationhood in the face of globalization. The karez reintroduction in Azerbaijan did not just secure livelihoods but more importantly returned an important cultural symbol, which was deemed to be the basis of community and local pride in the region. The hydro-hazardscape approach highlights these relatively neglected aspects of water geographies. Lastly, the hydro-hazardscape approach is not just about understanding reality but also charting a way forward. Towards that end, the chapters in this book have tried to retain a positive outlook. By historicizing and subjecting the Canal and Drainage Act 1873 to critical geographical analyses, its implicit biases are made explicit and hence the job of reforming it more tangible. Recognizing multiple values of water and empowering multiple and subaltern voices in the Indus Basin hydro-hazardscape has a prospect for changing the whole parameters of the debate and conflict at the international and sub-national scale in the Indus. Recognizing geographies of social power and the nature of power 208

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operative in places can help bring about reforms that can negotiate the contours of power in the hydro-hazardscape of rural Pakistan on the local scale. Understanding that important social capital, community cohesion and civic pride-type values crystallize around the karez infrastructure will help attract attention to these anchors of community life in Balochistan and Azerbaijan. Tangible interventions for karez revival can lead to greater equity and resilience in the hydro-hazardscapes of the arid realm, especially in a climate change future. Neoliberal water privatization in Belize did not take into account the multiple values of water that the society held as important as water’s utilitarian value. In the Belizean hydrohazardscape, water privatization became an exemplar of the multiple injustices to which Belizean people seemed to be subjected. And finally in the American West the prior appropriation doctrine has legitimated a very inequitable hydro-hazardscape that is likely to cause greater stress in a climate change future. Recognizing the distinct problematic strains constraining equitable and ecologically sustainable water management in the West will be key to ensuring a socially and ecologically sustainable future for the arid American West. In this book I have tried to integrate the material and discursive, cultural and political in the water resources realm through the hydrohazardscape lens. All perspectives are incomplete and partial, because the human knowledge informing them is incomplete. The hydro-hazardscape approach, by attending to a less incomplete set of paradigmatic constructs, is intended to enable a better understanding of the complexity of interlinkages that govern water use, access and vulnerability to its hazards. It would be so much easier if there was a world out there for us to understand and change. But it seems that the world – or shall we say worlds – is so inextricably linked to our thoughts about the worlds that to try to untangle the two has as much prospect of success as humanity’s vain attempts through time to be anything but human. There are no individual truths, there are social truth constructions. Engaging with those truths and recognizing that the world itself is deeply social can itself be an incredibly empowering insight. I am always frustrated that many around me can imagine the end of the universe, Earth or even God, but cannot imagine the end of capitalism, or patriarchy, or nation-states – things that we have created. Therein the paradox lies the answer. Within 209

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human–environment relations at least, the hydro-hazardscape approach helps us understand human constructs as, well, human; and it is through that understanding that we are empowered to undo those constructs and usher in newer and more just worlds.

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Notes 1. For example, the controversy surrounding leaked emails from the prestigious Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, at the University of East Anglia in November 2009. The leaked emails seemed to imply that the scientists had either hidden troublesome data or – worse – had doctored it. Subsequent inquiries have repeatedly exonerated the scientists of any wrongdoing, but many climate sceptics have held on to the controversy as a sign of a vast conspiracy to convince the public of climate change. 2. This refers to the controversy that erupted in January 2010 when the IPCC admitted that the claim in its 2007 report of the Himalayan glaciers melting by 2035 was not founded on a refereed source, but was instead based upon the reported interview of an individual scientist from 1999. The details of the controversy can be found at the following source: Carrington, D. (2010) ‘IPCC officials admit mistake over melting Himalayan glaciers’, the Guardian, 20 January 2010. Retrieved on 3 August 2010 from www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/jan/20/ipcc-himalayan-glaciersmistake. 3. In addition, no political party of any significance in Pakistan in general and in the Punjab in particular has ever passed a resolution in support of Kalabagh Dam, nor is there any evidence of a public rally held in support of the dam in the Punjab. The Punjab assembly in the aftermath of Pakistan’s nuclear tests in 1998 did pass a resolution congratulating the then prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, for the nuclear tests and his announcement of the construction of Kalabagh Dam. There is, however, no resolution of the assembly specifically supporting the construction of the dam. Retrieved on 26 March 2007 from www.pap.gov.pk/business/summary/backlog/ assembly-1997-99.htm. 4. Mackey, R. (2010) ‘Attempts to tame Indus River contributed to disaster in Pakistan, expert says.’ Retrieved on 17 September 2010 from http://thelede.blogs. nytimes.com/2010/08/18/attempts-to-tame-indus-river-contributed-to-disaster-inpakistan-expert-says. Also Mustafa, D. (2010) ‘Pakistan floods: living with the mighty Indus.’ Audio file available at www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/news/2010/08/100818_ mustafa_wt_sl.shtml 5. With two growing seasons, growing crops on 100 per cent of the arable land, twice a year, would translate into 200 per cent cropping intensity.

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Water Resource Management in a Vulnerable World 6. Admittedly there are also engineering reasons for varying the supply of water in a water channel to manage the level of silt accumulation in a channel. In my conversations with the PIDA staff, it was often cited as a main reason for their insistence upon retaining the right to vary the amount of water in a channel. Some of the operatives did, however, admit that the flow variations were not always for technical reasons and were a major source of rent extraction for the irrigation staff. 7. These are fictitious names of two of the villages to protect the identities of the research subjects. The remaining two villages of Chak 15-D and 13(lot) have their real names used because of reasons that will become clear as the narrative progresses. 8. For succinctness, the term ‘modes’ is used as a surrogate for social structures. So when I refer to ‘modes of power’, following Partha (1983), I mean ‘structures’ of power. 9. A 100 per cent cropping intensity means that 100 per cent of the cultivable land in a cropping season is under cultivation. In Pakistan, since there are two cropping seasons, the maximum possible cropping intensity is 200 per cent. 10. This spelling comes closest to the phonetic pronunciation of the name and is most widely used. Other spellings (for example, Leh and Lei) are also in use. 11. This was the same institute where Albert Speer, Hitler’s architect and armaments minister, was also on the faculty at the same time as Doxiadis was a student there. 12. By the European sense, I mean the relatively recognizable division of economic classes in the industrialized societies of Europe; for example, the working class, the petit bourgeoisie, the bourgeoisie and the ruling classes (see also Gramsci, 1971). 13. Mr Mehmood, a resident of Rawalpindi and one of the most ardent environmentalists and an acknowledged ‘friend’ of the Lai, was very insistent on this particular point. At every forum where I saw him talking about the Lai, he insisted that it was not a Nullah but a nadi (stream), which should be respected as such. He frequently cited the richness of aquatic life that used to exist in the Lai and still does in its head reaches in the form of local river bass, turtles and other types of flora and fauna. 14. This discussion is not meant to imply that this subtle change of terminology is solely to blame for the condition of the Lai. In fact, the Lai was a rich aquatic system with recreational fishing and swimming on its banks up to 25 years ago. The point is that in the official referral as well as some popular referrals to the Lai, it becomes more difficult for environmentalists and citizens to make a case for saving a Nullah, as opposed to a river or a stream; for example, it would sound absurd in the local language for somebody wanting to save a Nullah or declaring themselves a friend of the Nullah (drain)! 15. Watersheds have increasingly become a popular scale for social mobilization and environmental activism in the United States. The politics and mechanics of environmental activism around the watershed scale have been documented among others by Woolley (1999) and Woolley et al. (2002). 16. Check dams to slow down the flow of water to facilitate recharge. 17. ‘Water right’ here means the usufructuary right to use the entire flow of karez water for a specific length of time. The length of time is tradable and is almost like a property right.

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Notes 18. 1 Azeri Manat (AZN) = (2011) US $1.27. 19. Total survey respondent n = 225 with equal distribution between males and females. The questionnaires were administered largely by one male and two female enumerators. 20. Higher standard (5.3*100*30) = 15,900 litres = 3,533 imperial gallons = 4,184 US gallons. And the lower standard (5.3*50*30) = 7,950 litres = 1,767 imperial gallons = 2,092 US gallons (Bureau of Economic Analysis, 2006). 21. WASA tariff higher water quantity standard (9.90 + (0.01320*1,000) + (0.01452*1,533))/2 = US $22.68 = US $27.76; WASA tariff lower water quantity standard (9.90 + (0.01320*767))/2 = US $10.01 = yr 2005 US $12.25; BWSL tariff higher water quantity standard (9.23 + (0.01589*1,000) + (0.01743*1,000) + (0.01845*1,000) + (0.01948*195))/2 = US $32.4; BWSL tariff lower water quantity standard (9.23 + (0.01589*1,000) + (0.01743*98))/2 = US $13.42.

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index Abbasi, A., 41 Acequia communities: civil society coalition, 197; identity and community, 195 Acequias (irrigation), 189–190, 194–196, 200; cooperative water development, 190; legal recognition, 194 Afzal, H., 41 Agrawal, A., 107 Agriculture: agricultural drought, 161; Azerbaijan, 133, 154; Balochistan, 136–138, 147, 149, 151–152, 161; development, 57–58, 148; effect of lack of water, 63; Indus Basin, 45, 203; irrigation, 70; Islamabad, 106; prior appropriation, 191; productivity, 15, 41, 162; United States, 194, 196–198, 200, 207 Akali Dal Party (Sikh nationalist), 38 Akhter, M., 37 Ali, I., 63 Allan, J. A., 12–14; ‘Virtual water’ thesis, 12–15 American pragmatism (see ‘Pragmatic research tradition’) American Water Development Inc. (AWDI), 196–197 American West, 26, 57, 187–203 Amery, H., 7–8, 46 Anasazi (native American tribe), 189 Architecture, 105, 212 Arnold, T., 195

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Asian Development Bank (ADB), 111, 114, 119, 128, 149 Ayub Khan, M., 105 Azerbaijan, 133–139, 146, 154–161, 161–163, 207–208; Baku, 133–139, 146, 154–161, 161–163, 207–208; Nakhchivan Autonomous Region, 25, 134, 139–140, 153–164; Ordubad region, 155, 157–158; Soviet collectivization, 154–155, 156; water allocation sharing, 155; water pumps, 153, 158, 160; Zovar (community leader), 140, 156, 158–159 Bakker, K., 16, 165, 193. Balochistan, 25,42,133, 134–139, 143, 146–155, 161–164; agricultural sector development, 162; Balochistan Groundwater Rights Administration Ordinance 1978, 150; Balochistan Rural Support Programme (BRSP), 152; drought, 137, 150, 161–162; groundwater management, 150; highlands, 136; international donor recommendations, 164; modernization/developmental discourse, 150–153, 161–164; NGO participatory discourse, 151–153; rais (water leader), 140 Bartram, J., 177 Beas River, 38–39

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Water Resource Management in a Vulnerable World Beas–Sutluj Link Canal, 39 Beaumont, P., 136 Behaviourist tradition (see ‘Human ecology’) Belize: as British Honduras, 166; demography, 166–167; governmentCASCAL dispute, 169–174, 186; independence from Britain, 166, 180; National Trade Union Congress of Belize, 174; national identity, 169, 184; nationalism, 26, 183, 185; Public Utilities Commission (PUC), 170–174, 186; Water and Sewerage Act, 168; Water and Sewerage Authority (WASA) 168, 171, 176, 178 Belize City, 25; health, 176; privatization, 25–26, 165–172, 173–186; urban hydro-hazardscapes, 25, 166, 185–186; water access, 175–177; water affordability, 176, 177; water quality, 176; water supply, 174, 175 Belize Water Services Limited (BWSL), 168, 170, 171–174, 176–180; customer service, 179–180; service disconnection, 179 Berlin-Charlottenberg Institute of Technology, 105 Bhakra–Nangal Dam, 39 Biwater, 173–174 Bolin, B., 201–202 Braun, B., 20 Bribes, 60, 66–67, 113, 117 British imperial rule, 30, 31; 1947 partition, 32; mapping, 118; ‘Standstill Agreement’, 32 British Indian Army, 104 British Raj, 30, 52 Buenos Aires, 170 Cameroon, 183

Canal and Drainage Act 1873 (general), 23–24, 47–68, 69–72, 89, 192, 207, 208; absolute authority of the state, 56–62; impact on water equity, 50, 62; parallels with American West, 57; police and judicial power, 61; politics and ideology, 49–59; stateuser balance of power, 49–50, 53–54; unlawful behaviour as consequence, 68; use of caste/ethnicity, 61 Capital Development Authority (CDA), 116, 142 Caribbean, 25, 176–180, 190 CASCAL (BV), 168, 170–171, 173, 179, 185 Caste, 15, 53, 61 Castree, N., 20 Central America, 1, 174, 180 Central Treaty Organization (CENTO), 33 Chaklala Cantonment Board (CCB), 106 Chenab River, 35–37; Baglihar project, 35–37; Salal hydroelectric project, 35–37 Chouinard, V., 48 Civil society, 9, 17, 49, 69, 87, 88, 98, 107, 110, 126, 129–130, 197 Climate change (see also ‘GEC’), 1–2, 4–7, 19, 20–21, 22, 23, 25, 29, 43–44, 72, 128, 130, 134, 163, 189, 191, 199, 199–202, 207–209 Cold war geopolitics, 33 Communal power, 87 Corruption, 60; Pakistan, 85–86, 95, 117, 129–130; Belize, 166, 181, 207 Crime, 59–60, 180–181, 207 Critical realism, 4, 17, 19–20, 21, 207 Crony capitalism, 126, 129 Cultural geography, 21 ‘Cultural turn’, 4 Culture: bureaucratic, 96, 120; global South, 5; irrigation culture, 194;

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Index landscape (cultural geography tradition), 21; Nakhchivan culture, 163; Pashtun culture, 138, theorization, 1, 20; United States, 189, 195; water, 18, 208 Custer, E. (c. nineteenth-century Coloradan), 200

137, 180, 190, 201 Ethnography, 14–15, 17–18, 70, 117, 143, 165–167, 181 Europe, 18, 49, 105, 191; colonialism, 28–29, 29–31, 50–54, 61–63, 75, 88, 97, 118, 166, 169, 180, 189–190; migration and settlement, 191, 195, 199–200 Extortion, 79, 97

Deedat, H., 18 Demeritt, D, 20 Democracy, 3–4, 8–9, 17–18, 45, 49–50, 118, 129–130, 174, 180, 180, 201–202, 203, 207 Democratization, 45 Derrida, J., 20 Developing world, 16, 97, 101, 173, 175 Dewey, J., 8 Discursive constructs: of hazards and hazards policy, 19, 104; by irrigators, 153; by power elites, 14, 187; of rivers, 19; of the Indus Basin, 23, 30, 45; of the Mekong, 45; of water, 17–18, 45; by water managers, 18 Disempowerment, 47, 73, 91, 97, 169 Dove, M., 107, 108 Doxiadis, C. (architect), 105–107, 212 Drip irrigation, 149, 152 Drought Relief Project, 149 D’Souza, R., 48 Dualisms: nature/society, 20; culture/ environment, 20

Feminism, 17–18 Feudal power, 79, 86–87 Floods: disease, 109, 129; flood hazard, 7, 10, 14, 24–25, 43–44, 59, 69–72, 73, 79–85, 90–92, 97, 101–117, 126–131; flood plains, 44–45, 80, 207; forecasting/warning, 104, 111, 127; harvesting, 137, 189; management, 24–25, 43–44, 54, 71–73, 89, 91–92, 97, 111–112, 131; relief, 75–76, 81–82 Foggara (see also karez), 134, 195 Fox, C., 18, 45

Ecofeminism, 3 Ecuador, 16 Efficiency, 90 Environmental degradation, 10, 11, 134 Environmental hazards, 1–2, 103 Equity (principle and discourse), 15, 26, 27, 38–39, 39, 45, 49–50, 52, 54, 68, 89, 89–92, 97–98, 144, 162, 166, 180, 195, 202, 203, 207, 208–209 Ethnicity, 3, 9, 26, 45, 46, 52, 61, 106,

Galeria (see also karez), 134 GEC, 2, 3–7; biophysical research discourse, 3–4; critical research discourse, 4–5; human-environment research discourse, 3, 7 Gender, 4, 9, 15, 108–109, 112–113, 117, 207 General Circulation Modelling (GCM), 5 Gilmartin, D., 30, 51–52, 54, 62, 88 Globalization, 17, 24, 101, 164–169, 186, 207 Gramsci, A., 11 Greater Thal Canal project, 493 Gulf States, 150 Hardstaff, P. (Tanzanian government official), 174 Harim (rule), 139, 150, 155, 158

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Water Resource Management in a Vulnerable World Hartmann, B., 10 Hasan, A., 116 Haughton, G., 90 Hazards research, 19 Hazardscapes, 20–22, 72, 86, 92, 101–102, 104–107, 108, 117–118, 119, 126–128, 129–152, 152, 161, 189, 200, 205–207 Helsinki Rules, 45 Henderson, G., 21 Hicks, G., 200 Historical memory, 155, 160, 185–186 Homer-Dixon, T., 10–11 Howard, G., 177 Hulme, M., 6 Human ecology, 8, 23, 43 Human-environment interactions, 19, 22, 206–207, 210 Human security, 45 Hybrid hazards, 103 Hydro-hazardscapes, 1, 19, 21, 22, 24–27, 30, 45, 47–49, 62, 69, 72, 98–99, 132, 165,186, 187, 199–203, 206–210; abnormalityas-normality, 206; climate change, 206; contestation of power, 205; livelihood generation, 207–208; multiple values of water, 206; placebased perspective, 206; potential to inform future policy and reform, 208; power, 206 Hydro-hegemony, 11 Hydrological cycle, 18 Hydro-politics: basin scale, 23, 30–32, 38, 206; cross-scalar, 45–46; Indus, 29, 203; international, 32–37, 45–46; inter-provincial, 38–44; subnational, 23, 29, 37–44, 45; United States, 193 Identity, 18; identity politics, 38, 39, 43; local, 163

Imperial science, 51, 88 India: abortion, 15–16; Gujarat, 15; Indira Gandhi Canal, 15, 34, 39; Punjab state, 30, 32, 38–39, 43, 45, 46; Punjab–Haryana water dispute, 30, 38, 43; Rajasthan, 15, 38–39 India–Pakistan relations: conflict, 34–35, 38, 39; cooperation, 37 Indus River Basin, 5, 23, 27–46; agriculture, 45; British colonial administration, 30–31, 51–54; discursive construction, 23, 27, 45; hydro-politics, 29; Indus Basin Water Development Project, 34; irrigation, 27; physical structure, 70; political geography, 27; post-colonial era, 32–37; parallels with US view of water as property, 203 Indus Waters Treaty (IWT), 23, 29, 32–37, 40, 45–46 Ingram, H., 195 Inter-Dominion Agreement, 32 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), 2, 211 International donor community: karez preservation, 164; capitalist developmentalism, 49; interaction with local functionaries, 96; irrigation sector reform, 14; Lai Basin, 107; liberal participatory ambitions, 69; privatization agenda, 171 International Organization for Migration (IOM), 140, 154, 156, 159, 160 Inter-provincial Water Accord, 41 Intimidation, 66–67 Irrigation bureaucracy, 61, 89–96 Isaac, J., 72, 76 Islamabad Master Plan, 105, 131 Islamists: political parties and rhetoric, 139; radicalism, 33, 138 Israel, 11–12, 46 Iyer, R., 36

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Index Jammu and Kashmir, 36, 38 Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA), 118, 126–128 Jehlum River, 35, 40 Jordan River, 11–12 Judicial power, 61 Justice, 10, 11, 13, 22, 45, 50, 86, 117, 209 Kalabagh Dam, 29, 40, 211 Kammen, D., 107 Karakoram mountains, 29 Karez irrigation system, 25, 195, 207, 212; communal harmony, 143, 160; conflict, 141; construction, 164; decline through government policy (Balochistan), 149; development praxis (effect of ), 144, 149; drying up, 136; impact on land distribution, 142; ‘invention’ (in Kalba Alekbar), 160–161; locus of social organization, 139–140; maintenance, 139–140, 144, 153–154, 158–159, 164; post-Soviet era, 155; pre-Soviet era, 155, 163; provision of livelihood, 144; rehabilitation/resurrection, 136, 143, 151, 153–154, 156, 158, 159–160; social capital, 146, 146–154, 161–164, 208; Soviet era decline (Azerbaijan), 154 Kazi, A., 41 Kennedy, C., 88 Khattera (see also karez), 134 Korang River, 127

Flood Mitigation and Environmental Improvement Plan, 118, 126–127; Dhok Naju bridge, 121–123; flood damage, 110; flood mitigation, 112–113; flood plain, 102–103, 106–117, 119, 123–126, 128, 128–131, 207; geomorphology, 125, 128, 130, 132; hazardscape, 104–108; hazardscape epistemologies, 130; human encroachment, 114–116, 125–126; hydrology, 106, 126, 127, 128; lived experience of, 130; modernist/technocratic view of, 130; monsoon season, 111; public/ policy discourse: 107–108, 131–132; semantic implication of ‘nullah’ (drain), 119; technocratic discourse on, 118–119; watershed, 24, 101–115, 117–132, 207, 213 Land degradation, 41, 60 Land ownership/property, 67, 154–155; effect on social identity, 73; land owner influence on government, 82 Landscapes tradition (cultural geography), 21, 22 Law (general), 47–68, 89, 191, 195, 197–198, 199–202; critical legal geographic approach, 48–49; international watercourse law, 45; legal pluralism, 49; legal regimes, 48 Lebanon, 12, 46 Lightfoot, D., 136 Linton, J., 18 Loftus, A., 17, 170

Lai Nullah Improvement Works, 111, 114, 118, 119–126; encroachment removal, 126; engineering intervention, 119–120 Lai River: 2001 floods, 103; benefits of floods, 109; climate change uncertainty, 129; Comprehensive

Malik, A., 88 Managerialist discourse and understanding, 69, 89, 92, 118 Margalla Hills, 104 Marxism, 4, 7, 18 Mayordomo (Hispanic community water leader), 140, 195

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Water Resource Management in a Vulnerable World McDonald, D., 166, 169 Meinzen-Dick, R., 147 Mekong Basin, 18, 45 Mercy Corp International (MCI), 152 Mexico, 189, 194, 201 Migration, 11, 129, 140, 145, 161, 163, 191, 197 Miller, J., 136 Ministry of Water and Power, 88, 95 Mirani Dam, 149 Mir-e-aab (water leader), 140, 195 Modernity, 6, 24–25, 69, 97, 101, 103, 131 Moench, M., 134 Moga (watercourse inlet), 52, 62–68, 78, 82, 90 Mormons, 190 Morocco, 134, 136 Moscow, 158, 160, 163 Multilateral donors, 99, 185 Muslim political reconstruction (see ‘politico-cultural reconstruction’) Native American communities: alliances with environmentalists, 199; water rights, 197–198 Natural hazards management, 118 Nature, 15, 16, 19–22, 91, 129, 130 Neoliberalism, 16, 26, 165, 166, 169, 183, 185 Neo-realism, 7, 11, 19 Newstead, C., 168–169 Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs), 139, 149, 151–153 Non-Aligned Movement, 33 North Western Frontier Province (NWFP, see Pakistan, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa) Oestigaard, T., 46 Olwig, K., 22 Oxfam, 152

Page, B., 183 Paiutes (people), 189 Pakistan: 2001 floods, 110, 119, 121; 2010 floods, 43–44; access to irrigation water, 52–53, 69; aid, 83, Balochistan (see Balochistan); Bombanwala–Ravi–Bedian– Dipalpur link project (BBRD), 32; Central Superior Services (CSS), 87; Civil service (see also Central Superior Services), 88, 105; colonial era community–environment relations, 88; engineering, 53–54; hydropolitics, 30; infrastructure, 44; irrigation sector and reform, 14, 42, 48, 51, 73, 95; irrigation, 30, 32, 35, 40, 43, 44, 45, 51, 53, 56–68, 70–72; irrigators, 53–55, 56, 141, 153; Islamabad, 24, 101, 104, 110, 114–116, 127, 129, 207; katchi abadis (shantytowns), 106, 110, 115–116, 126; Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KPK), 42, 43; Lai River (see Lai River); local elite–formal state elite power struggle, 93; Pakistan Army Corps of Engineers, 120; Pakistan Institute for Environment and Development Action Research (PIEDAR), 84; Pakistan Muslim League (Q) (PML-Q), 43; Pakistan Poverty Alleviation Fund (PPAF), 152, 153; post-colonial state form, 24, 54; Punjab province, 32, 37, 40, 43, 53, 63, 64, 66, 70, 75–76, 81, 88, 89, 91, 151, 211; Rawalpindi (see Rawalpindi); Sindh province, 31, 38, 40–43, 53–54; Sindhi nationalism, 38, 42, 43; state flood management, 23, 25, 44, 54, 72, 89–96, 111–112; ‘Talibanization’, 138–139; Tulbul/ Wullar project, 35; water pumps, 40, 81, 136, 207

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Index Panopticon (Foucauldian), 205 Participatory management, 92–95, 98 Patwari (officials/administrators), 80, 82, 93 Peet, R., 10 Pena, D., 200 Political ecology, 9, 17, 20 Political economy, 9–11, 13, 14, 133 Politico-cultural reconstruction, 4, 5 Pong Dam, 39–40 Popular privatization narrative (PPN, Belize), 181–186; on corruption, 181–182; on national ownership of assets, 182–183; on systemic globalization, 183–184 Post-structuralism, 7, 18, 20, 72, 132, 234 Pothwari (Punjabi dialect), 134 Poverty, 31, 47, 130, 145, 152, 164, 202, 204, 206 Poverty alleviation, 17 Powell, J. (pioneer), 190 Power: and flood hazard vulnerability, 79; modes of power in study villages, 76–78, 86; and property/land ownership, 76–86 Power/knowledge dynamics, 12, 24, 92, 96, 107, 130–131, 132 Pragmatic research tradition, 7, 8–9, 19–20, 22, 117, 131, 132, 189, 207 Prior appropriation doctrine, 48, 57, 187–203, 207, 209; ecological impact, 199, 200; impoverishment of non-white communities, 199 Privatization, 16–18; Belize, 25–26, 165–186, 208–210; England and Wales, 17; global South, 10; job losses, 172; Tanzania, 174; United States, 201 Proctor, J., 19 Production of scale, 169 Project Management Unit (PMU), 120–121, 125

Provincial Irrigation and Drainage Authority (PIDA), 50, 54–55, 61–62, 64, 65, 66, 89–94, 212 Provincial irrigation departments (PIDs), see Provincial Irrigation and Drainage Authority Public–private partnerships, 132 Pue, W., 49 Pueblo (people), 189 Punjab: aristocracy, 88; British canal construction, 40; British colonial administration, 53, 63, 66, 118; ecological concerns, 37; engineering projects, 38–39; Punjabi language, 118–119; separatism, 37–38; Shorkot canal subdivision, 63, 66–67, 68; Sidhnai canal subdivision, 63–67; Sikh nationalism, 38, 39; Sindh– Punjab Agreement (1945), 39–40; water conflict with Haryana and Rajasthan states, 38, 43 Qanat (see also karez), 134, 136, 195 Ravi River, 32, 38, 39, 75, 81, 83 Rawalpindi, 24, 101–116, 118–132, 207, 212; Rawalpindi Cantonment Board (RCB), 104, 106, 118, 132; Rawalpindi Development Authority (RDA), 106, 118, 119–120, 125, 132; Relief Commissioner, 107; Tehsil Municipal Administration (TMA), 105, 107, 132; Water and Sanitation Authority (WASA), 120 Realism, 8, 14, 20–21, 31, 72–73, 117 Religion, 3–4, 38, 45, 106, 117, 139, 220 Resilience (ecosystems), 5, 15, 25–26, 72, 128–132, 133–134, 163, 208 Robbins, P., 20, 107 Rocky Mountains, 191, 194, 196–197 Rodriguez, S., 195

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Water Resource Management in a Vulnerable World Romero, T., 199 Ruiters, G., 166, 169 Rural electrification, 136, 146 Russell, B., 76 Salmon, 198–199 Sanitation directorate (CDA), 106–107 Scale (theorization), 2, 4, 7, 13–15, 16, 19 ‘Science of the empire’, 51, 52, 88, 98 Shinker, J., 201 Sindh colonial province, 31, 39–40 Sir Mott McDonald and Co. (engineers), 120 Sivaramakrishnan, K., 107 Smith, N., 20 Sneddon, C., 18, 45 Soan River, 104, 118 Social justice, 17, 18, 22, 45, 128–132, 180–185, 201–202 Social power, 3, 9–10, 17, 24, 26, 47, 69, 70–75, 92, 93, 98–99, 130, 169, 199, 208 Socio-nature thesis, 20–21, 207 South Africa, 18 South East Asian Treaty Organization (SEATO), 33 Sovereignty (national, popular, state), 49, 166, 169, 184 Soviet Union, 136, 139, 147, 154–155, 156, 160, 162 Space (theorization), 24–25, 29, 58, 77–78, 85, 146, 187, 233, 234 Spain, 16, 134, 194–195 Sutluj River, 32, 38; Bhakra–Nangal Dam, 39 Swyngedouw, E., 16, 17 Syria, 136 Taraqqi Foundation, 152 Tawan (water charges/fines), 61, 63–68 Taxation, 30, 93, 114, 128, 184

Technocracy, 24–25, 31, 39, 45, 90, 92, 94, 96–97, 101, 116–117, 119, 126, 128, 129–131, 154 Technocratic/managerial discourse, 68, 69, 104–105, 119 Tenancy, 61, 75, 78–82, 86, 144, 148 Tohono O’odhams (people), 189 Torture, 79 Transhumance, 136, 161 Tribes, 142, 164, 198 Tubewell water pumps: conflict, 142; effect on droughts, 161–162; government promotion (Balochistan), 146; impact on social organization, 141, 145, 146; impact on social equity, 162; power differentials, 141–142; power failure, 141; productivity, 142, 146, 162; restriction, 176–179 Tvedt, T., 46 Tyndale Climate Research Centre, 6 United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), 152 United States: Arizona, 189, 193, 201; Bureau of Indian Affairs (US Dept. of the Interior), 197; Central Arizona Project, 193, 194; Colorado (US state), 196–197, 200, 201; Colorado River, 194; Colorado River Compact, 194; Colorado Supreme Court, 200; Colorado water law, 200; Columbia River, 198–199; Congress, 193; Desert Land Act, 191–192; Dust Bowl (1930s), 200; Endangered Species Act, 202; Federal Government, 190, 193, 196; Gold Rush, 190; interstate water management, 193; Louisiana Purchase, 189, 191; migration, 189–190,191, 194–195; Mining Act, 191; North Platt River Basin,

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Index 201; Pacific Northwest, 189, 198, 208; Public Trust Doctrine, 202; Reclamation Act, 190; San Luis aquifier, 196; San Luis Valley (Colorado), 196; Snake River, 189, 198–199; Sonoran Desert (Arizona), 189, 201; urban growth and water vulnerability, 201; US Federal Bureau of Reclamation (BuRec), 190; water geographies, 190; water law reform (prospects for), 202–203; Walla Walla Treaty, 198; water as property (view of ); 193–194, 196, 201–202, 202–203; water as a shared amenity (view of ), 195, 196, 200; water communities, 26; water projects, 193–194; Wind River, 198; Wyoming, 198, 200 United States Supreme Court: Arizona vs. California, 197; Winters vs. the United States, 197 Urban planning/design, 105, 107, 116, 129; and corruption, 117 Urban hazards, 24–25 US–Mexico borderlands, 201 Varamin Plain (Iran), 136 Vulnerability, geographies of 68, 101, 205, 206 Warabandi (water distribution system), 52–53, 70, 94 Warashikni (taking water out of turn; see also ‘water theft’), 63 Warner, J., 11, 12 Water: access, 2, 3, 3–4, 14, 16, 23, 55, 56, 68, 85, 97, 173, 176, 185–186, 206; affordability, 144–145, 159, 176–179, 185–186, 208; bureaucracy, 24, 31, 42, 54, 61, 68, 69–72, 73, 83, 87, 87–88, 97–98,

106, 115, 120, 126, 203, 207; commodification/commercialization, 16, 17, 166, 169, 193, 205; conservation, 16, 153, 201–201; drinking supplies, 174–176; footprints, 12; geographies of, 13, 14, 21, 69, 190, 197, 202–203, 208; groundwater, 7, 14, 15, 25, 37, 40–41, 45, 58, 64, 65–67, 75, 106, 133–164, 196, 201–202; as a human right, 169, 173; leakage, 171, 177, 179; policy, 9, 43, 45; pollution, 155, 207; safety, 169, 175, 186; salinity, 15, 37, 40–41; sanitation, 7, 16, 25–26, 106, 119–120, 129, 132, 169–170, 171; scarcity, 11, 13–14, 21, 29, 41, 46, 58, 63, 69, 86, 152, 195; supply,7, 16; sustenance, 2, 90; theft, 62–66, 79, 171–172; transboundary conflict, 12–13, 26; user-engineer dissonacen, water war, 10, 11, 13; waterlogging, 15, 37, 40 Water sharing: among states, 37; community systems, 141, 155, 158, 160 Watts, M., 11 Weber, M., 76 Wescoat, J., 4–6, 8, 202 Whitcombe, E., 30 White, G., 7–8 Wichelns, D., 13 Wilder, M., 201 Wittfogel, K., 9 Wolf, A., 11 World Bank, 32, 33, 36, 151, 171 World Conservation Union (IUCN), 152 Young, L. (poet), 180–181 Zeitoun, M., 12

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