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Globally, decentralisation has become the dominant paradigm for environmental governance. This paper explores the linkages between green governmentality approaches to subjectivity and Gramscian notions of hegemony to examine recent efforts in Rajasthan, India to decentralise groundwater governance through targeted formal regulations and outreach activities, such as water awareness campaigns ( Jal Abhiyaan). The latter seeks to alter the beliefs and practices of farmers by institutionalising their support for state groundwater conservation efforts, including privatisation. The paper draws on household surveys and interviews with farmers and government agents to examine the relationship between the political economic motivations for and practices of state subject-making and differential resistance to these efforts based on farmers’ multiple subject positions. Findings suggest, first, that the state is motivated through its monetary and advisory relationship with donor agencies, such as the World Bank. Through both outreach activities and coercion, it attempts to gain ‘consent’ for its proposals, which devolve state control rather than truly decentralising decision-making, to make self-conducting and willing subjects of specifically neoliberal groundwater conservation. But, second, these attempts are being resisted by some farmers through protests, informal discussions, non-participation, and the collectivisation of access to groundwater and irrigation through irrigation partnerships. Third, resistance to these efforts, or support for them, is different between farmers based on their multiple subjectivities (caste, class and ecological conditions). The paper advances both our understanding of the processes of environmental subject-making and of the devolution of environmental governance, by integrating the lessons from governmentality and Gramscian approaches to social power and subjectivity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In light of the new cooperative water development agreements in South Asia since 1996 and, in particular, the 1996 Ganges Waters Treaty between India and Bangladesh, this paper explores the geopolitical obstacles to cooperation between states in the joint development of large-scale river systems and current opportunities for successful development. The general problems of cooperation faced by the riparian states which share successive rivers are examined with reference to the geopolitical obstacles to cooperation in the Bengal delta since the Partition of the Indian subcontinent through which India and Pakistan gained Independence as separate states in 1947. Against the background of repeated attempts to resolve water-sharing issues between India and East Pakistan and its successor state, Bangladesh, this paper concludes that for cooperation to succeed contemporary large-scale river development has to meet a wide range of criteria which go beyond conventional engineering or economic cost-benefit analyses to include geopolitical criteria. These range from global-scale environmental concerns to micro-scale issues of mutual regional benefit. This paper proposes a major new development on the Brahmaputra and Ganges which the authors argue could break the log-jam of a zero-sum game approach to surface water development in the Bengal delta. Unlike most large-scale dam-building proposals, the barrage construction outlined would cause negligible population displacement, and making maximum use of existing river channels would minimize the environmental impacts associated with the large canal or dam construction envisaged in earlier Ganges–Brahmaputra–Meghna (GBM) schemes. Yet the paper also recognizes that while such a proposal could bring economic, environmental and political advantages to all users in the GBM basin, new thinking on the management of international rivers is less in favour of supply-side solutions, and the case would need to be... [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the urbanisation drive comes steady growth in urban water demand. Although in the past this new demand could often be met by tapping unclaimed water sources, this option is increasingly untenable in many regions where little if any unclaimed water remains. The result is that urban water capture, and the appropriation of associated physical and institutional infrastructure, now often implies conflict with other existing uses and users. While the urbanisation process has been studied in great depth, the processes and, critically, impacts of urban water capture and appropriation are not well researched or understood. This paper undertakes a critical examination of the specific case of Hyderabad, one of India's fastest growing cities, to shed light more generally on the process of water capture by cities and the resultant impacts on pre-existing claims, particularly agriculture. It does this by examining the history and institutional response to Hyderabad's urban–rural water contest; how the results of that contest are reflected in surface and groundwater hydrology; and the eventual impacts on agriculture. The findings show that the magnitude, and sometimes even direction, of impact from urban water transfer vary in space and time and depend on location-specific rainfall patterns, the nature of existing water infrastructure and institutions, and farmers' adaptive capacities and options, notably recourse to groundwater. Broader consideration of the specific findings provides insights into policy mechanisms to reduce the possible negative impacts from the global, and seemingly inexorable, flow of water to the world's growing cities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]