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Drip irrigation is often considered a technological solution to increase water use efficiency and crop productivity. However, all too often, its social and institutional entanglements are ignored. This paper treats drip irrigation as a socio-material assemblage and discusses the social and institutional changes triggered by the introduction of drip irrigation infrastructure in Ağlasun, a rural town located in the southwest of Turkey. Through an ethnographic study, we investigate how the switch from surface irrigation to drip irrigation entails an interaction of institutional re-arrangements, material infrastructures and strategizing actors to reshuffle the operation and maintenance of irrigation infrastructures, water distribution rules and water pricing. Expanding the concept of institutional bricolage to socio-material bricolage, we offer a nuanced understanding of how material infrastructures and institutions are mutually shaped by individual and collective agency. ispartof: International Journal Of The Commons vol:17 issue:1 pages:69-86 status: published

How Ecuadorian páramos are perceived has drastically changed over the last five decades. From cold, hostile, and unproductive hinterlands, páramos have changed to become areas for biodiversity conservation and ‘water towers’ that ought to be protected to provide clean and abundant water for cities and irrigation. To understand how these changing perceptions of páramos relate to interventions and their on-the-ground negotiation by local communities, we develop the notion of imaginaries of place and explore its relations to notions of governmentality and territorialization. We show how, based on changing imaginaries of what páramos are, state and non-state interventions have tried to control the Oyacachi páramos in the Northern Ecuadorian Highlands for the specific purpose of nature and water conservation. At the same time, we show that these interventions are highly contested on-the-ground. This leads to confrontations, negotiations, and a re-definition of the imaginaries of place there exist. Our analysis expounds the relevance of understanding imaginaries of place and its close relations to interventions and their negotiation.

Adaptation to climate change has become a major policy and project focus for donors and governments globally. In this article, we provide insight into how adaptation projects mobilize distinct imaginaries and knowledge claims that create territories for intervention (the objects) as well as targeted populations (the subjects) to sustain them. Drawing on two emblematic climate change adaptation projects in Ecuador, we show how these objects and subjects are created through a knowledge production process that (a) creates a discursive climate change rationale; (b) sidesteps uncertainty related to climate change impacts; (c) fosters a circular citational practice that (self-)reinforces the project's expert knowledge; and (d) makes complex social variables commensurable based on the project's rationality, interests, and quantifiable indicators. The emerging hydrosocial territories ‘in need of intervention’ require subjects that inhabit, produce and reproduce these territories, in accordance with specific climate change discourses and practices. To manufacture and align these subjects, projects employ participatory practices that are informed by recognition politics aimed at disciplining participants toward particular identities and ways of thinking and acting. We analyze these distinct strategies as multiple governmentalities enacted through participatory adaptation projects seeking to produce specific climate change resilient hydrosocial territories and corresponding subjects.

Agricultural transformations have significantly contributed to the global market’s year-round supply of capital-intensive greenhouse-grown crops. For instance, berry production in México is increasingly relying on greenhouse systems to meet the growing demand of international markets, particularly in the USA. It is still unclear to what extent these transformations are related to land tenure, as data on greenhouse distribution often do not exist, are incomplete, or lack spatial resolution. This paper presents a support vector machine learning algorithm tool to map greenhouse expansion using satellite images. The tool is applied to the major berry-growing region of Michoacán, México. Here agricultural areas are transforming to satisfy foreign demand for berries, altering local land and water resource use patterns. We use this tool and a unique land tenure dataset to investigate (a) the spatially explicit extent to which high-input commercial agriculture (mainly the production of berries) has expanded in this region since 1989; and (b) the extent to which smallholder (ejidal) land has been incorporated into the highly capitalized agro-export sector. We combine a national dataset on ejidal land (which includes both communal and parcel land) with geospatial agricultural data to quantify the land-use changes in six municipalities in the berry-growing region of Michoacán between 1989 and 2021. We find that the development of the greenhouse berry boom can be quantified and shown with spatially-explicit detail, growing from zero to over 9,500 ha over the period, using almost one-quarter of all regional agricultural land in 2020. We further find that the capital-intensive market-oriented berry industry has been widely integrated into smallholder ejidal lands, so much so that over half of greenhouses are found there.

Virtual water flows, incorporated in global food trade has increased the last decade. The drivers and consequences are complex. These complex relations between humans and water resources are studied from different perspectives. In this article, an overview of four such perspectives on water in global food production and trade is provided. These four perspectives are: (1) More crop per drop for increasing production, (2) Less drop per crop for reducing impacts, (3) National food security and import dependency; and (4) Local values and implications of water used in export food production. Each of the perspectives is valuable in the sense of representing different value frameworks, which represent contrasting norms and convictions, belief systems, and discourses; which are often incommensurable.

Groundwater forms the basis for millions of rural and urban livelihoods in the Global South. Its use for irrigation has spurred widespread socio-economic development in various areas but has also led to aquifer overdraft and related socio-environmental impacts. This article presents common challenges that agricultural groundwater regulation faces in the areas of intensive use. It shows the main approaches that have been used to try to regulate and control groundwater use. These revolve mostly around direct regulation by the state; different forms of co-management between groundwater user groups and state agencies; and incentives aimed at reducing agricultural groundwater use. This review analyzes why in many contexts, these mechanisms have not led to more sustainable aquifer use. Finally, the article brings to highlight the important challenges this poses in terms of socio-environmental sustainability.

Based on insights from peasant and indigenous communities’ struggles for water in Andean Peru and Ecuador, in this article we argue that the defense of grassroots interests -and with it the advancement of more equitable governance- greatly hinges on the capacity of these groups to engage in grassroots scalar politics . With increasing pressure on water resources in the Andes, the access to water of many rural peasant and indigenous communities is being threatened. The growing realization that their access to water and related interests are embedded in broader regional and national politics, legal frameworks and water policies, has led many communities and peasant water user associations to engage in networks and create alliances with other water users, governmental institutions and non-governmental actors. To better understand these (and other) grassroots struggles and strategies, in this contribution we develop the concept of grassroots scalar politics , which we use as a lens to analyze two case studies. In Ecuador we present how water users of the province of Chimborazo have defended their interests through the consolidation of the Provincial Water Users Associations’ Federation Interjuntas-Chimborazo and its networks. Then we focus on how with the support of Interjuntas-Chimborazo the Water Users Association of the Chambo irrigation system defended their historical water allocation. In Peru we analyze the conformation and achievements of the federative Water Users Association of Ayacucho (JUDRA) and present how the community of Ccharhuancho in the region of Huancavelica, managed to defend its waters and territory against the coastal irrigation sector of Ica.

Water is and has always been the “life stream” of rural livelihoods in Andean communities. Access to water has for centuries been guaranteed through various forms of collective action and autonomous governance structures (Boelens, 2015). Until now, collective action has assured individual water access and is mostly based on local, inter- and intra-community water rights systems that shape, and are shaped by, water flows and infrastructure, local water-related practices, authorities and territory, and particular world views on how societies relate to water and nature (see Beccar et al., 2002; Hoogesteger et al., 2016).

This article reviews, illustrated by two case studies, how struggles around scales play out in three globally hegemonic trends in river governance: (1) stakeholder participation for (2) integrated water resources management (IWRM), conceived at (3) the watershed or river basin level. This ‘holy trinity’[1] has found blanket acceptance and support both in top-down (donors, governments) and bottom-up [nongovernmental organizations (NGOs)] directions as a way of democratizing water management, rationalizing water resource use, and managing conflict between water users in river basins. The precepts underlying these trends however have largely gone unquestioned, and the basin scale has become ‘naturalized’. This continuing hegemonic frame tends to obfuscate how boundaries are often manipulated for political ends and how different stakeholders frame the ‘natural’ scale in quite different ways. In this article we notably question the way boundaries get drawn and scales framed in light of water infrastructure, such as dams, canals, locks, and pipelines, which not only act as ‘pipelines of power’ but also seemingly impose management scale, ‘naturalizing’ water management in a different, semi-deterministic way. Rather than providing a full-fledged literature review, we build our argument drawing from cases from Ecuador and Turkey, each in its own way showing that depoliticizing discourse hides a political reality that may be better captured by ‘polycentricity’.

'Watering the Revolution: An Environmental and Technological History of Agrarian Reform in Mexico', by Mikael D. Wolfe, Duke University Press, 2017.

In Molden, David (Ed.). Water for food, water for life: a Comprehensive Assessment of Water Management in Agriculture. London, UK: Earthscan; Colombo, Sri Lanka: International Water Management Institute (IWMI).