Water, Water everywhere and not a drop to drink

As the elective’s only water person, the final two weeks’ readings were particularly appropriate and provided insight into the reality that water is both a material reality and a social construction. Mehta’s chapter (2011) introduced me to a new area of the political ecology of water—discourse analysis on media and public perceptions of water scarcity, solutions to scarcity, and how public perception is generated and may be at odds with scientific analysis. A case study centered on Kutch, a state in western India and a so-called beneficiary of the ongoing Sardar Sarovar megadam project, Mehta’s illuminates the created narrative of the dam water as the only solution for bringing irrigation water and develops a counternarrative wherein scarcity is not an absolute material state, but one produced by human actions and relative social and economic inequalities. Similarly focusing on water through the lens of agriculture and irrigation, Zimmerer (2000) breaks down the false dichotomy of local canal versus basin wide “large scale” irrigation in the Andes. Through a historical narrative of irrigation over time and how irrigation been used as an instrument of empire building and exclusion throughout the Inca and Spanish occupations, Zimmerer critiques modern development projects. These projects focus on local canal and create a value structure where local projects are “good” and “sustainable” and disassociate them with the larger valley and basin irrigation structures with which they were historically linked and interdependent. One of the great weaknesses of the political ecology we have read thus far, which extends to both Mehta and Zimmerer, is the absence or deficiency scientific grounding. While political ecology contends that it is grounded in material reality, the material reality is often actually a historical and economic reality rather than a scientific reality. Mehta discusses adaptation and mentions that the canal focus has decreased the legitimacy of rainwater harvesting and local reservoir or capacity building measures. However, by failing to estimate the potential of these local measures and adaptations to improve security and reduce perceived scarcity, the critique of the dam measure falls short. Yes, people adapt an Mehta is right to point this out, but what are the best means by which to encourage and improve adaptation behaviors and projects? Zimmerer lays out a comprehensive and very interesting historical narrative on the legal, societal, and economic development of irrigation systems. However, in pointing out that there is a link between local and large scale irrigation systems, Zimmerer leaves out critical point related to the fluid nature of water. It is not just an absence of historical perspective that leads development experts to create a false dichotomy between local and large-scale water, but a basic failure to understand important scientific concepts including: the local hydrological cycle, the nature of water as a fluid, the link between precipitation, water quality concern, and the distinction between a valley basin and a hydrogeological basin in terms of managing a system of water. As such, Zimmerer missed out on possibly the most important argument for managing and developing water at multiple scales from the local to the basin-wide.