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| Aqeducto de Aguila, Nerja - Peter Tjon 2023. !9th Century sugar mill water works. |
Hydropolitical dream schemes
It is not just in Ecuadorian or Peruvian modernization
programs that idealtype systems are implanted, based on standardized,
replicable property regimes, governance structures and water-control
techniques. Conventional training institutes and manuals universally promote
packages combining very similar hydraulic, economic, organizational and
agro-productive designs. Contextuality of water rights, cultures and peoples is
made irrelevant to reshape community institutional practice in line with
national (State) and international (market) frameworks. Hydrosocial
engineering, ‘rational’ cropping patterns, ‘optimal’ water schedules, and
‘efficient’ water use, ‘functional’ water rights and ‘accountable’
organizations can all be manufactured. Their schemes share the dream that
finely graded governance techniques, strategically interweaving legal procedures
and administrative structures with hydraulic, agro-productive and organizational
designs and training efforts, will persuade water users that these policy
objectives, normative frameworks and system responsibilities are self evident. Their
endeavors share, indeed, a sociotechnical utopia internalizing subjection: an
all-inclusive, productive hydropolitical web aligning material and social can
and should subject water users to a control/self-control game, playing
universal, rational system norms and rules on efficient water use and modern
governance upon themselves. Rather than being forced, they “want to come in
from the cold”.
I am not the first to argue that such social/legal
engineering of water societies is a myth. Moreover, meticulous configuration of
humans and nonhumans, rules, rights and prescriptions, all working toward a
convergent, predictable water-control system, is an illusion. Except for some
archaic ‘deskjockeys’, even the greatest policy dreamers know that official
rules and policies are profoundly mediated by ‘the stubbornness of reality’.
Therefore, it is not so much the particular contents or effectiveness of these
rules, rights and techniques that lead to their strong influence—it is
relatively easy to discredit a substantive part of their claims to quality and
effectiveness when put into practice. What matters is that, at the
legal–political–technical design table, ‘hydropolitical dream schemes’ make up
a coherent, potent discursive system, rationally linking individuals and
micro-water control society to meso- and macro scales of governance. Hence
their self-fulfilling properties: when components of the model fail, their
functionality or rationality are not questioned but the very user communities,
for failing to apply it as ‘rational clients’ would do. They are blamed and
made to blame themselves. As the book’s illustrations demonstrate, beyond just
blaming the victims (i.e. Andean water-user collectives), models often either
reconstruct or erase them.5 The fact that proposals are largely unadapted to
local contexts is not directly relevant: the point is not to adapt but to
transform and control users’ reality. Quite aside from (also existing) powerful
interests behind dream-scheme realization, there is a conviction, mostly
unrelated to any wickedness, that the myth must be realized. Modernist progress
thinkers’ illusion (from liberal humanists and Marxists to neoliberal
modernizers) that full, overall water control is morally necessary and in
everyone’s interest continues the quest to build Babylon’s Water Tower, forcing
everyone to speak the same water language. Its illusiveness does not make its
power illusory; on the contrary, it generates powerful contradictions in
everyday practice. It may be a mission impossible, but mission it is.
