Dear readers, it’s been a couple o f weeks since my last post. Returning to the states has been a bizarre experience. Being immersed in field data, video footage, and strong, lingering feelings from the trip while getting back to the clean and orderly task-based pace of here has been more disorienting, perhaps differently disordering, than landing in the Mumbai airport at 1am, getting 3 hours of sleep and hitting the Mumbai airport again to fly to Delhi (..don’t forget all the puking in airport garbage cans...) to join up immediately with some people passionately engaged in alternative waste management systems...The return to the states was, yes, differently disorienting. I’m happy to be home after such a rich experience, but I admit I miss the place I’ve recently left. The data keeps it alive and the feelings of analysis are, well, bitter sweet.
In today’s post I want to offer a couple of remarks about the transcript excerpt that spans posts on January 31st and January 29th. I feel so fortunate to have been able to interview this man, Vijay Paranjype, who has been involved in community water management and water rights struggles in the state of
was published in Infochange, along with a series of other insightful papers on the Politics of Water http://www.infochangeindia.org/agenda3.jsp
Alongside his work as a commentator and community activist, Vijay is also involved with the IWRM movement. One reason it is important to emphasize this involvement, is that there are some rather severe ambiguities within IWRM policy discourse, as to whether it is represents a pro-privatization water management movement or an equitable, and participatory water management movement. For example, in the widely read “Blue Gold” by Barlow and Clarke, the Global Water Partnership (GWP), which has been one of the main consciousness raising proponents of the integrated water resources management movement, is described as a “big business lobby organization” that promotes “the privatization and export of water resources and services through close links with global water corporations and financial institutions” (Barlow and Clarke, 2002: 157). Barlow and Clarke maintain that the Global Water Partnership (GWP), the World Water Council (WWC), and the World Commission on Water (WCW) for the 21st Century “appea[r] to be neutral because in theory, they exist to facilitate dialogue between the various stakeholders and to bring about a more sustainable management of water resources. But a closer look reveals that these agencies promote the privatization and export of water resources and services through close links with global water corporations and financial institutions. The Global Water Partnership was established in 1996 to “support countries in the sustainable management of their water resources.” Its operating principle, however, is the recognition that water is “an economic good” and “has an economic value in all its competing uses.” This basic principle lies at the core of the GWP’s main programs to reform water utility systems and water resources management in countries around the world.” (Barlow and Clarke, 2002:157)
However, it strikes me that as a management model that is meant to inform the construction of domestic policies and legislation, IWRM is perhaps a more complicated a story than that which is painted by Barlow and Clarke. Insofar as the GWP is a cultural steward engaged in the promotion of IWRM, it endorses a wide range of principles that are, at least formally, equally important to the conception of water as an economic good. There is no doubt, however, that what the GWP really promotes, that what IWRM really is, is neither evident nor reducible, and the reason is that IWRM itself is a heterogeneous set of guidelines which is, self-avowedly and strategically, many things to many people. Put differently, if we attempt to parse the difference between what IWRM proponents purport to be and what they really are, we miss some interesting and consequential social and political features of the very circulation of the IWRM moniker as such.
The perspective of Vijay on his relations to IWRM throw some light on this. Because what he describes is a process of community activism that has been undertaken in light of the absence of desirable, effective, and accountable action on the part of state-sanctioned agents – a community action that at some point takes up a relation to the IWRM moniker in order to achieve some more steam and legitimacy and support on the part of those very state-sanctioned actors. Community actors account their actions in the terms of a moniker which itself has some claims to make on the legitimacy of the state. And it’s not that in utilizing the moniker those community activities are claiming something untrue for themselves; they were doing ‘it’ all along; the moniker affords for those community activities fresh leverage and legitimacy and support from the state – and precisely insofar as the concept to which the moniker is related has attained the power to ‘force’ the state to accept them as legitimate. And one of the interesting questions here is what it means sociologically for relations that emerge between IWRM and what Vijay calls the Council for Equitable Water Rights (for some background on this council see an interesting paper by Roopali Phadke http://www.india-seminar.com/2002/516/516%20roopali%20phadke.htm) Ought we to suppose that Council is really a lobbyist for equitable water rights, but, upon its relation with IWRM, then it appears to be a lobbyist for big private water business, or that perhaps, then, it is really a lobbyist for big private water business?
