Excerpt 4 – Vann’s Northern European Lectures, March 2008 – continued…
– Recognizing Water Governance: visibilities and invisibilities ‘on the ground’
IWRM ‘on the ground’
Considered as events that, in principle, happen in all nations, ‘policy’ and ‘legislation’ provide coarse-grained categories that allow for the aggregation and comparison with respect to a well-defined ideal. Indeed, one of the most interesting conflicts within the IWRM community that I have observed concerns how the implementation of IWRM should be recognized. And the need to develop one hegemonic method for ascertaining that was argued for on the basis of the need to have the same technique used by everyone so that results could be compared. These practices suggest an enormous collective engagement in practices of knowledge stabilization, requiring the continuing centrality of the nation state as an organizing tool. While that may be a pragmatic approach for the UN’s assessment project, in that it allows ‘local’ practices to be aggregated, assessed, and compared, it also renders invisible some aspects and sites of IWRM implementation that are – or may be – happening in ‘local’ domestic spaces...’on the ground’…
Now, with respect to such invisibilities, we are again confronted with the question of how anthropology of governance should proceed. Should we try to assess whether indeed IWRM is being implemented in local cases and how? I have taken this question with me into the field, in an effort to see how the views of those who have in some sense become known as agents of IWRM implementation actually orient to this question. I want to visit this sub-inquiry in some detail, because what I learned there actually teaches a lot about how ‘governance’ works ‘ on the ground’.
The setting is Pune, where one of the Global Water Partnership “area partnerships” in India is located. I went there to learn about how IWRM was being done there. I want to share with you some data from the conversations I had with folks who work in a civil society organization there. They work in the Kolwan Valley of the Bhima River Basin, in the State of Maharashtra. And they told me about how they are helping the villagers to develop their own water balance. How to figure out how much it rains, how much it percolates into the ground, what is discharged, what are the local demands and supplies, and where are the shortages. Where would they need to do the balancing?
Water users committees and water development committees are put into place in every village. They sort out problems at the village level. There are also systems put into place so that representatives from 16 surrounding villages can come together to negotiate transboundary resources. A man I spoke to called this a traditional system that has now been revived. Through this system, he said, integration of groundwater and surface water is achieved. Also they are able to re-use irrigation tanks that were constructed by the government 25, 30 years ago but which were not being used because there was no system in place to utilize them. He suggested that his civil society organization would negotiate and facilitate the discussions among the villagers, so that they are able to understand their own system. He said that they help the villagers to revive their own negotiating skills so that they can sort out distribution problems, quality problems, catchment problems, and efficient use of water problems. I asked him how their skills got lost. He described for me how in the 50s and 60s and 70s, the government agencies and the political discourse made Indian citizens feel that they no longer had to worry. The post- independence central government said, ‘now we have the Indian government - and not an imperial British government – so the Indian government will look after you. It’ll take care of all your problems, and it’ll make the necessary money available, and it’ll put systems into place, and everything will be hunky dory and everything will be set in order. So people started feeling, well, why should we worry about these old ways in which we were negotiating, and having our little water meetings and so on. And those sort of died out.
As this occurred, he said, the indigenous system of understanding, developing and using water, gave way to the so-called planning system of the irrigation and water supply department, where they said, well, the simplest way to do it, store it one place, have pipes all over, and that’s it. But it didn’t happen, because it didn’t reach all these places at the same time. 60, 70% of the areas are still not covered, and even those which are covered are still facing problems, because local people don’t know how to manage those systems, how to repair those systems, how to sort of raise money for those systems, and so on. So the civil society organization – Gomukh foundation – tries to marry what’s been created in terms of assets by the government, and upgrading the skills of the local populations, so that they can with honor and dignity use their skills in order to capture and fill the gaps left by centralized public systems. He said that this has worked. In the past, seven out of sixteen nearby villages had to be supplied with tankers during the summer and during droughts and scarcities. Now with the watershed development program, they emphasize the conjunctive use of groundwater and surface water and conjunctive use of reservoirs and surface and ground, and watershed – altogether – into what he called “a single managed and planned system.“ And it has led to a situation where the river flows all twelve months of the year, and no tanks need to go in any of the villages. Since 2000 there are no tankers go there. They worked from 1995 to 2000, and the sixth year or fifth year, tanker water was stopped.
So, we might ask, what does this have to do with IWRM? Is it IWRM?
UN water governance assessment and the textual perpetuation of the Nation State
Excerpt 3 - Vann’s Northern European Lectures, March 2008 – continued…
– Water Governance and the United Nations’ Transnational Assessments
From IWRM Plans to UN Assessment
As we pursued our original research plan, the international IWRM community went through some growing pains. The prior centrality that had been accorded to IWRM
National Plans began to lose some of its momentum. The reason was two-fold. First, there was some rumbling within the international IWRM community about how much sense it made to stress the terms “IWRM” in the first place. This was in 2006, and a lot of people in the community were saying ‘hey, look at South Africa – they are doing all of the things that are claimed about IWRM, but they don’t even mention IWRM in their documents!” Why then should it be so important to make an IWRM Plan?” Second, not many nations were getting very far writing national IWRM plans, anyway. The 2005
Johannesburg target obviously was not going to be met. And the international IWRM community began to put much more focus on cross-national assessments that would attempt to represent the extent to which IWRM was being carried out in multiple domestic arenas. These assessments were being conducted by various ngo’s.
This meant that the writing of IWRM Plans was not the important site of accounting as it had previously been. This suggested that our plan needed to transform in accordance with what we were finding. WE shifted attention to the cross-national assessments being conducted by various ngo’s. And soon learned that these were actually preparatory practices that would culminate in the grand assessment that would be undertaken by the UN as part of its world water assessment program.
Earlier I noted that the original research plan had sought to look at the relations between IWRM discourse on the web and IWRM discourse in National IWRM Plans. Again, the question was to ascertain the textual practices that nation states draw on to represent themselves as ‘doing IWRM’. Our reorientation to the assessment practices of the UN maintains the logic of that original question, but actually raises the stakes. The reason is that the UN is perhaps the central transnational organization that can represent and recognize the extent to which nations are fulfilling their commitments. In other words, the UN does in fact have a privileged position as an agent that engages in the practices of accountability, if only because its view of the world has consequences for other processes, such as world bank conditionality And reflecting its privileged position in this sense, the UN actually gets to ask the questions that it feels are important as a way of ascertaining the extent to which IWRM is actually being implemented in nation states.
That is to say, the UN is now in the position to create a set of textual conventions in terms of which empirical practices in the domestic arena can be represented as instances of IWRM practice. In doing so, the UN is in the position not only to accentuate specific properties of IWRM, but also to accentuate specific domestic institutions as social spaces in which such IWRM properties are legitimately implemented.
So I’ve conducted a fairly detailed study of the techniques that the UN uses to assess the extent to which IWRM is being implemented in the domestic field. Here again, I have a paper on this topic and I can share it with interested readers. But I want to share some of the highlights of the paper, because they have bearing on the question that NWO asks about the continuing centrality of the nation state and the practices of legitimacy and accountability.
What we find from an analysis of this assessment effort is that the nation state is presupposed as the key mediation and is thus the primary object of the UN’s present assessment practices. The assessment targets the water ministries of nation states as the respondents of the survey. The survey exclusively asks for information about the extent to which IWRM principles have become embedded in national policy and legislation, foregoing recognition of precisely those social practices where the implementation of IWRM may be most dynamic – such as in the work of civil society organizations. This suggests that a presumption of the power of the state as legitimate authority informs it. This is to be expected in the sense that the nation state was the presumptive agent of IWRM commitments in international fora and agreements at both Rio and Johannesburg. Yet the continued centrality of the state is also surprising, if not dilemmatic, precisely insofar as IWRM discourses have extolled a shift away from the state to civil society organizations as the more fruitful social spaces for the implementation of sound water management practice. Yet the meta-normative presumption of the centrality of the nation state is brought into being precisely in that its practices are presumed to be the site of IWRM implementation. One wonders how this very ‘traditional’ focus on the nation state would find its way into an assessment of anti-traditional water management practices. The explanation that I suggest in the paper, however, is that the nation state is a category that offers a powerful conceptual tool for organizing questions about reproduction and difference. The focus on policy and legislation creates closure, or stabilization, around ‘the implementation of IWRM’ as an object of knowledge, and holds domestic IWRM practice still for the purposes of aggregation and comparison. The survey doesn’t reflect a desire or need to know all the wild details of how IWRM ‘happens on the ground’ in ‘different contexts’. It seems rather to reflect a need to have many answers (from different contexts) to questions about the presence or absence of clearly definable and circumscribed object.
Considered as events that, in principle, happen in all nations, ‘policy’ and ‘legislation’ provide coarse-grained categories that allow for the aggregation and comparison with respect to a well-defined ideal. Indeed, one of the most interesting conflicts within the
IWRM community that I have observed concerns how the implementation of IWRM should be recognized. And the need to develop one hegemonic method for ascertaining that was argued for on the basis of the need to have the same technique used by everyone so that results could be compared. These practices suggest an enormous collective engagement in practices of knowledge stabilization, requiring the continuing centrality of the nation state as an organizing tool. While that may be a pragmatic approach that allows ‘local’ practices to be aggregated, assessed, and compared, it also renders invisible some aspects and sites of IWRM implementation that are – or may be – happening in local domestic spaces.
– Water Governance and the United Nations’ Transnational Assessments
From IWRM Plans to UN Assessment
As we pursued our original research plan, the international IWRM community went through some growing pains. The prior centrality that had been accorded to IWRM
National Plans began to lose some of its momentum. The reason was two-fold. First, there was some rumbling within the international IWRM community about how much sense it made to stress the terms “IWRM” in the first place. This was in 2006, and a lot of people in the community were saying ‘hey, look at South Africa – they are doing all of the things that are claimed about IWRM, but they don’t even mention IWRM in their documents!” Why then should it be so important to make an IWRM Plan?” Second, not many nations were getting very far writing national IWRM plans, anyway. The 2005
Johannesburg target obviously was not going to be met. And the international IWRM community began to put much more focus on cross-national assessments that would attempt to represent the extent to which IWRM was being carried out in multiple domestic arenas. These assessments were being conducted by various ngo’s.
This meant that the writing of IWRM Plans was not the important site of accounting as it had previously been. This suggested that our plan needed to transform in accordance with what we were finding. WE shifted attention to the cross-national assessments being conducted by various ngo’s. And soon learned that these were actually preparatory practices that would culminate in the grand assessment that would be undertaken by the UN as part of its world water assessment program.
Earlier I noted that the original research plan had sought to look at the relations between IWRM discourse on the web and IWRM discourse in National IWRM Plans. Again, the question was to ascertain the textual practices that nation states draw on to represent themselves as ‘doing IWRM’. Our reorientation to the assessment practices of the UN maintains the logic of that original question, but actually raises the stakes. The reason is that the UN is perhaps the central transnational organization that can represent and recognize the extent to which nations are fulfilling their commitments. In other words, the UN does in fact have a privileged position as an agent that engages in the practices of accountability, if only because its view of the world has consequences for other processes, such as world bank conditionality And reflecting its privileged position in this sense, the UN actually gets to ask the questions that it feels are important as a way of ascertaining the extent to which IWRM is actually being implemented in nation states.
That is to say, the UN is now in the position to create a set of textual conventions in terms of which empirical practices in the domestic arena can be represented as instances of IWRM practice. In doing so, the UN is in the position not only to accentuate specific properties of IWRM, but also to accentuate specific domestic institutions as social spaces in which such IWRM properties are legitimately implemented.
So I’ve conducted a fairly detailed study of the techniques that the UN uses to assess the extent to which IWRM is being implemented in the domestic field. Here again, I have a paper on this topic and I can share it with interested readers. But I want to share some of the highlights of the paper, because they have bearing on the question that NWO asks about the continuing centrality of the nation state and the practices of legitimacy and accountability.
What we find from an analysis of this assessment effort is that the nation state is presupposed as the key mediation and is thus the primary object of the UN’s present assessment practices. The assessment targets the water ministries of nation states as the respondents of the survey. The survey exclusively asks for information about the extent to which IWRM principles have become embedded in national policy and legislation, foregoing recognition of precisely those social practices where the implementation of IWRM may be most dynamic – such as in the work of civil society organizations. This suggests that a presumption of the power of the state as legitimate authority informs it. This is to be expected in the sense that the nation state was the presumptive agent of IWRM commitments in international fora and agreements at both Rio and Johannesburg. Yet the continued centrality of the state is also surprising, if not dilemmatic, precisely insofar as IWRM discourses have extolled a shift away from the state to civil society organizations as the more fruitful social spaces for the implementation of sound water management practice. Yet the meta-normative presumption of the centrality of the nation state is brought into being precisely in that its practices are presumed to be the site of IWRM implementation. One wonders how this very ‘traditional’ focus on the nation state would find its way into an assessment of anti-traditional water management practices. The explanation that I suggest in the paper, however, is that the nation state is a category that offers a powerful conceptual tool for organizing questions about reproduction and difference. The focus on policy and legislation creates closure, or stabilization, around ‘the implementation of IWRM’ as an object of knowledge, and holds domestic IWRM practice still for the purposes of aggregation and comparison. The survey doesn’t reflect a desire or need to know all the wild details of how IWRM ‘happens on the ground’ in ‘different contexts’. It seems rather to reflect a need to have many answers (from different contexts) to questions about the presence or absence of clearly definable and circumscribed object.
Considered as events that, in principle, happen in all nations, ‘policy’ and ‘legislation’ provide coarse-grained categories that allow for the aggregation and comparison with respect to a well-defined ideal. Indeed, one of the most interesting conflicts within the
IWRM community that I have observed concerns how the implementation of IWRM should be recognized. And the need to develop one hegemonic method for ascertaining that was argued for on the basis of the need to have the same technique used by everyone so that results could be compared. These practices suggest an enormous collective engagement in practices of knowledge stabilization, requiring the continuing centrality of the nation state as an organizing tool. While that may be a pragmatic approach that allows ‘local’ practices to be aggregated, assessed, and compared, it also renders invisible some aspects and sites of IWRM implementation that are – or may be – happening in local domestic spaces.
Water Governance and Questions of Research Method
Hi readers. Last time I left off at the end of the first section of a talk I recently gave in northern Europe. TodayI pick up where we left off, and share section two. The topic is water governance and questions of method.
Excerpt 2 – Vann’s Northern European Lectures, March 2008 – continued…
– Water Governance and Questions of Method
Although any instance of IWRM implementation would entail some aspect of the series of anti-traditional governance properties that distance IWRM from centralized modes of administration, heterogeneity is expected and encouraged with respect to which of those properties is reproduced, and indeed what form any such properties would take were they reproduced. That is to say, recognition of impending heterogeneity of the sort that we find within the IWRM movement is somehow embedded in the standard of conduct to which the IWRM movement seeks to give rise. For neo-institutionalists in the room, this differs significantly from incidental forms of ‘loose coupling’, which neo-institutionalists and situated interactionists alike have discovered attend even the most heavy-handed attempts at rationalization and standardization. By contrast, there is nothing incidental “loose coupling” in IWRM implementation; it is rather as if the discovery of neo-institutional theory had itself been internalized and proceduralized.
The situation has led to some anxiety around the ‘vagueness’ of IWRM, and many practitioners have commented upon the need to arrive at more precise definitions of its principles. If only IWRM could be properly defined, folks ‘on the ground’ could get to work doing it, and the international community would be able to recognize whether they were, or not. The situation also leads to some fairly sticky issues of accountability, in the sense that, as a movement which seeks to foster a prospective shift in governance world- wide, while not specifying what such governance conduct would precisely entail, the movement is deeply paradoxical – it is simultaneously both centrist and non-centrist in character.
In relation to such a situation, the anthropology of IWRM as a mode of governance has some choices to make when it asks what NWO asks: ‘whether the widely held beliefs about the shift to multi-level governance are actually corroborated by empirical evidence?” – Will anthropology orient to ‘empirical evidence’ ‘on the ground’ in order to specify what a robust IWRM would entail? Will it attempt to ascertain whether practices “on the ground” are really doing IWRM, or not? It should be clear to people in the room that in following either of these lines of inquiry, anthropological research takes on precisely the same form of engagement with the IWRM movement as that which is taken up by participants in the IWRM movement itself. Put differently, anthropology is instrumentalized toward the realization of the very interests that characterize the cultures it is seeking to understand. Now, there is nothing so wrong with trying to be useful, and this mode of anthropological research is highly valued and has a long history in policy and development studies.
But what some folks have come to realize is that inquiry in this mode is essentially corrective in its logic: it assesses and improves upon features of the cultural formation it seeks to understand, but only by framing some of it features as deficiencies that need to be overcome. Is IWRM really happening here? If not, what’s missing? A corollary of that framing is that the very practices that make up the cultural formation are regarded as barriers to something else, rather than cultural phenomena in their own right. This is particularly problematic in studies governance, because they wind up orienting to governance as something research might itself learn to give rise to, rather than as something that research might understand. In short, the descriptive imperatives of social research become thoroughly conflated with the normative imperatives of the cultures social research seeks to characterize.
The conflation is problematic in the case of governance studies because it diverts attention away from the ways in which ‘governance’ practices entail precisely those efforts to specify what a robust IWRM would really entail, and to ascertain whether practices on the ground are really doing IWRM: is the presence of IWRM implementation corroborated by empirical evidence? Such efforts are not external to cultures of governance; they are features of it. Even anthropologists of policy and development are beginning to see this. Many of them are influenced by actor network theory and look likewise to the processes of translation that actor network theory proposes goes a long way toward holding cultural formations together. How are the heterogeneities of water management practices ‘on the ground’ translated as instances of IWRM governance? As NWO might pose the question: what are the ways in which the shifts in governance are rendered operational in practice? Note that asking about how practices are ‘rendered’ suggests that ‘translation’ does not necessarily consist in turning an idealized policy model into actions, but rather in rendering (or drawing and representing) actions as instances of an idealized policy model.
Our Project Method and Plan
Working in this mode of anthropological reasoning, our project took a very specific stance in formulating its questions. Rather than trying to help define IWRM more rigorously so that it might be adequately implemented in local cases, and rather than trying to assess whether the evidence corroborates the existence of IWRM in particular settings, our project sought to understand how local IWRM practices as such are represented in such a way that they are recognized by others as successfully or unsuccessfully implementing IWRM. How are the practices of local actors rendered in such a way that those practices are recognized as instances or examples of IWRM? This question reflects our awareness that IWRM is a globalized normative construct, and that as such there are stakes – interests - involved in being recognized as having implemented it. This connects with the question of accountability: how are practices being accounted for in terms of the IWRM model? And who are the multiple actors that are accounting for local practices? At the time the research plan was formulated what are called “National IWRM Plans” were a salient example of representational practices. The reason is that nation states had committed to writing “National IWRM Plans” at Johannesburg. So we wanted to find out how IWRM plans were written such that they represented nation states as instances of ‘doing IWRM’. WE also wanted to know whether there were some robust connections between those the language choices that were used in writing IWRM Plans, and the ways in which IWRM principles were operationalized in discussions of IWRM at the scale of the World Wide Web. The hypothesis was that the web provided a communication medium through which the operational properties of IWRM were circulated. Such circulation would give salience to particular properties of IWRM, and they thus would provide textual resources to actors as they went about the process of representing the implementation of IWRM in their own countries. Posed in schematic methodological terms, we were asking, what are the relations between the representation of IWRM at the micro scale of IWRM plans, and the representation of IWRM at the macro scale of the web. Those relations would display forms of iteration, or the reproduction of and emphasis through language of certain IWRM properties over others.
If the world wants to know whether nation states are ‘doing’ IWRM, the world relies heavily on the nation states’ own ways of representing itself to the world. Textual practices of this sort play an important role in bringing the ‘real’ that happens ‘locally’ to the world as an object of scrutiny. The role of such representational practices is of course necessitated because of the scale at which such ‘locals’ proliferate (the world cannot itself go to every local to see for itself whether they are all ‘doing it’). But it is also, and perhaps more importantly, necessitated by role of textual practices even in first-hand accounts of empirical phenomena. When one seeks to ascertain whether a model of conduct is really being implemented in empirical practices in a local context, he or she necessarily engages in processes of representing those practices, drawing on particular textual resources to describe them and to classify them as instances of the properties he or she is looking for, or not. In other words, there is no privileged position from which an account of empirical practices can be constructed, which itself is not highly mediated by conventions of language use.
The original research plan had focused on the relation between IWRM-related language conventions of this sort on the web and the conventions of language use that were evidenced in IWRM national plans. Our focus on IWRM plans in the research proposal reflected the centrality that IWRM Plans had in the IWRM community at that time.
IWRM Plans had been targeted and formalized in the Johannesburg Plan of
Implementation. Insofar as nation states committed to implementing IWRM in their countries, this was to materialized in national IWRM Plans. The ‘commitment’ nation states made at that time was to have developed IWRM plans by 2005.
Web study
We conducted several analyses of IWRM’s web presence. We have published two papers on this, and a third paper is under review at this time. What I emphasize here are two points: the first the second concerns what that IWRM content is. The second concerns who is producing IWRM content on the web. With respect to the content, we found some surprising results. We had hypothesized that IWRM’s web presence would be highly populated with terms that referred to it operational principles. Our hypothesis was refuted, but in the process we did learn a lot about IWRM’s actual web presence. We found that there was not high frequency for what we might think of operational IWRM terms (such as public-private partnerships, participation, cross-sectoral integration, subsidiarity, gender mainstreaming, and so on). What there was high frequency for were goal-oriented terms such as ‘sustainable development’ and ‘economic development’.
We also learned a lot about who is producing IWRM content, on the web. At the time of our web crawls, IWRM’s web presence is dominated by the production practices of its promoters (not, for example, those who are ‘doing it’ in ‘local’ communities. That is to say, to the extent that IWRM has a presence on the web, that presence is largely produced by IWRM promoters – for example, the Global Water Partnership, the UN, and some other transnational organizations organized run in the global north. Though not as significant, there was also quite a lot of IWRM content being produced by academics. Many of these papers were of the corrective genre: here is how practices which claim to be IWRM practices are failing to be IWRM practices; Here is how IWRM can really be brought about; here is how IWRM should be done. We found little evidence of IWRM content being produced by civil society organizations that were themselves engaged in doing integrated water resources management. If you care about the web as a medium for the communication of shifts in governance, this is an important finding.
Excerpt 2 – Vann’s Northern European Lectures, March 2008 – continued…
– Water Governance and Questions of Method
Although any instance of IWRM implementation would entail some aspect of the series of anti-traditional governance properties that distance IWRM from centralized modes of administration, heterogeneity is expected and encouraged with respect to which of those properties is reproduced, and indeed what form any such properties would take were they reproduced. That is to say, recognition of impending heterogeneity of the sort that we find within the IWRM movement is somehow embedded in the standard of conduct to which the IWRM movement seeks to give rise. For neo-institutionalists in the room, this differs significantly from incidental forms of ‘loose coupling’, which neo-institutionalists and situated interactionists alike have discovered attend even the most heavy-handed attempts at rationalization and standardization. By contrast, there is nothing incidental “loose coupling” in IWRM implementation; it is rather as if the discovery of neo-institutional theory had itself been internalized and proceduralized.
The situation has led to some anxiety around the ‘vagueness’ of IWRM, and many practitioners have commented upon the need to arrive at more precise definitions of its principles. If only IWRM could be properly defined, folks ‘on the ground’ could get to work doing it, and the international community would be able to recognize whether they were, or not. The situation also leads to some fairly sticky issues of accountability, in the sense that, as a movement which seeks to foster a prospective shift in governance world- wide, while not specifying what such governance conduct would precisely entail, the movement is deeply paradoxical – it is simultaneously both centrist and non-centrist in character.
In relation to such a situation, the anthropology of IWRM as a mode of governance has some choices to make when it asks what NWO asks: ‘whether the widely held beliefs about the shift to multi-level governance are actually corroborated by empirical evidence?” – Will anthropology orient to ‘empirical evidence’ ‘on the ground’ in order to specify what a robust IWRM would entail? Will it attempt to ascertain whether practices “on the ground” are really doing IWRM, or not? It should be clear to people in the room that in following either of these lines of inquiry, anthropological research takes on precisely the same form of engagement with the IWRM movement as that which is taken up by participants in the IWRM movement itself. Put differently, anthropology is instrumentalized toward the realization of the very interests that characterize the cultures it is seeking to understand. Now, there is nothing so wrong with trying to be useful, and this mode of anthropological research is highly valued and has a long history in policy and development studies.
But what some folks have come to realize is that inquiry in this mode is essentially corrective in its logic: it assesses and improves upon features of the cultural formation it seeks to understand, but only by framing some of it features as deficiencies that need to be overcome. Is IWRM really happening here? If not, what’s missing? A corollary of that framing is that the very practices that make up the cultural formation are regarded as barriers to something else, rather than cultural phenomena in their own right. This is particularly problematic in studies governance, because they wind up orienting to governance as something research might itself learn to give rise to, rather than as something that research might understand. In short, the descriptive imperatives of social research become thoroughly conflated with the normative imperatives of the cultures social research seeks to characterize.
The conflation is problematic in the case of governance studies because it diverts attention away from the ways in which ‘governance’ practices entail precisely those efforts to specify what a robust IWRM would really entail, and to ascertain whether practices on the ground are really doing IWRM: is the presence of IWRM implementation corroborated by empirical evidence? Such efforts are not external to cultures of governance; they are features of it. Even anthropologists of policy and development are beginning to see this. Many of them are influenced by actor network theory and look likewise to the processes of translation that actor network theory proposes goes a long way toward holding cultural formations together. How are the heterogeneities of water management practices ‘on the ground’ translated as instances of IWRM governance? As NWO might pose the question: what are the ways in which the shifts in governance are rendered operational in practice? Note that asking about how practices are ‘rendered’ suggests that ‘translation’ does not necessarily consist in turning an idealized policy model into actions, but rather in rendering (or drawing and representing) actions as instances of an idealized policy model.
Our Project Method and Plan
Working in this mode of anthropological reasoning, our project took a very specific stance in formulating its questions. Rather than trying to help define IWRM more rigorously so that it might be adequately implemented in local cases, and rather than trying to assess whether the evidence corroborates the existence of IWRM in particular settings, our project sought to understand how local IWRM practices as such are represented in such a way that they are recognized by others as successfully or unsuccessfully implementing IWRM. How are the practices of local actors rendered in such a way that those practices are recognized as instances or examples of IWRM? This question reflects our awareness that IWRM is a globalized normative construct, and that as such there are stakes – interests - involved in being recognized as having implemented it. This connects with the question of accountability: how are practices being accounted for in terms of the IWRM model? And who are the multiple actors that are accounting for local practices? At the time the research plan was formulated what are called “National IWRM Plans” were a salient example of representational practices. The reason is that nation states had committed to writing “National IWRM Plans” at Johannesburg. So we wanted to find out how IWRM plans were written such that they represented nation states as instances of ‘doing IWRM’. WE also wanted to know whether there were some robust connections between those the language choices that were used in writing IWRM Plans, and the ways in which IWRM principles were operationalized in discussions of IWRM at the scale of the World Wide Web. The hypothesis was that the web provided a communication medium through which the operational properties of IWRM were circulated. Such circulation would give salience to particular properties of IWRM, and they thus would provide textual resources to actors as they went about the process of representing the implementation of IWRM in their own countries. Posed in schematic methodological terms, we were asking, what are the relations between the representation of IWRM at the micro scale of IWRM plans, and the representation of IWRM at the macro scale of the web. Those relations would display forms of iteration, or the reproduction of and emphasis through language of certain IWRM properties over others.
If the world wants to know whether nation states are ‘doing’ IWRM, the world relies heavily on the nation states’ own ways of representing itself to the world. Textual practices of this sort play an important role in bringing the ‘real’ that happens ‘locally’ to the world as an object of scrutiny. The role of such representational practices is of course necessitated because of the scale at which such ‘locals’ proliferate (the world cannot itself go to every local to see for itself whether they are all ‘doing it’). But it is also, and perhaps more importantly, necessitated by role of textual practices even in first-hand accounts of empirical phenomena. When one seeks to ascertain whether a model of conduct is really being implemented in empirical practices in a local context, he or she necessarily engages in processes of representing those practices, drawing on particular textual resources to describe them and to classify them as instances of the properties he or she is looking for, or not. In other words, there is no privileged position from which an account of empirical practices can be constructed, which itself is not highly mediated by conventions of language use.
The original research plan had focused on the relation between IWRM-related language conventions of this sort on the web and the conventions of language use that were evidenced in IWRM national plans. Our focus on IWRM plans in the research proposal reflected the centrality that IWRM Plans had in the IWRM community at that time.
IWRM Plans had been targeted and formalized in the Johannesburg Plan of
Implementation. Insofar as nation states committed to implementing IWRM in their countries, this was to materialized in national IWRM Plans. The ‘commitment’ nation states made at that time was to have developed IWRM plans by 2005.
Web study
We conducted several analyses of IWRM’s web presence. We have published two papers on this, and a third paper is under review at this time. What I emphasize here are two points: the first the second concerns what that IWRM content is. The second concerns who is producing IWRM content on the web. With respect to the content, we found some surprising results. We had hypothesized that IWRM’s web presence would be highly populated with terms that referred to it operational principles. Our hypothesis was refuted, but in the process we did learn a lot about IWRM’s actual web presence. We found that there was not high frequency for what we might think of operational IWRM terms (such as public-private partnerships, participation, cross-sectoral integration, subsidiarity, gender mainstreaming, and so on). What there was high frequency for were goal-oriented terms such as ‘sustainable development’ and ‘economic development’.
We also learned a lot about who is producing IWRM content, on the web. At the time of our web crawls, IWRM’s web presence is dominated by the production practices of its promoters (not, for example, those who are ‘doing it’ in ‘local’ communities. That is to say, to the extent that IWRM has a presence on the web, that presence is largely produced by IWRM promoters – for example, the Global Water Partnership, the UN, and some other transnational organizations organized run in the global north. Though not as significant, there was also quite a lot of IWRM content being produced by academics. Many of these papers were of the corrective genre: here is how practices which claim to be IWRM practices are failing to be IWRM practices; Here is how IWRM can really be brought about; here is how IWRM should be done. We found little evidence of IWRM content being produced by civil society organizations that were themselves engaged in doing integrated water resources management. If you care about the web as a medium for the communication of shifts in governance, this is an important finding.
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