The water question in feminism: water control and gender inequities in a neo-liberal era

Abstract

The current neo-liberal moment in water policy appears to offer possibilities for realizing feminist ambitions. Several feminist scholars see the individualization and privatization of resource rights as offering possibilities for confronting gender inequalities rooted in, and reproduced by, historic and structural male favoured access to productive resources such as land and water. But we seriously doubt a progressive feminist potential of neo-liberal reforms in the water sector. We focus on water used for agricultural purposes, because neo-liberal water proposals are premised on taking water out of agriculture to uses with higher marginal economic returns. A first set of doubts involves water as a specific resource, largely because of its propensity to flow. Rights to water are less fixed and more prone to be contested at various levels and in different socio-legal domains than rights to other natural resources. The second set stems from our disagreement with the ideological underpinnings of the neo-liberal project. It reflects our concern about how water reforms articulate with wider political-economic structures and historical dynamics characterized by new ways of capitalist expansion. Furthermore, mainstream neo-liberal water policy language and concepts tend to hide precisely those issues that, from a critical feminist perspective, need to be questioned. Feminist reflections about tenure insecurity and social inequities in relation to water clash with the terms of a neo-liberal framework that invisibilizes, naturalizes and objectifies the politics and powers involved in water re-allocation. A feminist response calls for challenging the individualization, marketization and consumer/client focus of the neo-liberal paradigm.

Keywords:

• water management
• gender
• feminism
• water rights
• neo-liberalism

Acknowledgements

This article benefited greatly from discussions with Kathleen O'Reilly, Nina Laurie, Leslie Harris, and the thoughtful and challenging comments from three anonymous reviewers. This was a fully collaborative effort: the authors' names are listed in alphabetical order only for convenience.

Notes

 1. Trained as irrigation engineers, we focused our gender critique on irrigation development. Elsewhere (Zwarteveen and Bennett 2004; Ahlers 2000) we have argued that while gender became an accepted topic in water supply and sanitation as early as the 1980s due to locating women stereotypically in the domestic domain, in the field of irrigation this was far more difficult to accomplish (see Zwarteveen 2007 for a detailed examination of the reasons thereof). Even though work on gender and irrigation has been available since the early 1980s (Dey 1981), only more than a decade later, after numerous case studies and theoretical analysis of gender and water rights, did gender issues in irrigation achieve the recognition it deserves.

 2. For Mexico see for instance Ahlers (2002a, 2005b); Carmona (1997); Pacheco (1999); Monsalvo-Valezquez and Wester (2002); for Bolivia see Gutiérrez and Cardona (1998); Prins (1996); Tuitelaars de Quitón et al. (1994); for Ecuador see Ahlers and Smits (1991); Arroyo and Boelens (1998, 2004); Bastidas (1999); Francke (1993); Jacome and Krol (1994); Krol (1994); Vokral (1991); for Peru see Bourque and Warren (1981); Bunker and Seligmann (1986); Lynch (1991, 1993), Van de Pol (1992). For multiple country cases see Bennett, Poblete, and Rico (2004); Boelens and Zwarteveen (2002); and Vera (2005).

 3. We are aware of the ongoing discussion concerning the problems arising from using a generic and universalistic notion of the term neo-liberal (see Castree 2006; Bakker 2007). We take the Chicago school economic policy framework implemented in Chile during the Pinochet dictatorship (1973–89) and applied by the World Bank and International Monetary Fund as lending conditionality in Mexico since the Mexico peso crisis in 1982 as our reference policy model. For the water sector this policy framework is literally the basis for the World Bank 1993 water policy directive that has greatly influenced water policy and legal frameworks throughout the world.

 4. This is highly influenced by the shift from private to state controlled irrigation systems in the early twentieth century and the movement back towards privatization and decentralization in the late twentieth century.

 5. Privatization reforms are argued on the premise of failing state (and collective) management of resources and service delivery (for irrigation see Merrey 1996; Ostrom 1990, 1992; Vermillion 1991), whether these are national assets such as oil or railways, or public services such as health care and education.

 6. For a conprehensive version of this argument see Briscoe (1996); Rosegrant and Binswanger (1994); Rosegrant and Gazmuri (1994); Perry, Rock, and Seckler (1997); Ringler, Rosegrant, and Paisner (2000).

 7. For a full discussion on how accumulation by dispossession unfolds in the irrigation sector in Mexico, see Ahlers (2005b).

 8. The pareto optimum is the situation characterised as optimally economically efficient as it describes the moment when no further improvements to any individual well-being can be made without reducing the well-being of another. In other words, the optimal distribution of well-being among a number of individuals has been reached. This notion has been critiqued extensively for its primary focus on the individual as disconnected from a social context.

 9. In neo-liberal thinking, water use and management are typically postulated as activities of which the rationale can be directly deduced from, and is limited to, a clearly delimited and relatively insulated water domain. Who you are in this domain is thus seen as primarily a function of the characteristics of the domain itself, related to the internal rules of the game and its functional hierarchies, rather than as stemming from any ‘outside’ social context or identity (Zwarteveen 2007).

10. The term ‘god-trick’ comes from Donna Haraway (1991). Earlier, the utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham used the idea of a ‘god-view’ from nowhere and everywhere in his design of the panoptical prison in the eighteenth century. On this basis, Foucault (1995) developed his ideas on power, discourse, disciplining and normalization.

11. In other words, water knowledge is written ‘from the centre’. Chambers referred to this as the ‘center-outward, core-periphery’ perspective (Chambers 1989, 6). A powerful characteristic of the neo-liberal water policy discourse is that this centre is made invisible, thereby strengthening its disciplining power.

12. For empirical cases, see Ahlers (2005a) and Rap, Wester, and Pérez-Prado (2004) for Mexico; Vera and Zwarteveen (2008) for Peru; and Boelens (2008) for Ecuador.

13. Fernandes develops this notion of social property for urban development in the Brazilian context (Fernandes and Rolnik 1998; Fernandez and Varley 1998; Fernandes 1999, 2002).