Governing the water user: experiences from Mexico

ABSTRACT

This article traces a policy shift that makes the ‘water user’ the main subject of water governance. From a Foucauldian perspective on governmentality these new subjectivities accompany neo-liberal governmental technologies to devolve autonomy from state institutions to an active user base, whilst retaining some ‘control at a distance’. The expectation is that individual subjects will incorporate control mechanisms and internalize norms and that this leads to new publicly auditable forms of self-regulation. The article questions the underlying assumption that policy necessarily accomplishes its strategic effects through governmentality. For this purpose, it draws on an ethnographic case study of how policy produced a new power/knowledge regime and how different societal actors and ‘user’ groups responded to that. The study specifically investigates the Mexican policy of irrigation management transfer during the 1990s, by which government transferred the public control over irrigation districts to locally organized water users’ associations (WUAs). The article argues that governmental technologies make and govern the ‘water user’ by discursively and materially constituting an organizational arrangement for user management (WUA), more than by directly acting on individuals’ self-regulated conduct. The analysis contributes to a broader reflection on the role of power/knowledge in natural resources management and decentralized resources governance.

KEYWORDS:

• Governmentality
• power and knowledge
• governmental technologies
• policy
• water governance
• NRM
• Mexico

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Dr. Edwin Rap has been undertaking research as a visiting scholar at IHE-Delft. He has a PhD in water management and rural development sociology from Wageningen University and his research interests include the ethnography of water institutions and organizations, professional formation and expertise, and the making of water policy and law. He has worked in different parts of Latin America, the Middle East and Africa.

Dr. Philippus (Flip) Wester is Chief Scientist Water Resources Management with the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD). He has a PhD degree in water resources management from Wageningen University and his research focuses on climate change adaptation and water resources management, with attention for the politics and governance of water resources, river basin management, water reforms and water allocation processes.

ORCID

Philippus Wester http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0126-7853

Notes

1 The text of this article draws significantly on our earlier articles on the topic in which Mexican and international sources are quoted that have formed the Mexican policy discourse and model of IMT. Those references will be left out here because of space considerations and the reader is requested to go back to those earlier articles for the sources and background. We only included theoretically relevant sources here.