Attention to Sociotechnical Tinkering with Irrigation Infrastructure as a Way to Rethink Water Governance

Abstract

Inspired by the proposal of political scientists and anthropologists to focus on “practice” as the smallest unit of analysis for understanding politics, as well as the renewed scholarly attention to materiality, this paper sets out to show that detailed ethnographic attention to processes and acts of sociotechnical tinkering provides a useful entry-point for understanding water governance. This is so methodologically, because infrastructural forms of tinkering are very visible, and therefore researchable, manifestations of agency and change in water governance. Attention to sociotechnical tinkering helps shift the basis for understanding water realities from official norms, designs and laws to everyday practices. This in turn allows questioning, rather than assuming, how expertise and agency are exercised and distributed in water governance, thereby also providing useful information for re-thinking water politics. In addition, by explicitly engaging with the contingency and capriciousness of actual water flows, a sociotechnical tinkering approach entails a much-needed re-appreciation of the materiality of water, infrastructure and other matter, a re-appreciation that extends to those who design, construct, operate and use water infrastructure.

Conflicts, cooperation and experimentation: Analysing the politics of urban water through Accra’s heterogeneous water supply infrastructure

“…Most significantly, these analyses are not only concerned with the production of socio-spatial inequalities, but also how they might be challenged, or substantially altered by the diversity of efforts to circulate water across the city. Such goals and perspectives align with recent proposals for a practice-based understanding of water governance (Alba et al, 2019;Cornea et al, 2017;Neves Alves, 2019;Truelove, 2019) acknowledging 'the messiness, creativity and contingencies in water governance processes, while also allowing a better appreciation of how water decisions and actions may be as much the outcome of pragmatic or tactical choices, as of strategic, power-laden ones (Kemerink-Seyoum et al, 2019: 3). These practice-based analyses echo Lawhon et al (2017), calling for recognition of how 'societal orders, and the governance these assume or produce are always in-the-making and inherently performative -and therefore open to change' (Kemerink-Seyoum et al, 2019: 2).…”

Water Infrastructure Always In-The-Making: Distributing Water and Authority through the Water Supply Network in Moamba, Mozambique

“…As the various examples described in this paper show, every undesired performance of the infrastructure requires further calibration, adjustments, and corrections, making infrastructural development an essentially experimental process [2]. Acknowledging this prompts a re-thinking of what engineers are and do: instead of merely following blueprint designs, much of their actual job consists of improvisations needed to steer capricious flows of water (see also [1,22]).…”

“…As stated elsewhere in this special issue, original infrastructural designs are not a very good guide for understanding how these infrastructures are laid-out and functioning in practice [1].When constructed and in-use, water infrastructures are constantly changing in form and materiality as a result of interactions with their physical environment, for instance through the scouring and creeping of water, the sedimentation of soils, changes in water and air pressures, algae blooms that block or roots of vegetation that punctures pipes. Changes are also induced by the actions of different actors, who may tinker with the infrastructure to make the water flow in the desired quantities and qualities to particular locations at specific times.…”

“…These importantly include practices of tinkering with the infrastructure to abstract, direct, store, drain, and spill water. In this paper, we use the term sociotechnical tinkering to refer to such acts, acts that produce deviations from the original infrastructural plans and designs [1]. Rather than considering these deviations as shortcomings that need to be redressed, we take them to be symptomatic for the work needed to make the infrastructure function.…”

“…Pointing out that infrastructure can be tinkered with and is always in-the-making does not mean that the initial form and materiality of the water infrastructure do not matter; acts of tinkering are conditioned by the tenacious nature of the infrastructure. However, recognizing that engineers and operators never fully control the infrastructure and the water it conveys, and accepting that water infrastructure is never fully known nor knowable, draws attention to the possibility that actual water flows are-at least partly-the contingent outcomes of the interactions and negotiations between different people, water(s), infrastructure and much else [1,2,11,12]. Moreover, since only a few of those actors have formal responsibilities, rights and powers, tinkering with infrastructure is as much about making the water flow as it is about redistributing authority-authority to speak and decide on water.…”