Abstract
Families living in Gorno-Badakhshan—situated in the Pamir Mountains in Tajikistan—depend on irrigated agriculture to meet their subsistence needs. Because men predominate, and are most visible in, the operation and management of irrigation systems in this region, water-related activities are often labeled as masculine. Yet women historically played an important role in on-farm irrigation activities and even formed the majority of the agricultural workforce during the Soviet period. Today women are still responsible for the bulk of farming activities, including irrigation. This is partly a consequence of the difficulty of depending on farming alone for making a living, which leads many men to migrate elsewhere in search of employment. Drawing on 6 months of fieldwork in 2 villages in different irrigation systems, this article argues that although formal water rights and power are vested in men, this does not mean that women lack agency, nor is it necessarily a reflection of wider gender inequities. Understanding the power and equity implications of formal distributions of rights and powers among men and women requires an analysis that links formal rights to actual irrigation and farming practices and places them in broader historical and livelihood contexts.
Highlights
The management and use of natural resources in GornoBadakhshan Autonomous Oblast, situated in the Pamir mountain range in Tajikistan, is deeply gendered
Our analysis of irrigation management in 2 mountain villages in Gorno-Badakhshan resonates with earlier gender and irrigation studies that showed that irrigation management is often marked as a distinct masculine sphere of work and power
In line with these earlier studies, we have shown that the masculinity of the formal and public domains of water management only tells part of the story about how gendered water powers and agency are divided and constructed
Summary
Open access article: please credit the authors and the full source. Families living in GornoBadakhshan—situated in the Pamir Mountains in Tajikistan—depend on irrigated agriculture to meet their subsistence needs. A woman’s bargaining powers depend on her relative dependence on incomes from the proceeds of malecontrolled irrigated farming in proportion to incomes she herself controls, or her so-called fallback position This in turn is partly a function of the intrahousehold organization of farming and distribution of incomes, and depends on the weight of irrigated agriculture in overall livelihoods and incomes (Jones 1983; Schrijvers 1986; Carney and Watts 1990; Dey 1990; Zwarteveen and Neupane 1996; Carney 1998; van Koppen and Hussain 2007). Following the suggestions of earlier gender and irrigation studies, we acknowledge that agential powers cannot just be read from formal water rights, but instead appear in and through everyday water use and distribution practices (Brunt 1992; Zwarteveen and Neupane 1996; Delgado and Zwarteveen 2007). This depends on their aspirations and sense of gendered selves, which in turn are colored both by prior cultural experiences and by imaginings of possible futures
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