Return migration and the reiteration of gender norms in water management politics: Insights from a Chinese village

Abstract

Recent work on return migration in China suggests return migrants bring with them new knowledge, skills, and potentially beneficial relationships accumulated during their sojourns, enabling them to introduce new forms of leadership and community action. Social remittances of this kind could be read as carrying the potential to enhance collective action in support of sustainable local natural resource-based livelihoods. This study of the links between return migration, leadership and collective action in water management sounds a more cautionary note, demonstrating that home communities may respond to return migrants in ways that repeatedly mark and reiterate gender and kinship norms, reiterating gender, generational and clan-based social hierarchies. The paper draws on and contributes to recent feminist political ecology approaches to show how migrant returnees’ ’social remittances’ translate into leadership in collective action in a rural Chinese village in ways that reinforce existing gender hierarchies and social positions within the community, thus questioning the extent to which any influx of new ideas, relationships and practices acquired from migrant experiences necessarily destabilizes power and authority in the village in any meaningful way.