Abstract
Development initiatives often cite Water Users’ Associations (WUAs) as fundamental to water governance reform or the broad process of decentralizing responsibilities for management, supply and delivery. But the label of “WUA” indicates little about those who take on these duties as association members, suggesting all who use water in pursuit of life or livelihood are eligible to participate and benefit through collective action. Grounded in the belief that participatory projects can equitably empower and distribute resources, the enthusiastic introduction of WUAs continues despite critique that anticipated outcomes are overstated. Since borders opened to neoliberal development institutions in the 1990s, WUAs have been created throughout post-Soviet Central Asia. Yet, there has been limited reflection on how associations’ design and operation interact with physical or social structures to effect resource access across diverse groups. Drawing on fieldwork in Tajikistan, I demonstrate how WUAs reproduce exclusionary outcomes by requiring members to possess farmland in turn threatening rural food security. Held by a minority, farmland dedicated to commercial production stands in contrast to ubiquitous kitchen gardens, where crops sown for self-consumption form a buffer against hunger in the wake of labor migration and income inconsistency. Households’ inability to become members undermines their claim to water and voice in decision-making, ultimately constraining access to irrigation and a robust harvest.
Highlights
Project plans and reports drafted over the last several decades by development institutions and donor agencies are peppered with references to Water Users’ Associations (WUAs) as key components of rural water governance reform—their creation framed as an opportunity to transfer responsibility for local water management, supply and delivery from government bodies to those who directly engage with the resource as users
Grounded in dominant development theory and a belief in the ability of participatory, locally-based projects to empower without exception and equitably distribute resources, the enthusiastic introduction of WUAs has continued despite a rich body of literature arguing that these anticipated outcomes often fail to manifest [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12]
It is with this in mind that I turn to Tajikistan, exploring the dual transformations in (1) rural life, as the kitchen garden became key to survival and (2) water management, as WUAs were introduced
Summary
Project plans and reports drafted over the last several decades by development institutions and donor agencies are peppered with references to Water Users’ Associations (WUAs) as key components of rural water governance reform—their creation framed as an opportunity to transfer responsibility for local water management, supply and delivery from government bodies to those who directly engage with the resource as users. Drawing on evidence from the Central Asian Republic of Tajikistan, I demonstrate how WUAs created by development actors produce exclusion by limiting membership to those who possess farmland, leaving kitchen garden cultivators without a formal basis for engagement. In so doing, these institutions may inadvertently threaten rural food security. The fifth well frameworks as empiricalasdata potential consequences of formally excluding kitchen garden section draws in literature on community-based natural resource management as well as empirical cultivators from WUAs, with respect to community power relations and household access to water data to highlight the potential consequences of formally excluding kitchen garden cultivators from as well as rural food security, by extension.
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