Tushaar Shah: Taming the Anarchy: Groundwater Governance in South Asia

Abstract

South Asian groundwater seems a narrow subject ill suited to an exploration of the socio-ecology of natural resource development and exploitation. Yet Tushaar Shah’s new book Taming the Anarchy takes a historical perspective on water resources and agrarian production in an intriguing treatment of irrigation governance that has implications beyond South Asia or just groundwater. Shah’s synthesis of irrigation technology as the means of agrarian livelihood, with social and political organization framing the evolving modes of production, offers new insights of interest to a broad Human Ecology readership. Mounting pressure on resources, collusion among farmers and officials, agencies working at cross-purposes: allout battle characterizes groundwater “anarchy” in South Asia. The contemporary era—from roughly the 1960s—is the latest phase in the long history of South Asian irrigation. This latest era is marked by an explosion in number, geographical extent, and importance to overall irrigation of private groundwater wells. Shah’s extensive review of studies and statistics from India and Pakistan, and to a lesser degree from Nepal, Sri Lanka, and Bangladesh, constitute the supporting empirics. The state—ever a step behind the unfolding reality on the ground—ineffectively manages or even fully comprehends the groundwater revolution in South Asia. The implications Taming the Anarchy has for future decision-making center on the elusive dynamic between policy and anarchy. Yet Shah only partially resolves this tension, leaving important questions open for further enquiry. The typology of groundwater institutions (pp. 155ff) is normative but not ultimately reductionist to the South Asian context. Specific insights are drawn from broader international experience, including China, the United States, Mexico, Australia, Spain, the Middle East, and SubSaharan Africa. Missing entirely is a review of Soviet-era irrigation that informed the command-and-control model of public administration in India during the Green Revolution’s privately financed groundwater explosion. Shah posits that the forms groundwater governance takes are produced by the interaction of users at multiple institutional scales with the physical resources they use or vie for. This analytical approach holds broad descriptive value but ineffectively accounts for the transformation among institutional forms. Innovation and evolution—what the final chapter’s “thriving in anarchy” are all about—remain inadequately explained, partly by Shah’s own admission. The first of eight chapters, “The Hydraulic Past: Irrigation and State Formation” historically contextualizes the “era of atomistic irrigation” (p. 29), specifically in the Mughal and British colonial periods. A particularly helpful section relates the modern irrigation experience in South Asia to colonial and postcolonial experiments in irrigation from other regions: West Asia and North Africa, humid East and Southeast Asia, and Africa. Shah engages theoretically with Foucault and Wittfogel, among others, to understand the differential efficacy of “constructive imperialism” across time and space, as well as to broach the relation of hydraulic interventions to state formation. Data on irrigation types, area, and users reveal the increasingly important role of groundwater relative to surface water in the irrigation economies of South Asia. C. Scott (*) Udall Center for Studies in Public Policy and School of Geography & Development, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, USA e-mail: cascott@email.arizona.edu