Wedlock or deadlock? Feminists’ attempts to engage irrigation engineers

ons were made about reality differed too widely, different conceptual languages proved difficult to match, and data-sets were incompatible, often resulting in reports and documents that continued to be divided in separate disciplinary sections. Since the 1990s, efforts have therefore been undertaken to develop conceptual frameworks that are able to incorporate the physical/technical and social dimensions of irrigation simultaneously, as interrelated dimensions of the same reality. Two schools of thought have been of major influence here, and provide an important basis for an interdisciplinary approach to irrigation: the SCOT school (the social contruction of technology, see Winner, 1985; Bijker and Law, 1992) and actor-network theory (Latour, 1987; Law, 1994). The basic underlying insight of both approaches is that water management technologies not only mediate people’s relationships with bio-physical processes, but also shape the people-people 40 Wedlock or deadlock? relationships that are part of water management. Where most existing approaches to water management take either the social relations or the technologies as a given, this insight demands attention to the interactions between technology and social relations (Bolding et al., 2000, also see van den Belt, n.d.). An important implication is that what an irrigation system is, in an ontological sense, is a question that cannot be answered out of the context in which the system is used. For irrigation, this insight has been further captured and operationalized by Peter Mollinga, through his characterization of irrigation systems as sociotechnical systems (Mollinga, 1998). Building on the insights of the SCOT school, he distinguishes three main ways in which irrigation is social. First, the development and design of irrigation systems is a process of social construction, a recognition that allows analyzing how objectives and interests of different participants in technology development influence design characteristics. Second, irrigation systems have social requirements for use in that designs imply and require certain skills and forms of organization in order to work as intended. And third, irrigation systems have particular social effects that emerge as a result of the interplay between the intrinsic characteristics of the technology and the (social, physical, political) environment in which it functions (See Mollinga, 1998; Bolding et al., 2000). Some insights from actor-network theory usefully complement this operationalization, in particular its realization that the fate of facts and of artifacts ultimately is in the hands of the final users. For irrigation, this is a particularly useful insight, because many things ‘happen’ to an irrigation system once its design leaves the drawing boards of the Engineers. All kinds of alterations and modifications are made, first of all during construction, but also later once the system is used. In actor-network terms, an irrigation system undergoes in its life-course many ‘translations’, a tendency that Engineers may try to counteract by giving their products the character of black boxes (and by presenting their knowledge as generic and universal). Final closure is achieved when the possible meanings and uses of a system are no longer contested and when its origins are ascribed to the laws of nature (cf. Bolding, 2004:114). A further contribution of actor-network theory to thinking about (irrigation) technology and knowledge that is of particular relevance to my project lies in its rejection of a priori distinctions, such as those between macro and micro, local and global, science and technology, nature and culture, nature and society, humans and non-humans. According to Latour, such distinctions are never pre-given, but can only be the outcome of the hard construction work of the actors involved (cf. van den Belt, n.d.). In the introduction, I already referred to the fact that much thinking about irrigation, is informed by powerful dichotomies such as nature-culture, private-public, work-home, production-reproduction, technology-society etc. The fact that irrigation tends to be placed on the culture, public, work, production, technology side of the equation and women on the other forms an important impediment to understanding gender in irrigation realities: women tend to be symbolically and metaphorically associated with everything that is NOT irrigation. Notions such as ‘sociotechnical systems’ (Mollinga, 1998), ‘waterscapes’ Dangerous Liaisons? Introduction 41 (Swyngedouw, 1997) and ‘naturecultures’ or ‘cyborgs’ (Haraway, 1991, 2003) provide possible ways to overcome this impediment through their capturing of the insight that the boundaries between the two poles of the dichotomies (such as that between ‘nature’ and ‘society’ , or between ‘technology’ and ‘society’) are themselves socially constructed. Definitions of nature (and of technology or society) change and are negotiated and manipulated as part of a political economy of contested access to and control over resources (Haraway 1991, Swyngedouw 1997, Peluso and Watts 2000). Infrastructural and institutional water developments have shaped ‘part natural part social’, as material dynamic reflections of historic and never ending socio-political-geographical struggles (Swyngedouw, 1997:4,6). Such insights invite a critical assessment of all truth and knowledge claims about irrigation and, importantly, challenge the monopoly and authority of Engineers to speak the truth about irrigation systems: all knowledge is ‘local’, even though the networks created for irrigation knowledge of Engineers have acquired much wider extension than those created by the irrigation knowledge of users. For Latour and his associates, Engineers (or scientists) are not a fundamentally different type of actors in water networks than irrigators; they have simply grown larger and gained more authority and power. Such a critical attitude towards knowledge and the possibility of knowing tallies well with feminist critiques of science, and with my epistemological position as explained above. It opens the door to new and different conceptualizations and definitions of irrigation systems that are potentially more hospitable to the possibility of female protagonism, it allows questioning taken-forgranted conceptual and metaphorical boundaries many of which have strong gender connotations, and it creates spaces for new forms and possibilities of knowing and of new types of knowers. Method and outline of the thesis I started thinking about the linkages between gender and irrigation in 1984, in the first year of my study at the Wageningen University and at the age of 20. At the time of finalizing this thesis, 2006 has just begun and I am 42 – and I still continue to be intrigued by the questions and dilemmas that thinking about these linkages entail. I am quite sure that my fascination will not end with this book: through my work as a gender analysis teacher and researcher, through interactions with colleagues, by learning from and interacting with students interested in and researching the topic, and through my involvement in various networks of water and gender professionals, I continuously am confronted with new questions and puzzles, and with new ways of understanding and looking at gender-and-water realities. All this is to say that this book, the thesis, is very much a reflection and product of a project that is much less clearly bounded than the book-form allows and suggests. Parts and chapters of the book were originally written in different points of time, in different contexts and partly for different audiences, and many still bear the 42 Wedlock or deadlock? traces of their origins. The case studies presented in chapter 3 and 4, for instance, were originally produced for an audience of irrigation professionals that needed to be convinced of the importance of gender. At the time of first analyzing and writing the research findings (mid 1990s), I still more strongly adhered to the belief in the possibility of one ‘right’ or ‘true’ representation of irrigation realities. My implicit position of that time probably was that attention to and awareness of gender would lead to better, less biased, accounts of such realities. This position importantly reflects the professional culture and context of which I tried being a part at that time, and with which I identified – at least to some extent. For the purpose of this book, I have re-written the studies to make the ways in which they differ from ‘mainstream’ accounts of irrigation realities clearer, thereby generating the kinds of questions about ways of seeing and thinking this thesis is about. All the other chapters largely are the product of reflections and analyses that I did from within a university environment, and display a somewhat more critical distance from the ‘mainstream’ from the start. What links all the chapters is that all, in different ways, try providing an answer to the central research question: “How can one conceptualize irrigation realities in ways that enable recognition of gender as constitutive?” The pre-occupation of all chapters is, therefore, with how different conceptual schemes and theoretical languages – which are seen as specific ways of looking at and ordering irrigation worlds, reflecting specific concerns, priorities and interests – visualize women or gender concerns. The main method I have used throughout the book is that of contrasting and comparing different ways of looking at irrigation realities in view of identifying and understanding the ways in which they portray women and gender relations, and in view of discussing the possibilities such portrayals offer to feminist inquiries in the sense explained above. This method follows from what I explained about my epistemological position.