Explaining the ‘opportunisation’ of water grabbing

September 21st, 2015

Ed Atkins, University of Bristol, UK

Nations have engaged in the harnessing of rivers for centuries and there are many examples of states exploiting water resources, transferring the benefits from one social group to another, and thereby destabilising local populations. Such projects have contributed extensively to societal welfare through, for example, providing resource wealth and protection from seasonal floods;1 and have thereby allowed this form of water management to become an important route to state formation.2

More recently, this supply-oriented paradigm has become part of contemporary patterns of water resource management – often in the form of the appropriation of resources from one community or operation, to provide them to another. From rurality to city, village to mine, and community to farm, episodes of ‘water grabbing’3 have extended from beyond traditional management of water abundance or scarcity, into the development of energy, food, and extractive operations across the globe.

Incorporated into the wider practice of land-grabbing, and diverse in experience and context; water grabbing results from governance structures that are designed to allow continued and extended accumulation by certain actors, often at the expense of local communities, their livelihoods, and their relationship with the area. Within this strategy, water infrastructure becomes an end in itself; symbolising power and the linkages between the hydrosphere and the spheres of politics, policy, and justice.

The role of narrative

However, contemporary patterns of power are not exclusively made apparent in traditional mechanisms of power – but also operate within the realm of discourse and ideas. Controversial schemes of water management are no different and our perception of water and bodies of water is often dictated by wider narratives. For example, although Egypt is the last of eleven riparian nations to enjoy the fruits of the River Nile, an entrenched narrative has dictated the prominent mantra that the Nile is Egypt and that Egypt is the Nile (see Hydro-mentality over the Nile).

The regulation of water resources has become a discursive practice and this construction of false narratives is significant in the naturalisation of scarcity within contemporary discourses of hydropolitics. The discourse surrounding water management schemes defines our perception of them, identifies the problems that they are deemed to solve, sets the agendas to be pursued, and defines their place in the wider political and economic realms.4

Historic examples of irrigation development, for example, have been accompanied by narratives of calls for rivers to be tamed to fit national aims and the subsequent conquest of nature. While contemporary episodes of a resource’s appropriation are coupled with recurring narratives of under-utilisation, vacancy, or the necessity of further exploitation for societal progress.5 It is this last tendency that provides an important window into understanding how projects that redesign hydrology are cast as a necessity for national development.

The importance of opportunity

Such a discursive device mirrors the Securitisation Theory of International Relations. Designed as a method to widen the discipline of Security Studies,6 the Securitisation approach of the Copenhagen School does not perceive security as an objective concern but focuses on the process that transforms an issue into one of security. It is this security that frames the referent object as beyond the established norms of politics, allowing a state or government to take exceptional measures when deemed necessary.7

As such, popular knowledge is constructed and the issue is raised above the realm of contemporary politics and debate, providing a legitimacy for action.6 However, in the water context such a reading of the supremacy of security is narrow. The management of water provides a myriad of benefits: irrigation systems develop agriculture, dams provide hydroelectric power and watercourses provide important transportation. As such, the study of water’s securitisation should not primarily be based upon on its (in)security but must also incorporate readings of the societal opportunities that it provides. Civilization does not only rely upon security, it also aims for growth.

As Warner (2004) has stated in his coining of ‘opportunisation’, assertions of economic growth and national progress tap into the popular consciousness in a way matched by no other narrative.11 The hydrosphere is no different. Although declarations of water’s scarcity as insecurity have driven controversial reforms across the globe8 – assertions of the opportunity provided by reforms and infrastructure create an important sense of urgency, allowing the circumvention of process and law.

This adoption of utilitarian discourse of opportunity allows for the establishment of total control over the resource in question – whilst allowing for the demonisation of opposition to such schemes. However, such processes may also allow for discursive construction of hydraulic projects as populist pursuits, whilst serving covert economic interests. Within this philosophy, the ideal of social justice and egalitarian principles of utilitarianism may be abandoned to ensure the benefits of the few.

In Sudan, the Al-Ingaz regime used the rhetoric of development to justify schemes of subjugating the Nuba population, via the appropriation of water supplies and flooding of villages.9 The Belo Monte dam in Brazil has been accompanied with an extensive narrative of the controversial dam providing benefits for all, that would be lost if opposition movements had their way (see Belo Monte Dam: A spearhead for Brazil’s dam-building attack on Amazonia?). In Spain, the failed Ebro transfer witnessed an effort by (former) Prime Minister José María Aznar to paint the scheme as a “plan to move forward, and Spain needs this Hydrological Plan to transform itself into a more modern, more cohesive and more united country.”

Conclusions

Water will always possess some materiality – it will always flow, the tides will always occur and water’s physical scarcity or over abundance will always pose a threat. However, it has been convincingly argued by many in critical geography that water is no longer exclusively a natural entity; with its materiality often mirroring the composition, structure and inequity of the society living along its bank and beyond.10

The role of narrative and discourse within this co-constitution is important – from historical assertions of conquering nature for progress to the contemporary as hydropolitical reforms as providing opportunity and benefits for all. Although water will always flow, it often flows the way we want it – and the way we are told to believe it should.

References:

Francois Molle; Peter P. Molinga and Phillipus Wester (2009), Hydraulic Bureaucracies and the Hydraulic Mission: Flows of Water, Flows of Power. Water Alternatives 2(3): 328?349 See: Worster, D. (1985). Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity, and the Growth of the American West. Oxford: Oxford University Press.; Swyngedouw, E. (2009). The Political Economy and Political Ecology of the Hydro-Social Cycle. Journal of Contemporary Water Research & Education, 142(1), 56-60.; Verhoeven, H. (2015). The Nexus as a Political Commodity: Agricultural Development, Water Policy and Elite Rivalry in Egypt. International Journal of Water Resources Development, 31(3), 360-374. Defined as “a process in which powerful actors are able to take control of, or reallocate to their own benefit, water resources used by local communities or which feed aquatic ecosystems on which their livelihoods are based.” (in Jennifer Franco, Lyla Mehta & Gert Jan Veldwisch (2013) , The Global Politics of Water Grabbing, Third World Quarterly, 34:9, 1651-1675: p.1654) Peter M. Hass, Constructing Environmental Conflicts from Resource Scarcity. Global Environment Politics, 2:1 (2002) For example: in Turkey, hydropower development has been presented as the utilisation of water that would be wasted if it flow further down its course (see: Islar, M. (2012). Privatised Hydropower Development in Turkey: A case of Water Grabbing? Water Alternatives, 5(2), 376-391.) Buzan, B., & Hansen, L. (2009). The Evolution of International Security Studies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Buzan, B., Waever, O., & de Wilde, J. (1998). Security: A New Framework for Analysis. London: Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. See: Mehta, L. (2001). The Manufacture of Popular Perceptions of Scarcity: Dams and Water-related Narratives in Gujarat, India. World Development, 29(12), 2025-2041.; Kaika, M. (2003). Constructing Scarcity and Sensationalising Water Politics: 170 days that Shook Athens. Antipode, 35(5), 919-954.; Aguilera-Klink, F., Pérez-Moriana, E. & Sánchez-García, J. (2000). The Social Construction of Scarcity. The Case of Water in Tenerife (Canary Islands). Ecological Economics, 34, 233-245.; Urquijo, Julia; de Stefano, Lucia; & La Calle, A. (2015). Drought and Exceptional Laws in Spain: the Official Water Discourse. International Environmental Agreements: Politics, Law and Economics, 15 (3), 273-292. Harry Verhoeven (2011), Climate Change, Conflict and Development in Sudan: Global Neo-Malthusian Narratives and Local Power Struggles. Development and Change 42(3): 679-707. See: Linton, J. & Budds, J. (2013). The Hydrosocial cycle: Defining and Mobilizing a Relational-Dialectical Approach to Water. Geoforum, 57, 170-180. Jeroen Warner, Plugging the GAP Working with Buzan: the Ilisu Dam as a security issue. SOAS Water Issues Study Group: Occasional Paper No 67′.

Ed Atkins is a PhD candidate at the University of Bristol. His research focuses on the role of discourse in processes of water’s management, appropriation and the conflicts that occur in the wake of such processes.

The views expressed in this article belong to the individual authors and do not represent the views of the Global Water Forum, the UNESCO Chair in Water Economics and Transboundary Water Governance, UNESCO, the Australian National University, or any of the institutions to which the authors are associated. Please see the Global Water Forum terms and conditions here.