Abstract
This introductory chapter sets out the main objectives, research questions and significance of the study on which this book is based. It explains the notion of the ‘watershed development regime’ and highlights the centrality of power relations in analysing the development interventions in the countryside. It is argued that the study takes us beyond the narrow analytical consideration of evaluating the ‘success’ or ‘failure’ of particular watershed interventions. Instead, making use of multi-sited ethnography of water conservation activities of different agencies (state, non-governmental and international), it explains the ‘how’ of development delivery in rural Rajasthan.
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- 1.
Watershed is an area which drains rainwater to a common point. For project purposes, generally a micro-watershed of about 500 ha is undertaken as a basic unit for treatment by the project-implementing agencies (particularly in governmental watershed projects).
- 2.
The state, however, remains the most powerful actor in terms of (financial and material) resources in the arena of rural development.
- 3.
See Hinchcliffe et al. (1999) for case-studies on participatory watershed development projects in Latin America, Africa, Asia and Australia.
- 4.
Li (2007) uses the analytical category of ‘assemblage’ in the context of community forest management in Indonesia. She (ibid: 263) argues that community forest management is an assemblage that ‘brings together an array of agents (villagers, officials, activists, aid donors, scientists) and objectives (profit, pay, livelihoods, control, property, efficiency, sustainability and conservation)’. Likewise, we can treat ‘watershed development’ as an assemblage that brings together a range of state and non-state actors with diverse agendas and motives.
- 5.
More on ‘development regimes’ later in the book, but for now, the definition by David Ludden can be instructive. Ludden (2005: 4042) offers the following definition: ‘A development regime is an institutional configuration of effective power over human behaviour, and that also has legitimate authority to make decisions that affect the wealth and well-being of whole populations. It includes an official state apparatus but also much more. A development regime includes institutions of education, research, media, technology, science and intellectual influence that constitute a development policy mainstream.’ It is in this sense that I use the concept of ‘development regime’. However, I highlight the heterogeneous nature of development regimes in the contemporary times and also include non-state agents of development as integral part of the development regimes. In Rajasthan, the Department of Watershed Development and Soil Conservation was formed in the early 1990s, and the entire watershed-related activities were delegated to rural local bodies in 2004–2005.
- 6.
In certain cases enclosures of village pasture lands can be detrimental for the (poorer) people who only have small animals like goats and sheep that are generally grazed in open land.
- 7.
More on development governance and the influence of Gramsci and Foucault on the studies of rural development in the next section and in Chap. 2 of this book.
- 8.
Pseudonyms have been used to maintain the anonymity of respondents who requested so. The TBS is based in Alwar district of north Rajasthan, and GVM is based in Udaipur district of south Rajasthan. Both these districts (Alwar and Udaipur ) share similar agro-climatic conditions and are marked by the Aravalli hill ranges which run across the state of Rajasthan from the south-west to the north-east.
- 9.
Gramsci suggests that the social relations of civil society (which are different from that of ‘political society’ or the state) are also relations of power (quoted in Simon 1982: 27).
- 10.
Sinha (2008) uses the term ‘trans-national development regime’ in order to highlight the elements of ‘transnationality’ in community development programmes in British India and in the decades of the 1950s and 1960s in independent India. Through this, Sinha (ibid) provides a new window to the understanding of community development programmes, and also expands the scope of the development regime to include not just the state but also transnational actors (such as missionaries and foundations). However, it is worth noting that transnational actors or institutions are important but are only one group amongst the array of other actors (local NGOs and grassroots organisations) involved in contemporary developmental interventions. Goldman (1996: 167), in the context of the World Bank’s environmental regulatory policies, argues that the World Bank has been able to ‘enlist scores of social actors and institutions to help generate a “new development regime” that is coherently green as well as neoliberal’. I prefer to highlight the heterogeneous nature of development regimes and suggest that coherence is not a necessary feature of the contemporary development regimes in India; they are polyvocal and in a state of flux.
- 11.
‘New institutional’ approaches are managerial in nature, and their main focus is on ‘efficient’ management of natural resources (say in a particular watershed area), either by the input of proper technology or by creating the ‘right’ institutional design or ‘rules of the game’ (following Ostrom 1990).
- 12.
Robbins (1998: 145) suggests the centrality of common resources to village life, and the divisiveness of their management politics has resulted in the promulgation of various management and authority systems to govern these lands in the pre-colonial, colonial and post-independence eras. Each successive legal system imposed over the years has resulted in the mixing of institutional forms under which these lands are governed today. Forms of authority and control realised in norms, rules and contracts are malleable and subject to rapid political and economic changes. The tussle between the state bureaucracy and rural local bodies currently marks the institutional terrain in rural Rajasthan.
- 13.
Based on post-modern and/or anti-modern theories of development (discussed in detail in Chap. 2 of the book).
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Gupta, S. (2016). Introduction. In: Politics of Water Conservation. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-21392-7_1
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