In this chapter I embark upon the disjuncture between the WUA‘s inherent ideas about inclusive participation in natural resource management and my discovery of how the household agricultural producers are not necessarily benefiting from the reforms in the irrigation water management. Processes of labor migration determined a gender division occurring in the Uzbek agriculture, with women becoming the majority of smallholder farmers. I discover that these women are routinely excluded from participation in and from benefiting from the new management policy-based practices. I explicate instances of the local operation of water management practices, and discover the text-mediated work that institutionalize water policy, prioritizing irrigation of the crops grown by the farmers who contribute to the state‘s agricultural export marketing. I argue that this not only contravenes the participatory and equity-oriented goals of the state policy, but has detrimental effects for the livelihoods of the smallholders and their families. I continue with an analysis of an international development project which aimed to strengthen the existing WUA in order to improve the livelihoods of all the rural population. I discover that this project produced gendered effects in which smallholder women‘s agriculture became invisible and their needs are unaddressed.
Explicating the problematic: making sense of uncertainty
Women-peasants experience a vast degree of uncertainty about when and whether they would be able to receive water for irrigating their plots. The uncertainty forces them to resort to a number of time-consuming and labor-intensive strategies in order to receive information about water. All of this requires additional work from women whose lives are already overly
complicated and busy. This additional work often involves referring or addressing the water-related questions to certain individuals in and outside Urto-Yop. Similar to Saparkul who once learns from her neighbor about the water, some other women-smallholders, when possible, turn to persons who are known to have this information. This suggests the existence of particular social actors who are positioned to know better about water than other individuals. Saparkul mentions that her neighbor is ‗employed at the farm‘, other women list concrete people such as
‗nasoschy, ‗pudryadchy‘, ‗ishbashkaruvchy‘, myrabs‘, ‗farmers‘, ‗farmers‘ neighbors, and
‗farmers‘ relatives‘. These people are either private farmers themselves or related to them in one or other way. ‗Nasoschy‘, for instance, are the persons responsible for operating the large
agricultural pumps owned by the private farmers, ‗pudryadchy‘ are seasonal employees of the farmers, ‗ishbashkaruvchy‘ are the farmer‘s employed work managers, ‗myrabs‘ are the water masters working for the local WUA. I became interested in the centrality of the figures of the farmers in this identified circle of individuals who are ―in the know‖. Guided by the question of how farmers might be organized to know, while the smallholders are not, I continued
ethnography among the individuals who have been pointed out in interviews and/or hold positions in the WUA.
My investigation shows that in sharp contrast to them, the farmers have fairly reliable ways of knowing about irrigation water. They find out right away when the WUA chairman or a water master telephones them and notifies about the date when they should expect the water to arrive. In order to understand these drastic differences I conducted ethnography in the WUA, looking for the coordinating work.
Water Users Association. Local institutional practices
The Water Users Association in Urto-Yop, also called WUA Ashirmat or WUA Kushkupir Ashirmat, was established in 2005 in accordance to the ‗Uzbek model‘ (Yalcin &
Mollinga, 2007), i.e., the government departments (mostly of the Ministry of Agriculture and Water Resources of the Republic of Uzbekistan or MAWR) designed and set up this WUA with little involvement from water users who were supposed to be the initiators of these processes.
The WUA leaders and their technical employees were appointed under close supervision of local authorities and regional departments of MAWR. This is one of the WUA which Zavgorodnaya (2006) would call either ‗unsupported‘, ‗normal‘ or ‗real‘ because they were founded without direct financial intervention from foreign development organizations. At the time of my ethnography the WUA consisted of its chairman, an accountant and five hydraulic engineers (also called ‗water masters‘ or ‗myrabs‘). The WUA had a management board consisting of the WUA chairman, the chairperson of the Village Council (Shura) (who was also a farmer) and the director of the local Joint Stock Machinery and Tractor Park, e.g., a government machinery service system. The WUA chairman was newly elected, so I interviewed both him and his
than two thousand ha of land and both, the farmers and the peasants paid fees for the services of the WUA. The peasants paid from three to five thousand Uzbek soum per one irrigation. The payment from farmers was differentiated by the type of crop. For instance, they paid seven thousand soum per one ha of cotton or wheat, 35 thousand soum per one ha or rice, and
seventeen thousand soum per one ha of vegetables. The WUA chairman and the members of the WUA‘s board acted at the interface between the state agencies and the village as they attended weekly meetings at the DWRD (District Water Resource Department) to hear about the details of the sequence in which water would be delivered among villages and districts, new water
regulations, temporary orders and discuss other issues pertaining the work of the WUA. Once the WUA chairman obtained this information he took it to his village and shared it with his
employees, i.e., hydraulic engineers. During the episodic water-scarce years the role of WUAs became especially prominent in the village because of their leading role in managing the water through the practices of ‗asvak‘. Asvak acquired a key meaning at these times and WUA staff took a leading position in the relevant practices within the village.
When it comes to irrigation, the concept of asvak is in common use, appearing frequently in the people‘s talk. It is used synonymously with water, irrigation, something that ‗just happens‘
and, in general, as an entity operating independently of human action, mysterious, but taken for granted. Following the approach of institutional ethnography, I tracked the actual activities carried out by real people to constitute the practices of asvak. As I interviewed the chairperson of the DWRD, I understand that theoretically, ―asvak‖ refers to a schedule-based distribution of irrigation water typically applied during water-scarce years. It takes place on different levels, e.g., interregional, inter-provincial, among villages and inside the village. State agencies such as the Uzbekistani Ministry of Agriculture and Water Resources, Departments of Water Resources, the Province Water Resources Department, and the District Water Resources Departments make decisions to plan the orderly and predictable distribution of irrigation water on their respective levels. Certain criteria apply in determining the sequence of the irrigation schedule. For instance, the villages located at the tail-end of the canal must be the first to receive the water. Once the DWRD determines the sequence in which villages under its mandate are to irrigate their territories, the respective WUA in each village takes the full responsibility for further water delivery inside the village. The DWRD holds regular meetings attended by the representatives
from the villages located in its district including WUA chairpersons, village council members, and hydraulic engineers to inform about the next asvak and about other water-related issues.
When a village takes its turn to irrigate by opening the gate of their canals, the asvak begins in the village. For Urto-Yop, as for the other villages, asvak lasts three or four days, which is essentially the only time in every two weeks that the village gets water in its canals to water its fields.
I observe asvak take place in the village from the moment it starts as I waited together with the water masters and the WUA chairman for the water to arrive into the canal. I note the multiple actors undertaking work processes which constitute practices of water management.
Water masters are responsible for ‗delivering the water‘ to people. They do it by a continuous monitoring of the water flows in the fields, making sure that the water does not go into the water collector but directly on the land, and they establish the order in which particular crops are to be irrigated. WUA chairman who manages these processes explains that ―each water master is assigned to particular seven or eight particular private farmers to ensure that their respective land is irrigated properly and timely‖. Myrab Bobonazar, a water master in the WUA describes his work:
I [am responsible for] six farmers. I have telephoned them three days ago [to tell about
‗asvak]‘. Before asvak I go and see which land must be watered and which can wait. Last asvak three farmers watered their land, the others were not allowed because they did so the previous time. This time they [the ones that did not] will be watered. During asvak I go around the farmers‘ land and look. (April, 2011)
Myrab Bobonazar‘s attentive focus is centered on his farmers‘ land and their needs. His description of work explains how it happens that farmers and their surrounding people are knowledgeable about asvak; i.e., they received this information efficiently and in a timely manner from their water masters. This information flow follows multiple and reliable ways for the farmers to find out about asvak. The figure below illustrates those channels of information flow.
Figure 11. Channels of information flow for farmers
When the DWRD calls for a regular meeting he invites the WUA chairpersons and the chairmen of the village councils (shuras) from Urto-Yop and a few other villages which use the same canal for irrigation. During those meetings the DWRD authority informs them about the details of the upcoming asvak. WUA chairperson and shuras are the first representatives from the village who received this information. They transmit it to other members of irrigation network in the village.
The WUA chairperson will inform its water masters, while the Shura will notify its subordinate deputy members (ilatkoms). From my interviews with farmers I learn that they can use a
multiplicity of reliable ways to receive this information. In the most common situation, the WUA water masters warn their farmers about approaching asvak over a mobile phone. In other cases farmers contact directly the WUA chairperson, shura or an ilatkom.
This sharply contrasts with the uncertainty experienced by the women-smallholders.
These women continue having a shared experience of having to ‗catch‘ water or ‗miss‘ it and rely on the indirect and inconsistent sources of information. Some of my data suggest the existence of semi-official mechanisms and rules whereby smallholders are entitled to be
promptly notified about water and related issues. I present these mechanisms graphically further in Figure 12.
Failed communication channels
My ethnography finds specific communal organization which is mandated to represent the interests, including irrigation-related ones, of the peasants. I learnt that there is a network of individuals whose communal roles may and ought to serve to benefit the peasants especially in terms of a reliable receipt of information (Figure 12). I wondered how given the availability of this communal organization working to protect its residents, women lacked opportunities to benefit from its services. I inquired into how this network consisting of the Village council Chairman (shura), village council members (ilatkoms) and their subordinates perform and did not perform the role of supporting irrigation needs of the peasants. I learnt that the specific job associated with irrigating the plots of the peasants has been entrusted to various actors by the village council whose accountability and funding arrangements made this work less then appealing, ostensibly blurring terms of references and eventually leaving the needs of the peasants unattended.
Figure 12. The channels of information for smallholders: How things ought to be
The village council consists of the chairman and six ilatkoms each of them being in charge of one of the six territorial sections (makhalla) comprising the village. The shura recently had a stroke and had three members of his family pass away lately. He was either in the hospital
in Tashkent or sick at home, and I did not have any chance to talk to him. But I interviewed all the other members of the village council including the deputy of the chairman and the secretary of the village council chairperson. I learnt that the chairman of the village council is also a farmer and a member of the executive board of the WUA. He did not deal directly with the peasants but delegated this responsibility to the six ilatkoms. The post of the ilatkom entitles them to tasks such as participation in public events, resolving conflicts among the villagers, organizing night surveillance in the village to avoid crimes and so on. Ilatkom Rustam, for instance, informs that his main responsibility in his role of the ilatkom is to ―ensure peace and cleanness in his makhalla and also to serve as a judge in the cases of intra- and inter-household conflicts as well as attend the family events of his residents as a guest of honor‖. It seemed peculiar that ilatkoms never mentioned their responsibility about asvak and water-related issues.
This is especially peculiar in light of the fact that all of the ilatkoms are intensively involved in all irrigation activities in the village, especially during asvak when they must watch the water-users from the up-stream villages and prevent them from using the water from the canal when it is not their turn. For instance, when I arrived to take an interview with Rustam he had just returned from a five-day duty where he was observing the processes of irrigation making sure that the sequence of irrigation was in order. In the courses of interview it became clear that ilatkoms rarely deal directly with the specific irrigation needs of the peasants and the job of informing them about asvak was delegated to particular individuals called ‗paikals‘. None of the informants among the smallholder families ever mentioned getting any news about irrigation from paikals. Nevertheless, I found it useful to talk to some of the paikals.
Paikals are the persons who are generally responsible for spreading news. It is an ancient community position and is even considered to be a rural profession that passes from generation to generation. In other cases, ilatkoms elect paikals among the male residents of the makhalla.
The person occupying this post receives news from the respective ilatkom about community events such as a ―collective cleaning day‖ and, supposedly, asvak. His neighbors use his services with regards to their own family events such as weddings, funerals and birth of children. He then takes this message to the entire makhalla by announcing it either by walking from door to door (which is very hard because every mahalla is about 400 households), going along the streets on foot or by bike and shouting out the information. None of the four paikals I interviewed
mentioned doing their work in relation to asvak. While they admitted the fact that they are supposed to do this, neither actually did. The same situation refers to a female version of paikals, referred to as ‗khodym‘. Khodym are the women, often recommended by the ilatkoms, who are invited by the households to help organize and manage family events. One ilatkom mentioned these women as those who are ‗in the know‘ with all the news in makhalla including water and that the peasants, especially women among them, can address questions about water to them.
However, again, the interviewed smallholder women (and men) reported no cases of cooperating with khodyms in this regard.
What was learned about the work arrangements under which paikals and khodyms perform their voluntary duties explains the disjuncture between what their semi-formal services and the actual failure of the peasants to benefit from them. The semi-formal nature of the job, the ambiguous terms of payment, and lack of reporting requirements characterize such work. For instance, when it comes to spreading the news about the family events, paikals and khodyms receive payments from the hosts in cash or in kind. In contrast to this, doing the job of announcing asvak is a volunteer work which does not involve any sorts of payment. For this reasons the ilatkoms do not explicitly obligate the paikals to announce asvak. Neither are paikal required to report back to ilatkom about this work. These conditions make it very conducive for the paikal to render the work of systematically announcing asvak ‗unimportant‘. In this
circumstances information can only be disbursed sporadically, thus, unreliably.
The data above suggest that the communicative channel of shura-ilatkom-paikal-khodym-peasants has a rather provisional character. None of these participants perceive the work with peasants as their direct responsibilities. On the contrary this task has been shaken off from one‘s shoulders upon the ones of others. The rather informal nature of their positions with ambiguous job descriptions and compensation determines the fact that working with peasants is not taken seriously. Rustam is the only ilatkom in Urto-Yop who receives a stipend from the local governor‘s office because he has worked in a similar position during the Soviet Union and his salary was retained. However, in all other regards his work and the work of the rest ilatkoms is rather arbitrary, they signed no contract or any other document which lays out exactly what their responsibilities are. Other ilatkoms receive no formal payment at all. Their remuneration is intangible and comes in the form of social respect, recognition and access to public spaces. It is
also important to remember that besides their communal roles, all the ilatkoms, paikals and khodyms have their own households to run. All of this makes their work with peasants, for which they receive no payment and no reporting is required, even less a priority. The vague definitions do not resolve the problem of uncertainty for the subsistence peasants who require a systematic and a reliable source of information.
WUA textual practices: The social organization of water use
Within the structure of the WUA I discover a similar absence of information mechanisms for the peasants. None of the water masters undertakes any specific and regular activity to inform the smallholders about water. My direct question about this surprised them and solicited a
moment of silence after which they admitted that their everyday work did not include
communicating to the smallholders about the water arrival. One of them, myrab Ikkhom, later said: ―Informing the smallholders is not worthwhile. They will find out anyways. They look at the canal‖. As an institutional ethnographer I am interested in the expression of ―worthiness―
pointed out by myrab Ilkhom. I inquired more into the work of the water masters and more became clear about how it is ―worthwhile‖ to notify the farmers and not worthwhile to do the same in relation to the smallholders. I traced this discursive practice through the textual organization of the WUA‘s work.
As I continue observing WUA water masters do their work, I notice how their farmer-oriented work is textually coordinated. Every day of asvak they must report on their work to the WUA accountant. Their reporting is mediated by the special form which the WUA staff call
‗konturs‘. Below I present a copy of one such kontur reproduced from an original document and translated by my research assistant.
Kontur is an unofficial name of the document; it derives its name from its content which displays data about the agricultural fields. The specific location of a particular crop can be identified with the use of numbers which indicate a particular section of land. Each section has a unique number and is also called a kontur, i.e., the original use of the term kontur comes from this definition. The WUA chairman explains konturs as being the ―plots of land measured and numbered by the land surveyor. There are konturs for all the land (within the village) including canals, smallholders‘, land, roads, and people‘s houses‖. The notion of kontur has been
generalized into its use in reference to the entire document.