Water, Knowledge and the Environment in Asia

Epistemologies, Practices and Locales

Ravi Baghel, Lea Stepan, Joseph K.W. Hill

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781134863402
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Epistemology in Philosophy

The dramatic transformation of our planet by human actions has been heralded as the coming of the new epoch of the Anthropocene. Human relations with water raise some of the most urgent questions in this regard. The starting point of this book is that these changes should not be seen as the result of monolithic actions of an undifferentiated humanity, but as emerging from diverse ways of relating to water in a variety of settings and knowledge systems.

With its large population and rapid demographic and socioeconomic change, Asia provides an ideal context for examining how varied forms of knowledge pertaining to water encounter and intermingle with one another. While it is difficult to carry out comprehensive research on water knowledge in Asia due to its linguistic, political and cultural fragmentation, the topic nevertheless has relevance across boundaries. By using a carefully chosen selection of case studies in a variety of locations and across diverse disciplines, the book demonstrates commonalities and differences in everyday water practices around Asia while challenging both romantic presumptions and Eurocentrism.

Examples presented include class differences in water use in the megacity of Delhi, India; the impact of radiation on water practices in Fukushima, Japan; the role of the King in hydraulic practices in Thailand, and ritual irrigation in Bali, Indonesia.

1 Contextualising the Anthropocene

The cultures, practices and politics of water knowledge in Asia

Ravi Baghel and Lea Stepan

Introduction

As the world population is projected to rise to 8.5 billion by 2030 and 9.7 billion by 2050, Asia is at the centre of major demographic change with a predicted population of 5.2 billion by 2050 (UNDESA, 2015). Countries in the region are seeing dramatic socioeconomic change, growth in consumption per capita driven by high gross domestic product (GDP) growth, runaway urbanisation and high mobility. The combination of population growth and economic growth with an increased use of water for agriculture and industry are likely to exacerbate water stress in Asia (Shiklomanov 2000; Rosegrant et al. 2009; Hijioka et al. 2014, p. 1338). These patterns emerge against the broader picture of global change, and the strong domination of Earth systems by humans, that is increasingly subsumed under the metaphor of the ‘Anthropocene’, the epoch where humans have overtaken other processes to become the most important geological agents (Vitousek et al. 1997; Crutzen and Stoermer 2000). The neologism ‘Anthropocene’ derives from the name of the present geological epoch, the Holocene, with anthropo- indicating human and -cene, derived from Greek kainos, indicating new or recent.

The metaphor of the Anthropocene is useful in that it helps us examine the planetary scale of human impact, and in that it subsumes not only ­climate change but also changes to other Earth systems. This is especially important because it has been suggested that the impact of changes on the global water system are likely to outweigh the effects of climate change, at least over the decadal time scale (Vörösmarty et al. 2000). These changes are driven by human alteration of the water system through the construction of infrastructure such as dams and embankments (Baghel 2014a, Nüsser and Baghel 2017), urbanisation, agriculture, alteration of drainage and unsustainable extraction of groundwater. However, even as the Anthropocene draws attention to the transformation of the water system at the planetary scale, it tends to present humanity as a monolithic agent acting upon an undifferentiated planet. This leads Biermann et al. (2016, p. 342) to warn that ‘using the Anthropocene lens must not mask the diversity of local and regional contexts and situations, nor the diversity and disparities in the conditions, contexts, and distribution of wealth, consumption and environmental impact across human societies’. This is certainly relevant to Asia with its large human population characterised by significant disparities and highly differentiated contributions to global environmental change.

It is difficult to carry out comprehensive research on water knowledge, a topic that has relevance across linguistic and national boundaries in Asia with its diversity of practices and languages. By using a carefully chosen selection of case studies in a variety of locations and across diverse disciplines, this book attempts to introduce this research to a global readership, making it easier to see commonalities and differences. While challenging existing paradigms and avoiding orientalism, it not only offers a critique in the tradition of science and technology studies, but also addresses everyday practices and in terms of environmental philosophy raises questions about epistemology. In this respect, Hulme (2011, p. 245) argues that

the new climate reductionism is driven by the hegemony exercised by the predictive natural sciences over contingent, imaginative, and humanistic accounts of social life and visions of the future. It is a hegemony that lends disproportionate power in political and social discourse to model-based descriptions of putative future climates.

In 2015, Steffen et al. (2015) refined the large-scale framework of ‘planetary boundaries’, a concept for sustainable development introduced in 2009 by a group of Earth systems and environmental scientists. The planetary boundaries concept distinguishes nine boundaries and defines a ‘safe operating space for humanity’ where these limits are not exceeded. However, as this framework dismisses the regional heterogeneity and scales of operation of some of the boundaries, Steffen et al. (2015) introduce a two-fold approach that acknowledges the sub-global level within the overarching model. Accordingly, there are regional biochemical, land-system and freshwater use boundaries, which impact the Global Earth System, if transgressed. This refinement is useful to avoid generalizations of the global and to lay emphasis on the complexity of the local. It enables us to recognise Asia as a sub-global level and as a useful scale for contextualising the Anthropocene.

The point of departure of this edited volume is the premise that there is something distinct to water, to water experiences and water knowledges in Asia. Some of these appear to be linked to particular spaces – when associated with specific local cultures or religions – whereas others are structured by functional and symbolic differentiations, such as expert, political or sacred knowledge. In Asia, well tested practices surrounding water, snow and ice are often inseparable from ritual or cosmological symbolism and performance. Therefore, it cannot be assumed that the latter necessarily conflict with ‘objective’ understandings of water, which also brings into question the epistemological status of water as a mere ‘resource’. We would like to examine how varied forms of knowledge pertaining to water flow, encounter and intermingle with one another. This volume is focused on attempts to trace the circulation and transformation of environmental knowledge fragments and practices across the boundaries of diverse knowledge systems.

Through the use of contemporary case studies of the role of knowledge in water practices across Asia, we address criticisms of Eurocentrism, but also avoid romantic notions of ancient traditions and indigenous knowledge. Further, this is a way of challenging the idea of water as a mere resource, by showing how people use and relate to water based on their knowledge obtained in a number of ways, from a multiplicity of sources. We take a bottom-up approach and avoid judging the relative worth of different kinds of knowledge, such as local, global, expert, scientific or religious. Our focus is less on theorizing abstract relations of water knowledge, and more on real world examples that show water knowledge as it is used in everyday life. Some examples of the empirical case studies of contemporary topics included in this volume are: water use in the megacity of Delhi, the impact of radiation on water practices in Fukushima, and ritual irrigation in Bali. However, the case studies highlight that there is no single generalizable epistemology, but a diversity of ways in which water and water-use is understood across Asia. The contributing authors come from a variety of disciplines such as anthropology, human geography, cultural studies, philosophy, sociology, area studies and development studies.

Along with acknowledging the severity of the impact, and appreciating the disparity of its distribution, it is especially relevant to appreciate one of the most important attributes of humans that distinguishes them from other geological processes. This is the ability of humans to understand, explain and alter their behaviour in response to a recognition of ongoing changes. Examining our ability to understand and respond to changes in the global water system (Kerkhoff and Lebel 2006; Kiparsky et al. 2012) is where the importance of understanding water knowledge comes to the fore.

Epistemic frames and communities

Haas (1992) proposed the influential concept of ‘epistemic community’ to describe communities or ‘networks of knowledge-based experts’ defined by their shared set of normative and principled beliefs; shared causal beliefs; shared notions of validity; and a common policy enterprise. This concept of epistemic communities primarily focused on transnational policy making, international regimes and expert groups. Considering that water is often an object of policy making and transboundary environmental governance, this concept can easily be extended to water. The different domains discussed here, even when not explicitly aimed at policy making, do have an indirect effect by changing the available knowledge base, introducing new considerations and drawing attention to overlooked problems.

Miller and Fox (2001, p. 669) define epistemic communities as ‘a group of inquirers who have knowledge problems to solve’ with a focus purely on epistemology and the process of knowledge production. According to them, ‘members of the epistemic community share norms (albeit contested and ­revisable) about how good research should be conducted’ (ibid.) with these norms varying from community to community. They also point out that every such community identifies some aspects of the problem as pertinent, while ignoring others. Bird (1987, p. 255) argues that scientific knowledge should not be regarded as a representation of nature, but rather as a socially constructed interpretation with an already socially constructed natural-technical object of inquiry. Barnes and Alatout (2012, p. 484) suggest that science and technology studies scholars can contribute to the study of water in two important ways, ‘first, by looking at water, as … a singular object with multiple ontologies … and second, by seeing social realms not as being separate from water, but rather, as being built, at least partially, in and through engagements with water’.

This implies that not only is water socially constructed as an object of inquiry, but further that the knowledge thus produced goes on to reconstruct it in representing it. In other words, the epistemic frames that are used to study water produce both the ‘problems’ and the ‘solutions’ through a shared understanding of cause and effect and by reducing water to a certain set of attributes while ignoring others. This reductionism should not necessarily be decried as it is also necessary to produce useful (though contingent and revisable) knowledge; it only becomes harmful when reductionism becomes combined with a claim to an exclusive and superior form of knowledge. We discuss several such communities identifying the way they frame water as an object of knowledge; and the kinds of problems and solutions they come up with based on a shared understanding of cause and effect. The aim of this exercise is not to produce an exhaustive list of epistemic approaches to producing water knowledge, rather the intention is to identify their multiplicities and overlaps. By placing these communities in context and contrast to one another we identify emerging trends in the way knowledge of water is created, the aspects of human-water relations that become salient, and attempts at boundary crossing, collaboration and disciplinary exchange.

Integrated Water Resource Management (IWRM) is, arguably the most influential policy driven managerial approach to water (Rahaman and Varis 2005). Its history can be traced to the first United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) International Conference on Water in 1977. This management framework can be considered one that produces ‘prescriptions regarding how knowledge should be produced and used (modes of knowledge production and use) to achieve specified desirable (natural resource management) outcomes’ (Medema et al. 2008, p. 2).

As discussed previously, just like any other epistemic community, IWRM has its own set of premises, a specific understanding of cause and effect, and a goal towards which the knowledge created should be applied. One of the most fundamental elaborations of IWRM, developed in 1992 through international consensus under the auspices of the United Nations (UN), is known as the four Dublin principles. Principle one identified fresh water as a finite and vulnerable resource, essential to sustain life, development and the environment. Principle two proposed that water development and management should be based on a participatory approach, involving users, planners, and policy-makers at all levels. Principle three saw women as playing a central part in the provision, management and safeguarding of water. The fourth, and perhaps the most contentious, principle suggested that water has an economic value in all its competing uses and should be recognised as an economic good (Allan 2006). Building upon these principles, in 2000, the Global Water Partnership (GWP) defined IWRM as:

a process which promotes the co-ordinated development and management of water, land and related resources, in order to maximize the resultant economic and social welfare in an equitable manner without compromising the sustainability of vital ecosystems.

(GWP-TAC 2000, p. 22)

In terms of water knowledge, IWRM identified not just availability, but also variability as a key source of uncertainty in water management. Therefore one of the aims of IWRM is to reduce knowledge gaps a...

Table of contents

• Cover-Page
• Half-Title
• 1 Contextualising the Anthropocene : The cultures, practices and politics of water knowledge in Asia
• 2 ‘If over a hundred Becquerels is no good, then what does fifty Becquerels mean?’: Governing fisheries and marine radiation in Japan after the Fukushima 
nuclear accident
• 3 Trans-disciplinary analysis of Australian–Indonesian monsoon epistemologies and their implications on climate change adaptation strategies
• 4 An epistemological re-visioning of hybridity: Water/lands
• 5 Science as friend or foe?: Development projects undermining farmer managed irrigation systems in Asia’s high mountain valleys
• 6 Competing epistemologies of community-based groundwater recharge in semi-arid north Rajasthan: Progress and lessons for 
groundwater-dependent areas
• 7 Traditional knowledge and modernization of water: The story of a desert town Jaisalmer
• 8 The hydro-ecological self and the community of water : Anupam Mishra and the epistemological foundation of 
water traditions in Rajasthan
• 9 Epistemological undercurrents
• 10 ‘Being-in-the-water’ or socialisation through interactions with water in the thermal baths of Taipei
• 11 In the eye of the storm
• 12 Balinese wet rice agriculture in transition: Water knowledge between a sentient ecology and the pursuit of development
• 13 Water flows uphill to power: Hydraulic development discourse in Thailand and power relations surrounding kingship and state making
• 14 Waterscapes in transition: Past and present reshaping of sacred water places in Banaras
• 15 Resettling a River Goddess : Aspects of local culture, development and national environmental movements in conflicting discourses on Dhārī Devī Temple and Srinagar Dam Project in Uttarakhand, India.
• Notes
• Index