Hydraulic infrastructure development, irrigation governance, and climate change adaptation in the engineered Colca-Siguas watershed, Peru
Restricted (Penn State Only)
- Author:
- Tubbeh Sierralta, Ramzi Michel
- Graduate Program:
- Geography (PHD)
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- December 13, 2021
- Committee Members:
- Larry Gorenflo, Outside Unit & Field Member
Karl Zimmerer, Chair & Dissertation Advisor
Brian King, Program Head/Chair
Helen Greatrex, Major Field Member
Trevor Birkenholtz, Major Field Member
Kimberley Anh Thomas, Special Member - Keywords:
- Water governance
Political ecology
Environmental justice
Sociotechnical assemblages
Hydraulic mission
Actor-network theory
State construction
State as effect
Polycentric governance
Latin America
Customary water governance
Glacial retreat
Water rights formalization
Majes-Siguas Special Project
Proyecto Especial Majes-Siguas
Social-ecological systems - Abstract:
- State-led construction of large hydraulic infrastructures dramatically increased in the 20th century at a global level. This phenomenon continues to expand central state presence in otherwise remote rural areas and accelerates the transformation of riparian ecosystems, water flows, and social relationships. Drawing from political ecology, more-than-human ontologies originating in Science and Technology Studies (STS), and social-ecological systems scholarship, this dissertation uses a case study of the Majes-Siguas Special Project (PEMS) in southwestern Peru to analyze the recursive ways in which state-water-society relations are forged through hydraulic infrastructure development and accompanying water policies. PEMS is one of several hydraulic projects originating in an early 20th-century national modernization strategy which aimed to expand agriculture through coastal irrigation, create a rural middle class, and increase state control of land and water. As the project conveys water from a high-altitude dam to the lowland plains near the coast, it creates new relationships between water officials, the main project beneficiaries in the lowlands, and highland smallholding farmers. Water struggles amid changing political-economic and environmental conditions are at the core of these emerging relationships. This dissertation is organized around four core questions: (1) how has Peruvian water governance changed since the early 20th century? (2) how are different state-farmer relations forged through different histories and processes of PEMS water allocation? (3) how does the distribution of hydraulic infrastructure construction, operation, and maintenance labor between farmers and technical staff influence local social relations? and (4) what are the merits and shortcomings of the Peruvian water license system as an institution for adaptive water governance in a context of environmental change? To address these questions, I conducted fieldwork between September 2018 and November 2019 in key irrigation sites serviced by PEMS. Methods include archival research, semi-structured interviews, participant observation, farmer surveys, land cover classification using remote sensing, and crop-water demand estimations. This research contributes to geographic scholarship on (1) the production of interrelated human-environment landscapes through biogeophysical and social processes; (2) collective labor and social organization in relationship to irrigation; and (3) state construction and state power. I highlight four main findings. First, the historical development of PEMS is rooted in a persistent spatial model of agricultural development that depicts the highlands as water sources and the arid lowlands as water-deserving sites of agricultural production. Second, differences in the ways that highland and lowland farmers obtained PEMS water are rooted in the spatial model of agricultural development and produce disparate state-farmer relations. Third, an entanglement of technical, biogeophysical, and policy factors shape hydraulic infrastructure construction, maintenance, and operation labor task distributions in site-specific ways, shaping local farmer-farmer relations as well. Fourth, the Peruvian water license system conceals and depoliticizes uneven water allocation processes, and lacks mechanisms for facilitating climate change adaptation amid glacial retreat and rising evapotranspiration rates. Together, these findings support the use of political-ecological, social-ecological, and historical-geographical analyses of water governance at different scales.