Gert Jan Veldwisch

• MSc, PhD
• Professor (Associate) at Wageningen University & Research

ABSTRACT This paper develops the methodological concept of river co-learning arenas (RCAs) and explores their potential to strengthen innovative grassroots river initiatives, enliven river commons, regenerate river ecologies, and foster greater socio-ecological justice. The integrity of river systems has been threatened in profound ways over the la...

Models are widely used to research hydrological change and risk. However, the power embedded in the modelling process and outcomes is often concealed by claiming their neutrality. Our review shows that in the scientific literature relatively little attention is given to the influence of models on development processes and outcomes in water governan...

Around the world, the development of large dams has been increasingly contested. India is no exception and has seen the mobilisation of powerful domestic and transnational socio-environmental movements against dams over more than four decades. In this context, the State of Sikkim in northeast India has been entangled in prolonged hydropower develop...

This article studies the policy dynamics of irrigated agriculture in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, based on stakeholder interviews and a literature review. We found that irrigated urban agriculture receives a positive reception supported by a discourse that values productivity, but this is increasingly challenged by a discourse that focuses on health an...

In this paper, we investigate China's vigorously promoted high-efficiency irrigation policies for farmland water conservation, deploying a governmentality framework. The paper explains how the modernist irrigation policies follow global discourses but seek to imbue these with new ambition and the meaning of ecological civilization. At the same time...

In the field of climate change adaptation, the future matters. River futures influence the way adaptation projects are implemented in rivers. In this paper, we challenge the ways in which dominant paradigms and expert claims monopolise the truth concerning policies and designs of river futures, thereby sidelining and delegitimising alternative rive...

The article investigates the evolution of rural water governance in the People's Republic of China through a historical review of its water governance transformations, including the ideology, institutions, and discourses. It is argued that the evolution of agricultural water management and rural drinking water development in China is inextricably l...

In the field of climate change adaptation, the future matters. Amongst others, river futures justify the way adaptation projects materialize in rivers. In this paper, we challenge the ways in which dominant paradigms and expert claims monopolise the truth concerning policies and designs of river futures, side-lining and delegitimizing alternative r...

Hydrological models are widely used to research hydrological change and risk. Yet, the power embedded in the modelling process and outcomes are often concealed by claiming its neutrality. Our systematic review shows that in scientific literature relatively little attention is given to the power of models to influence development processes and outco...

Accurately identifying irrigated areas is crucial for sustainable development, food security, and effective land and water resource management. However, incomplete or outdated national estimates of irrigated areas underestimate the extent of it, particularly among smallholders. This study aimed to address this issue by investigating the impact of d...

Grassroots initiatives that aim to defend, protect, or restore rivers and riverine environments have proliferated around the world in the last three decades. Some of the most emblematic initiatives are anti-dam and anti-mining movements that have been framed, by and large, as civil society versus the state movements. In this article, we aim to brin...

CONTEXT Worldwide farmer managed irrigation systems have provided crops for food, feed and the market for centuries. From high mountain environments to river valleys and deltas, in all continents people have organized to construct, use, maintain, transform and sustain irrigated agro-ecosystems. In this context it is important to better understand h...

This paper examines the politics of rural water governance in China through a governmentality lens and village water intervention case. The China Rural Drinking Water Safety Project (RDWSP) was an attempt to control water, while also serving as a tool of power to impel the rural population towards national development goals. The authors analyzed of...

This paper explores the role of contract farming arrangements in agricultural intensification in sub‐Saharan Africa, combining secondary literature and original case material from Mozambique. The paper extends the scope of “contract farming” beyond the formal contracts between large companies and small‐scale producers to include less formal credit...

Emerging narratives call for recognising and engaging constructively with small-scale farmers who have a leading role in shaping the current irrigation dynamics in sub-Saharan Africa. This paper explores whether new irrigation data can usefully inform these narratives. It argues that, for a variety of reasons, official irrigation data in sub-Sahara...

Virtual water flows, incorporated in global food trade has increased the last decade. The drivers and consequences are complex. These complex relations between humans and water resources are studied from different perspectives. In this article, an overview of four such perspectives on water in global food production and trade is provided. These fou...

p>The debate around what kind of irrigation, large- or small-scale, modern or traditional, best contributes to food security and rural development continues to shape irrigation policies and development in the Global South. In Tanzania, the irrigation categories of ‘modern’ and ‘traditional’ are dominating irrigation policies and are shaping interve...

This publication targets managers and practitioners in Kenya – but also elsewhere – interested to linkup with and support FLID. They may be based in companies interested to better understand processes of FLID in order to expand sales of relevant irrigation technologies or services. Or they may be based in NGOs or in government agencies mandated to...

Despite all the international attention on urban development, and the changing character of urban life and infrastructure, critical analyses of the entanglement of cities and their surrounds are often missing. Further, the rural–urban binary that scholarly and policy discussions often highlight can be misleading, as the concurrent rise of peri-urba...

This article explores the encounter between two contrasting visions of how the hydrosocial territory of the Elgin Valley of South Africa is, and should be, constituted and the conflicts over water pollution this gives rise to. It studies how poor urban dwellers try to upset the status quo of unequal access to land and water, which is linked to broa...

In this special issue, we set out to analyze the dynamics, discourses, identities and material conditions that evolve with increasing urbanization and associated transformations of rural–urban (dis)connections. Considering the growing importance of cities, water is a particularly useful lens through which to understand the ways in which rural– urba...

This paper explores how pump irrigation has evolved along the Kenyan shores of Lake Victoria. Over the past two decades access to petrol pumps has allowed small-scale horticultural enterprises to start up and then transform the size, intensity and nature of their production. We analyse the spread of petrol pumps as the assimilation and wider use of...

In both Mozambique and Tanzania, farmer-led development of irrigation is widespread, yet it is little recognised in irrigation policies and is under-supported by the government. This paper explores how this situation is exacerbated by modernisation ideas in irrigation policy and professional thinking. By means of a historical review, we trace moder...

This introduction is a reflexive piece on the notion of farmer-led irrigation development and its politics. It highlights the way the varied contributions to the Special Issue support a shared perspective on farmerled irrigation development as a process whereby farmers drive the establishment, improvement, and/or expansion of irrigated agriculture,...

Introduction Over the past decade, much media, academic, and policy attention has focused on the rapid growth of large-scale land deals around the world (see Borras and Franco, 2010; Cotula, 2012; Cotula et al., 2009; Deininger, 2011; De Schutter, 2011; GRAIN, 2008; Li, 2011; Oxfam, 2011; von Braun and Meinzen-Dick, 2009; White et al., 2012; World...

Drip irrigation has been introduced by iDE as pro-poor, as a low-cost production technology in various countries in the global South. This chapter explores agricultural production patterns in relation to the use of low-cost irrigation technologies and ways in which changes therein affect intra-household arrangements for sharing and distribution res...

The past decade has witnessed an intensifying focus on the development of irrigation in sub-Saharan Africa. It follows a 20-year hiatus in the wake of disappointing irrigation performance during the 1970s and 1980s. Persistent low productivity in African agriculture and vulnerability of African food supplies to increasing instability in internation...

Smallholder irrigation technologies introduced in sub-Saharan Africa are often unsustainable in the sense that they are not maintained by their users. In contrast, there is clear evidence that smallholder farmers have been developing and expanding irrigated areas. An approach was developed that takes these farmers’ initiatives as a starting point t...

This paper explores the relationship between governance regime and large-scale irrigation system design by investigating three cases: 1) protective irrigation design in post-independent South India; 2) canal irrigation system design in Khorezm Province, Uzbekistan, as implemented in the USSR period, and 3) canal design by the Madras Irrigation and...

p>Smallholder irrigation technologies introduced in sub-Saharan Africa are often unsustainable in the sense that they are not maintained by their users. In contrast, there is clear evidence that smallholder farmers have been developing and expanding irrigated areas. An approach was developed that takes these farmers' initiatives as a starting point...

This article contributes to the contemporary debate on land and water grabbing through a detailed, qualitative case study of horticultural agribusinesses which have settled in Tanzania, disrupting patterns of land and water use. In this paper we analyse how capitalist settler farms and their upstream and downstream peasant neighbours along the Ndur...

This paper contributes to the discussion about ‘inclusive business models’ as alternatives to large-scale land acquisitions by analysing a case in which a foreign agribusiness investor, within an impact investment paradigm, acquired and rehabilitated a rice processing plant in Chókwè, Mozambique. A contract farming programme drawn up to source raw...

This paper examines the organisational modalities of farmer-led irrigation systems in Tsangano, Mozambique, which has expanded over large areas with minimal external support. By looking at their historic development trajectories and the integrated nature of land and water resources, technological objects, and people three organisational modalities...

A “policy as process” perspective is adopted to analyze the early period of water users associations (WUAs) in Uzbekistan (2000–2006). The article is based on extensive fieldwork (in 2005–2006) and analysis of policy and other relevant documents. It is shown that WUAs have a role and logic beyond water management and are used by the state as instru...

The contestation and appropriation of water is not new, but it has been highlighted by recent global debates on land grabbing. Water grabbing takes place in a field that is locally and globally plural-legal. Formal law has been fostering both land and water grabs but formal water and land management have been separated from each other—an institutio...

In the context of the prevalent neo-liberal discourse on rural development through improved markets, involvement of companies and a strong reliance on foreign investors this article examines the vulnerable position of smallholder irrigators and their water rights. Through the parallel analysis of three contrasting cases of smallholder irrigation in...

On the basis of intensive fieldwork in the period 2002–2006, which combined interviews with direct observations, the implementation of two policies in the field of agricultural water management in Uzbekistan is analysed: the reform of the water bureaucracy along basin boundaries and the establishment of Water Users Associations. It is shown that th...

Recent large-scale land acquisitions for agricultural production (including biofuels), popularly known as 'land grabbing', have attracted headline attention. Water as both a target and driver of this phenomenon has been largely ignored despite the interconnectedness of water and land. This special issue aims to fill this gap and to widen and deepen...

Low crop productivity, food insecurity, hunger and malnutrition; inadequate farming knowledge and skills, implements and inputs are characteristic of smallholder agriculture in Southern Africa. Many researchers argue that conservation agriculture can guarantee higher crop productivity, food security, improved livelihoods and environmental protectio...

This paper describes how political and economic transition has affected the system of agricultural production in Khorezm, Uzbekistan in terms of economic practices and relationships. Based on recent fieldwork, the paper argues that the local agricultural economy is a hybrid economy, where production for market, quasi-market and subsistence merge in...

This article analyses an ongoing struggle around securing access to land and water between external parties and smallholders farmers in the Munda Munda irrigation system in Nante, on basis of long term and regular involvement in the area since the year 1996, The struggle was consecutively fought in four different domains, from (1) the delimitation...

In the fifth period of the academic year 2008/2009 the chair groups Irrigation and Water Engineering (IWE) and Land Degradation and Development (LDD) organized a new course, i.e. Design in Land and Water Management 2 (IWE- 21312). The course is part of the BSc program International Land and Water Management (BIL). The decision to develop the course...

The establishment of the Bwanje Valley Irrigation Scheme (BVIS) in Malawi is a striking example of informed amnesia in development assistance. Despite the lessons learned earlier concerning a process approach to participatory irrigation development in Africa, in the case of BVIS outside interveners designed an irrigation system and parachuted it in...

The most recent land reform in Uzbekistan, in which Large Farm Enterprises (LFEs) were split into medium-sized fermer enterprises, left, alongside the country's overwhelming majority of small dekhan peasants, continued strong state intervention in agrarian production. Three ‘forms’ (rather than ‘modes’) of production emerged: (1) state-ordered prod...

In 2005 the Uzbek government accelerated the dissolution process of collective farms through full-scale land reform. As the central production unit, the collective enterprise was supplanted by a private, family-based enterprise. Simultaneously Water Users Associations (WUAs) were established that operate and maintain the irrigation and drainage inf...

Thabina Irrigation Scheme was one of the pilot schemes within the Revitalisation Programme of Smallholder Irrigation Schemes in the Limpopo Province of South Africa. The paper describes local governance practices approximately three years after the intervention. This involved the rehabilitation of infrastructure, mobilising and training farmers and...