Beyond categorisation in groundwater programmes: Mobilising the subsurface- surface continuum

Abstract

Improving groundwater governance has led to calls for improved understanding of groundwater, availability of data, and collective action for managing groundwater. In India, various state and non-state actors have devised community-based programmes for managing and governing groundwater (eg. APFAMGS, MARVI, PGWM etc in India, COTAS in Mexico etc.). Much of these programmes follow a specific model of participatory governance and management. It involves monitoring of groundwater, data collection, understanding of aquifers and other groundwater formations, water budgeting, development of water conservation plans and institutional arrangements for implementing these activities. This article intends to draw attention to the concept of (ground)water budgeting as envisaged, designed and mobilised through these programmes.

While calls to address the ‘water budget myth’ is well discussed within academia (see Molle 2023, Bredehoeft 2002), many programmes aimed at managing and governing groundwater still emphasize on water budget-based planning (see MoJS 2020). This analysis draws attention to the classification, categorisation and boundary making when it comes to understanding groundwater in such programmes. It specifically intends to focus on groundwater budgeting and makes an argument about how groundwater users often transcend such categorisations as soil moisture, recharge, and run-off in their understanding as well as mobilising that understanding through everyday practices that in turn shape groundwater governance. Using practices as an axis of inquiry, I show that such a classification or differentiation as the surface and the sub-surface, or different phases of water, becomes blurry and problematic at local scales.

This has emerged as part of my PhD fieldwork in western Indian state of Maharashtra. I undertake this analysis through an empirical attention to practices. A practice-based understanding usefully shifts thinking about water governance away from societal orderings that can be assumed (theorized) before an empirical investigation, and therefore, rationally designed and “fixed’ (Seyoum et al. 2019, Zwarteveen et al. 2017). Instead, a practice-based understanding takes societal orders, and the governance these assume or produce, as always in-the-making and inherently performative.

This work attempts to contribute towards the session on groundwater geographies by answering the calls for transforming our understanding about groundwater invisibility and uncertainty across spatial and temporal scales. This ethnographic work intends to answer the recent call for ‘critically examining and challenging forms of segregation and hierarchy in knowing groundwater- such as those between natural sciences and social sciences; between knowledge originating in the majority world and that coming from the minority world; between experts and practitioners’ (Zwarteveen et al. 2021).