TY - JOUR
T1 - Infrastructuring drip irrigation
T2 - The gendered assembly of farmers, laborers and state subsidy programs
AU - Birkenholtz, Trevor
N1 - Funding Information:
I have accrued quite a debt during the research and writing of this paper. I received financial support for fieldwork from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Penn State and through a Fulbright-Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence Award. This paper grew out of critical feedback I received during invited presentations at the University of British Columbia, the Northeastern Nature-Society Workshop hosted by Penn State, Bath Spa University, the Robert McC Netting Plenary Lecture sponsored by the Cultural and Political Ecology Specialty Group of the American Association of Geographers, the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research in Pune, India, and the Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment in Bengaluru, India. I thank three anonymous reviewers for their kind and generous feedback. I am particularly grateful to Leila Harris for her support and for sharing her expertize on gendered agrarian change in irrigated landscapes. I am forever indebted to my research participants and to my research assistant Jaywant Mehta. Finally, I couldn't have researched and written this paper without the support of my partner, Jessica Vantine Birkenholtz, who both managed our household and advanced her own academic career during all my gallivanting, even as we also navigated a move from Illinois to Pennsylvania in 2019. Despite all of this support, any shortcomings with the paper rest with me.
Funding Information:
I have accrued quite a debt during the research and writing of this paper. I received financial support for fieldwork from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Penn State and through a Fulbright-Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence Award. This paper grew out of critical feedback I received during invited presentations at the University of British Columbia, the Northeastern Nature-Society Workshop hosted by Penn State, Bath Spa University, the Robert McC Netting Plenary Lecture sponsored by the Cultural and Political Ecology Specialty Group of the American Association of Geographers, the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research in Pune, India, and the Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment in Bengaluru, India. I thank three anonymous reviewers for their kind and generous feedback. I am particularly grateful to Leila Harris for her support and for sharing her expertize on gendered agrarian change in irrigated landscapes. I am forever indebted to my research participants and to my research assistant Jaywant Mehta. Finally, I couldn't have researched and written this paper without the support of my partner, Jessica Vantine Birkenholtz, who both managed our household and advanced her own academic career during all my gallivanting, even as we also navigated a move from Illinois to Pennsylvania in 2019. Despite all of this support, any shortcomings with the paper rest with me. The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by the Fulbright-Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence Award.
Publisher Copyright:
© The Author(s) 2022.
PY - 2023/3
Y1 - 2023/3
N2 - This paper examines the relationship between the diffusion of drip irrigation technology, state subsidy programs to encourage its adoption by farmers, and gendered labor dynamics. Drip irrigation is promoted globally as a water conserving agricultural innovation that enhances water-use and productive efficiency by increasing yields with less water, while freeing up “saved” water for other uses. India leads the world in its rate of expansion and in total area. Relying on analyses of government drip irrigation policies and ethnographic field research conducted between 2015 and 2020 in the Indian state of Rajasthan, I find the successful diffusion of drip irrigation is dependent upon state subsidies, farmer adoption decisions and the availability of female labor. I engage conceptual work on water conservation technologies, and from feminist political ecology and infrastructure studies to argue: (1) the diffusion of drip irrigation is better understood as a gendered process of infrastructuring; which (2) is an ongoing process of the assembly of state subsidies, the aggregation of decentralized individual farmer adoption decisions, and the availability of on-demand, underpaid female labor; where (3) female laborers provide a “feminine labor subsidy” that produces productive efficiency gains and lends drip irrigation infrastructure its durability. Conceptualizing drip irrigation as a gendered process of infrastructuring, renders visible its emergent and gendered material politics. The conclusion discusses prospects for reassembling drip irrigation infrastructure in more materially just ways and its implications for the political ecology of water infrastructure.
AB - This paper examines the relationship between the diffusion of drip irrigation technology, state subsidy programs to encourage its adoption by farmers, and gendered labor dynamics. Drip irrigation is promoted globally as a water conserving agricultural innovation that enhances water-use and productive efficiency by increasing yields with less water, while freeing up “saved” water for other uses. India leads the world in its rate of expansion and in total area. Relying on analyses of government drip irrigation policies and ethnographic field research conducted between 2015 and 2020 in the Indian state of Rajasthan, I find the successful diffusion of drip irrigation is dependent upon state subsidies, farmer adoption decisions and the availability of female labor. I engage conceptual work on water conservation technologies, and from feminist political ecology and infrastructure studies to argue: (1) the diffusion of drip irrigation is better understood as a gendered process of infrastructuring; which (2) is an ongoing process of the assembly of state subsidies, the aggregation of decentralized individual farmer adoption decisions, and the availability of on-demand, underpaid female labor; where (3) female laborers provide a “feminine labor subsidy” that produces productive efficiency gains and lends drip irrigation infrastructure its durability. Conceptualizing drip irrigation as a gendered process of infrastructuring, renders visible its emergent and gendered material politics. The conclusion discusses prospects for reassembling drip irrigation infrastructure in more materially just ways and its implications for the political ecology of water infrastructure.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85138291967&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=85138291967&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1177/25148486221100386
DO - 10.1177/25148486221100386
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85138291967
SN - 2514-8486
VL - 6
SP - 132
EP - 152
JO - Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space
JF - Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space
IS - 1
ER -
