Living with flows of groundwater and infrastructure governance: the case of Rufaro Irrigation Scheme, Zimbabwe

Smallholder irrigation using groundwater holds considerable promise for policies intending to enhance food security and reduce poverty for rural populations. The practices, logics, wisdoms, knowledges, and understandings used in irrigation in this context become of paramount importance . Practices of smallholder farmers often deviate from initial plans – designs and constructed infrastructure by irrigation engineers – and are often considered inefficient or unproductive by professional irrigation engineers. Such judgements devalue the actual challenges, experiences and knowledges of smallholder farmers. The knowledge and logics of farmers, obtained through their everyday engagement with irrigation infrastructure, are power-laden, shaping actual flows of water, determining irrigation practices and co-constitute social relations. Even though these wisdoms and logics shape practices and interactions, they are relatively little researched in mainstream studies on (ground)water and irrigation management. This research investigates the rationalities farmers mobilise to initiate, carry out, preserve and justify their dealings with water. It aims to capture how people make sense of and understand (ground)water and how they rework irrigation infrastructure and engage with the social context to share and care for this source of water, even in times of crisis. In this interdisciplinary research, I combine ethnographical and technographical methods for data collection and analysis and mobilise different concepts to explore the topic from different perspectives. These are worked out in three empirical chapters based on published or submitted papers. The first paper draws on ideas about socio-technical tinkering, the second on institutional bricolage and the third on fragmented authoritarianism and the everyday state. Blending insights derived from these conceptual framings and bringing these into engagement with rich empirical material concerning the Rufaro Irrigation Scheme in Zimbabwe, I offer an original analysis of the everyday governance of groundwater and irrigation. I show that farmers’ ideas and knowledge about groundwater influence their interactions with irrigation infrastructure and shape how this is adapted to make the water flow.
Furthermore, these ideas shape how people reason about how they and others interact with the groundwater. This research shows that such knowledge and practices are closely intertwined with moral ecological rationalities upheld in the community, which connect the natural and human worlds to the divine or supernatural. Moreover, they are enacted through the gendered embodied knowledge and practice of farmers, operators and engineers. In addition, my material shows how history and politics shape the possibilities of rearranging infrastructure within the ‘fragmented authoritarian’ governance landscape of Zimbabwe, offering opportunities and constraints for exercising authority over water, especially in times of crisis, like during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Through my empirical material, I show how irrigators engage in constant processes of bricolage, adapting to changing circumstances and dynamically enacting irrigation management. These processes of bricolage, shaped by hybridised moral-ecological rationalities, reveal that motivations to care (for people, the environment and infrastructure) and to control are imbued in water management practices. Furthermore, institutions governing groundwater show, through processes of bricolage, signs of transformation and degeneration over time as farmers cope with changing circumstances and challenges, for instance, during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The findings of this research could be used to direct the attention of policymakers and engineers to different understandings of water and irrigation infrastructure and how they are adapted and managed by farmers over time. Greater sensitivity to this involves taking seriously the materiality of water infrastructures and the multiplicity of ideas, modes of knowing, wisdoms and meanings that farmers associate with groundwater governance as it shapes everyday practices and outcomes.