As globalization processes and related neoliberal agendas promote privatization through state action, people's struggles for rights to water have intensified. In this context, this book examines the role of the ambivalent state in local struggles for water, which are deeply intertwined with global forums that support and/or challenge the privatization of water resources. These local-global struggles have redefined the relationships between the state, corporations, and other social actors that impact the local politics of inequality and marginalization.
As globalization processes and related neoliberal agendas promote privatization through state action, people's struggles for rights to water have intensified. In this context, this book examines the role of the ambivalent state in local struggles for water, which are deeply intertwined with global forums that support and/or challenge the privatization of water resources. These local-global struggles have redefined the relationships between the state, corporations, and other social actors that impact the local politics of inequality and marginalization.
As water is increasingly subjected to market imperatives and transformed into a means for capital accumulation, the state has been unable to manage the resource. Building on the concept of accumulation by dispossession this article focuses on local neoliberalisms, arguing that collective governance of water resources is contentious. Local neoliberalism is atypical in that it brings within its fold a localized institution, the nongovernmental organization (NGO), engaged in mobilizing citizens and contributing to accumulative practices. Privatization practices of the state and NGOs serve as an impetus to mobilize local citizens to manage water resources. Citizens resist accumulative practices but challenges to local neoliberalisms are complex as politics of inequities exacerbate inequalities based on gender, class, and caste and limit the possibilities of collective governance. The article analyzes Indian government policy documents on water and the case of Tarun Bharat Sangh, an NGO in the state of Rajasthan, India, to show that accumulation by dispossession redefines the common property of water by appropriating a basic resource and suppressing local notions of consumption and maintenance.
Organizing grassroots groups, particularly among the deeply disadvantaged may require initial facilitation through a leader. This article suggests that such facilitative leadership will adopt a diffused form with increased participation and involvement of members in groups. Thereafter, members are less likely to rely on the facilitative leader for decision-making or collective action. Based on primary data from sanghas organized as grassroots groups through the Mahila Samakhya Karnataka (MSK) program in rural India, the article examines the effects of group characteristics; structure and leadership; and individual participation on the political-cultural empowerment of members. The analyses suggest that older bureaucratic grassroots groups are more likely to be empowering for women members. Members' involvement in the process of creating, setting up and adopting rules and procedures is significant for change within the family and the community, particularly for the poor illiterate dalit women in this case.
Resources received by NGOs, particularly in the developing world, are instrumental in shaping program activities and in establishing, through donors, the hegemony of Western knowledge. Building on earlier work involving the spatial and locational politics of knowledge, I argue that donors providing resources for designing and implementing programs, including that for capacity building, impact the structuring of knowledge to create intellectual realms. Intellectual realms structure knowledge and create bounded spaces in ways that maintain the centrality and power of knowledge producers in the West. The donors pre-determine activities to be pursued and utilize, the capacity building initiatives as mechanisms for promoting theoretical ideas and frameworks that conform to knowledge production in the West. Using two cases from rural India, I discuss the ways in which donor priorities can adversely impact local communities and how power relations at the local level and across the local and global levels facilitate the construction of knowledge.
