Farhana Sultana

Gender, class and access to water: Three cases in a poor and crowded delta.

Water plays a pivotal role in economic activity and in human well-being. Because of the prominence of water in production (primarily for irrigation) and in domestic use (drinking, washing, cooking), conflict over water and the effects of gender-influenced decisions about water may have far-reaching consequences on human well-being, economic growth, and social change. At the same time, social conflicts and social change are shaped and mediated, often in unexpected ways, by the natural conditions in which water occurs. The social relations of water are poorly understood. This article introduces a framework for disaggregating conditions of access to water and uses it to examine three pressing questions in Bangladesh. First, extraction of groundwater for irrigation has made many drinking-water hand pumps run dry. Second, increasing use of groundwater for drinking has been associated with the poisoning of at least 20 million people through naturally occurring arsenic in groundwater. Third, the article examines some of the ways access to water has been changed by the rise of shrimp aquaculture for export. This article highlights new directions for the analysis of interactions among water, class, and gender. The existing literature has tended to focus on the implications of gender analysis for government policy, especially development projects and water resources management, and for womens organization. In this article we begin to sketch some questions that arise from a concern to understand the broader context of social change.

Fluid lives: subjectivities, gender and water in rural Bangladesh

This article seeks to contribute to the emerging debates in gender–water and gender–nature literatures by looking at the ways that gendered subjectivities are simultaneously (re)produced by societal, spatial and natural/ecological factors, as well as materialities of the body and of heterogeneous waterscapes. Drawing from fieldwork conducted in Bangladesh on arsenic contamination of drinking water, the article looks at the ways that gender relations are influenced by not just direct resource use/control/access and the implications of different types of waters, but also by the ideological constructs of masculinity/femininity, which can work in iterative ways to influence how people relate to different kinds of water. Conflicts and struggles over water inflect gendered identities and sense of self, where both men and women participate in reproducing and challenging prevailing norms and practices. As a result, multiple social and ecological factors interact in complex and interlinked ways to complicate gender–water relations, whereby socio-spatial subjectivities are re/produced in water management and end up reinforcing existing inequities. The article demonstrates that gender–water relations are not just intersected by social axes, as generally argued by feminist scholars, but also by ecological change and spatial relations vis-à-vis water, where simultaneously socialized, ecologized, spatialized and embodied subjectivities are produced and negotiated in everyday practices.

Living in hazardous waterscapes: Gendered vulnerabilities and experiences of floods and disasters

Considerable literature exists on floods and weather-related disasters, but limited attention has been given to the varied social implications of hazards in the lives of people, especially from a gender perspective. This is particularly poignant in floodplains and coastal areas, where water is a key element in giving, sustaining and taking away life and livelihood. Critical social and geographical analyses enable better understanding of the ways hazardous waterscapes are perceived, experienced and negotiated by people across social categories in their everyday life. This article attempts to highlight the gendered and classed coping strategies and adaptation measures that men and women engage with (that both challenge and reproduce social relations and vulnerabilities) in their attempts to survive in hazardous environments. Drawing from an analysis of the gendered dynamics of floods and disasters as well as the interventions that were undertaken via the Flood Action Plan in Bangladesh, I demonstrate the differential and gendered implications of both water-related hazards and the structural interventions that were envisioned to address the hazards. With climate change likely to exacerbate floods and disasters, it is important to heed such differentiations and marginalizations, so as to draw insights to better inform current and future adaptation approaches, flood management and disaster management strategies.

Gendering Climate Change: Geographical Insights

Although climate change is expected to increase vulnerabilities, marginalization, and sufferings of many in the Global South, impacts will be unevenly felt across social strata. Intersectionalities of social difference, especially along gender and class lines, differentiate the ways in which impacts of climate change are experienced and responded to. Feminist political ecology and feminist geography insights can explain how different groups of people understand, respond to, and cope with variability and uncertainties in nuanced and critical ways, thereby elucidating the gendered implications of climate change. With a regional focus on South Asia, the article underscores the key issues that can be applied geographically elsewhere. Gendered implications of climate change in South Asia are particularly poignant as patriarchal norms, inequities, and inequalities often place women and men in differentiated positions in their abilities to respond to and cope with dramatic changes in socioecological relations but also foreground the complex ways in which social power relations operate in communal responses to adaptation strategies. This is particularly evident in water-related productive and reproductive tasks in agrarian societies that constitute the majority of South Asia. As climate change is expected to exacerbate both ecological degradation (e.g., water shortages) and water-related natural hazards (e.g., floods, cyclones), thereby transforming gender–water geographies, it becomes imperative to undertake careful multiscalar and critical analyses to better inform policymaking. This article elucidates the complex ways that climate change will affect gender and social relations, thereby highlighting the ways that existing policy narratives and adaptation programs might be better informed by geographical insights. To this end, the article encourages feminist and critical geographers to more forcefully and fruitfully engage with global debates on climate change.

Water, Technology, and Development: Transformations of Development Technonatures in Changing Waterscapes

Delivering safe drinking water is often equated with delivering development in much of the Global South. Yet different arrangements of technologies, waters, and social relations constitute uneven waterscapes and produce different water — society relations across sites and scales. Analyzing the contradictory roles of water-producing technologies and differentiated waters in enabling and challenging processes of development thus becomes important to explaining the political ecologies of development. In order to investigate the technonatural relations of power that constitute development, I look at the ways that different types of waters, water technologies, nature (aquifers, groundwater, arsenic), and power relations coproduce water (in)securities and (un)healthy development subjects, with a case study from waterscapes of the Bengal Delta. Contaminated tubewells have resulted in a drinking water crisis and a reconfiguration of hydro — social relations. Groundwater usage for drinking water purposes was introduced via tubewell technology, creating a public health success story as ‘safe’ groundwater offered alternatives to the consumption of unsafe surface water sources that had caused high morbidity and mortality rates. But a situation of millions of tubewells producing water with unsafe levels of naturally occurring arsenic has resulted in challenging such development narratives of success, where the tubewells that embodied social status and notions of progress (producing ‘good water’) came to slowly poison people across the delta (with ‘bad water’). I detail the ways that hybrid waters (safe/unsafe/untested and good/bad) and the discourses of water poisoning are produced by water technologies, aquifers, and social relations that are enrolled to support notions of development; in addition, I critically analyze the ways that development goes awry when these technonatural assemblages are unexpectedly altered by the agencies and materialities of variously contaminated waters, differentiated aquifers, and the changing status of water-producing technologies. In contributing to political — ecological analyses of water and technology, I raise questions about the troubled relationship between development and so-called appropriate technologies by bringing attention to the articulations and mutual enrollments of technologies, ecologies, discourses, and subjects in the technonatural processes of development.

Water, Water Everywhere, But Not a Drop to Drink: Pani Politics (Water Politics) in Rural Bangladesh

Abstract This article looks at the nature of water politics (pani politics) in the context of arsenic contamination of drinking water in rural Bangladesh. Pani politics is found to be a product of intersecting similarities and differences among women and men, where water comes to have material and symbolic power that people can exercise, which can lead to conflicts, marginalization and suffering vis-à-vis water. Gendered location makes a difference in arsenic contaminated areas, where gender differentiated impacts are being observed, in terms of water access, control and ramifications of water poisoning. However, gender has to be understood as intersecting with other axes of differentiation such as social class, age and geographical location, to understand the nuances and multiple ways that arsenic poisoning and water hardship affect lives of men and women in different ways. Attention to such differences highlights the variations in gendered hardships, labor, rights and resources vis-à-vis water, and the way that everyday politics comes to play a role in the ways that people negotiate their lives around water and arsenic in landscapes of social inequality and heterogeneity of arsenic contamination.

Introduction: Global perspectives on gender-water geographies

This introduction summarizes the work featured in the themed section of Gender, Place and Culture titled ‘Global geographies of gender and water’. It brings into dialogue scholars investigating a variety of gender–water relationships at different scales, including: poisoned waterscapes; fishing practices; and the implications of neoliberal water policies. The authors featured purposefully engage with the multi-faceted ways in which experiences, discourses and policies of water are gendered, and how gender is created through processes of access, use and control of water resources. In bringing these articles together, we have consciously aimed to support inclusive, feminist collaborative work and to prioritize diversity.

Producing Contaminated Citizens: Toward a Nature–Society Geography of Health and Well-Being

A nature–society geography approach to health and well-being demonstrates that socioecological parameters, in addition to economic and political factors, are critical to explaining outcomes of health crises. In expounding on this multifaceted understanding of health and well-being in the context of development, I draw on research on chronic arsenic poisoning and water contamination in rural Bangladesh. A public health crisis has arisen from naturally-occurring arsenic poisoning millions of people who drink, cook, and irrigate with arsenic-laced groundwater pumped up by tubewells, where the very sources that were promoted to bring health are now bringing illness, hardship, and death. In examining the interlinked ways that arsenic and water come to influence well-being and illness, I pay particular attention to social stigma and the production of contaminated citizens. By engaging the insights from nature–society geographies of health and feminist geographies of well-being in contributing to scholarship in geographies of health, the article highlights that the experiences of health and well-being are complex and evolving in instances where slow poisoning is simultaneously an outcome of development endeavors and environmental factors.

Doing development as a critical development scholar

Abstract notions of development andits theories may get smothered by the minutiae of practicalities and practices.Learning how the system works takes time and patience. Wavering betweencynicism and idealism, boredom and horror, are not uncommon. Within large or-ganisations, business-as-usual is easier and prevalent, whereby efforts perceivedto ‘rock the boat’ can bring on doubt, resistance and rejection. A productive andcritical engagement with development may feel like doing ‘double shift’–doingthe mundane, rote and challenging aspects of the job as well as constantly beingcritically reflexive and critiquing what is being done. The end results are impor-tant, nonetheless, and demonstrate how academics can have meaningful input indevelopment. While complicated analyses are more difficult, they are critical toimproving policy outcomes and configuring what is missing or problematic.Academic knowledge and training can be used to challenge or transformwhat is being done (or not) in the name of development, especially in spacesthat don’t always have the opportunity to critique in such ways. Engaged aca-demics can facilitate such transformation by translating ideas and theories tomake them more accessible and relevant. Connecting, rethinking and reassessingideas, policies and practices, often the bedrocks of our critical and analyticalapproaches, can then have an impact. Mindful of this, I was able to make strate-gic decisions on input and interventions in small and meaningful ways thatcould have a large impact over time. For instance, I placed great attention onensuring gender sensitivity across all projects, by not only questioning the prob-lematic and hegemonic usage of the term ‘gender’, but by offering paths for-ward by creating spaces for multiple perspectives and closer engagement withfeminist and postcolonial scholarship.

Water, Culture, and Gender: An Analysis from Bangladesh

In most of rural Bangladesh, the proliferation of tubewells that pump up groundwater has increased people’s access to drinking water over the last couple of decades. Most of the tubewells found in households, markets, schools, mosques, and other locations are privately owned, although the government has also installed some public tubewells. The government and development agencies heavily promoted these devices as ‘safe’ water sources compared to surface water (e.g., ponds and rivers), which is often chemically and pathogenically contaminated (and frequently led to high morbidity and mortality rates from water-borne diseases). However, the tubewell water that was deemed a public health success story only a few years ago is now poisoning millions of people, as naturally occurring, tasteless, odourless, colourless, carcinogenic arsenic is showing up in drinking water drawn from these wells.