Linking Gender and Water - Streams of Thought

Thinking about Gender and Water

Two main threads of argument are apparent from the works of experts on gender and water – in articulating women’s roles as users of water:

The first strand of thought is found in Cleaver and Elson (1995) and Cleaver (1998: 356) who point out that women’s uses of water occur in the domestic or non-market sphere. Informal structures and networks, and management through custom and practice and through ‘rules of use’. They show that women’s contributions to informal water resource management fit neatly with local women’s livelihood priorities for assured access to good quality water. Above all, they show that there is a disjoint here with formalised management principles - eg committee structures and Water Users’ Associations which usually comprise men – and women’s use of water. The formal structures generally emphasise restrictions on access and the importance of distributional rules.

The other broad group of thought is inherent in the works of Zwarteveen (1995; 1997) who puts the emphasis on women’s productive uses rather than reproductive related uses of water at home. Agarwal’s book, ‘A field of one’s own’, is also in this genre, showing women in India have little control over land, which is the most important productive asset, and hence are in a poor bargaining position. This group of experts point out that nearly one-third of agricultural workers in India are women and that most rural women tend to produce some crops for the household as a measure of food security, managing an enormous amount of water in this way. However, the crops produced by women or waters managed by them tend to remain receive very low or zero priority from irrigation analysts. In fact, the single biggest impediment in making water as a resource to empower women lies in the lack of recognition of women as irrigators and water users. Another important contribution has come from Meinzen-Dick et al (1997) who has consistently focused on property rights issues relating to water. Together, this body of research showed that besides intra-household disparities in rights, many of the rights women have over water are non-formal, unwritten, traditional and beyond the legal domain. A study by Meinzen-Dick and Zwarteveen (2003: 154) on gender participation in water users’ associations found that the biggest barrier to women’s participation stem from membership rules that directly or indirectly exclude women. These rules stipulate that only formal right holders to irrigated land can become members or require head-of-household status in order to be eligible for membership, or sometimes a combination of both. Prevailing stereotypical ideas about the gender division of labour and about appropriate male and female behaviour function as informal recognition as farmers and irrigators.

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Feminist Thoughts

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