A socio-material approach to water access struggles of smallholder farmers: 'co-shaping' actors, institutions, and infrastructures in Ağlasun, Turkey

Smallholder farmers are key users of irrigation water, and equitable access to water is vital for sustaining agriculture. Without smallholder farmers, global food production will drastically decrease, as more than one-third of global food production comes from small farms of two hectares or less in size. However, most smallholder farmers face serious issues accessing sufficient water. Given the urgency and significance of the global challenge of equitable access to water for smallholder farmers, it is crucial to understand and explain how farmers obtain access to water, the conditions for equitable access, and the reasons for the (structural) inequalities in access to water.   

In this thesis, I explain how critical institutional, political ecology, and socio-technical approaches can help to reveal the agency of different actors and explain how they become winners or losers in terms of water access. Building on these approaches, I synthesize insights from common pool resource (CPR) theory, theory of access, institutional bricolage, science and technology studies, infrastructural violence, accumulation by dispossession, and water grabbing. I aim to show how these different theories that prioritize mostly either the ‘social’ or the ‘material’ perspective in critical water studies can interact with each other to shape a ‘socio-material approach’, which stresses the interactions between actors, institutions and infrastructures. By introducing and applying this ‘socio-material approach’, I aim to demonstrate how to tinker a ‘bricolage’ of various theoretical frameworks to explain the specific reasons of inequalities in access to water. 

The findings of my research could help smallholder farmers fight the injustices they face on a daily basis. I demonstrate the crucial role of locally embedded institutions and collective action. Such institutions strengthen collective rulemaking, which increases the potential of smallholder farmers to oppose and counteract external institutions that are introduced by powerful actors. Therefore, my solidarity recommendations for smallholder farmers are to find ways to defend and strengthen local collective action and solidarity-based institutions, such as collective canal cleaning and the örüm system, related to specific infrastructures and institutions. Although giving up these institutions may look beneficial for farmers in the short term, preserving them can enhance the capacity of farmers to fight injustices in access to water in the long term.