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Project

Between the borders and the spirits: A historical political ecology of water from the perspective of a Himalayan village community

Mountain communities are today bearing the brunt of the adverse socio-economic and environmental impacts of human induced climate change, including the erratic and decreasing water supply caused by receding glaciers. Besides their on-going response to climate change, economists, anthropologists, and environmentalists have been studying mountain communities as models of how to sustainably manage natural resources with minimal intervention by the state or the market. However, both the economic and conservationist perspectives have been criticised for overestimating the autonomy of mountain natural resource management communities from external state and market apparatuses, while underemphasising their political embeddedness and historical evolution.

Such critiques have encouraged a more nuanced appraisal of water management communities, but there is still a limited understanding of what a community is; what its relationship with water means and, finally, how the meaning of this relationship changes over time under the influence of broader processes of environmental change and state formation.

This study examines these questions from the perspective of a village community in the ecologically and politically fragile Indian Himalayan border region of Ladakh. It employs a historical political ecology approach, which combines traditional archival research with in-depth field-work using ethnographic methods, quantitative household surveys, and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) aided analysis to understand landscape level change.

Based on an interpretation of the historical and empirical evidence gathered using this approach, I present my analysis in the form of six interrelated propositions to portray the historical relationship between community, water, place, and state formation. Further, I introduce the concept of ‘modes of territoriality’ to address the theoretical and practical shortcomings of existing approaches to studying state formation in postcolonial societies.

Together, these propositions constitute a frame of reference to synthesise and direct future research on community based resource management in mountain environments.

Date:1 Oct 2016 →  30 May 2020
Keywords:Common Property Resources, Water governance, sustainability
Disciplines:Applied sociology, Policy and administration, Social psychology, Social stratification, Social theory and sociological methods, Sociology of life course, family and health, Other sociology and anthropology, Ecology, Environmental science and management, Other environmental sciences, Curatorial and related studies, History, Other history and archaeology, Art studies and sciences, Artistic design, Audiovisual art and digital media, Heritage, Music, Theatre and performance, Visual arts, Other arts, Product development, Study of regions, Economic development, innovation, technological change and growth
Project type:PhD project