State rescaling and water governance

This paper adopts a political-ecological perspective on water governance, which presupposes that there is a close correlation between the transformations of the hydrological cycle in the natural world and power relations in sociopolitical sphere.

As Swyngedouw (2009:56) maintains, “hydro-social research envisions the circulation of water as a combined physical and social process, as a hybridized socio-natural flow that fuses together nature and society in inseparable manners”.

Hydraulic environments in this perspective thus tend to be regarded as socio-physical constructions in which water is organized through a combination of social historical and metabolic-ecological processes. Because hydraulic environment is a

social-physical construction, the enhancement of water supply of one area or a city may lead to change of other places’ physical condition and their water supply.

Therefore, water regulation is not environmentally neutral, neither is it a neutral sociopolitical process. Governing water involves political power of various levels of spatial scale in terms of utilization and controlling of natural water flows (Conca, 2006; Feitelson and Fischhendler, 2009; Swyngedouw, 2007; Bakker, 2002; Norman and Bakker, 2009). “All socio-spatial processes are invariably also predicated upon the transformation or metabolism of physical, chemical, or biological components”

(Swyngedouw 2004:23).

From this perspective, water supply since ancient time has been involving the sociopolitical processes that intended to conquer natural water flows. On the national scale, one of the major tasks for every state is to use their power to control and regulate water flow in order to generate resources for sustaining living condition and build its political power (Worster, 1985; Reisner, 1993; Wehr, 2004; Swyngedouw, 2007; Wester, 2008; Molle et al, 2009). In the process of water control, the state gained even more power from the society due to its increasing administrative capacity in controlling the flow of water to cover massive areas. This is the thesis that

Wittfogel (1957) has written in his thesis of oriental despotism.

The relationship between the state and its water control mechanisms formed the fulcrum of Wittfogel’s (1957) inquiry into hydraulic societies. Wittfogel proposed that

irrigation works, which conditioned the rise of highly centralized and despotic

regimes. Water held such politically transformative power, Wittfogel claimed, because it lay between two extremes of agricultural inputs: regional climatic conditions and soil composition. Water, a production factor thus created a “technical task which is solved either by mass labor or not at all.” Therefore, Wittfogel’s central argument is that the capital investment and labor coordination required for substantial water control on big rivers demand the rise of a strong and hierarchical power center which he called the ‘despotic’ states of the Orient (Imlay and Carter, 2012).

Wittfogel’s thesis had generated heated scholarly debates, especially the linearity he suggested between irrigation development, state formation and centralized power, and whether this evolution necessarily leads to a despotic state (Steward, 1978; Bray, 1994). Given the hot debate, nonetheless, it is still evident that there is a tendency of centralization of state power in water control on the national scale especially in the initial stage of state formation in many different parts of the world. As Bakker (2002) observes in the post-Franco Spanish case, the development of new and large-scale water resources implemented in the agricultural sector by the state during the Franco dictatorship was essential to the modernization and mechanization after the civil war.

The state assumed the key role in the development of hydraulic capability, through which water resources were regulated to cover most of the farm land and redirect water for the need of Spanish industrialization. This close relationship between state formation and water control also shows in the Chinese case as we will show later.

In this state formation stage, water regulation is always controlled by the power alliance of state bureaucrats (such as water development agencies) and engineers, they tend to propose wider scale of water governance to include multiple surface and groundwater basin by framing the issue as adequacy of national water supply.

Through this alliance, a water governance regime in a nation-wade level has been established (Feitelson and Fischhendler, 2009: 730). The centralization of power at the national level can be increased and facilitated by the improvements of technology that are supposed to have the capability to reduce the cost and enhance wider

economies of scale. The water agencies and engineers’ discourses have reinforced the national scale of water works. As Feitelson and Fischhendler (2009:730) suggest,

‘The centralization of management and the associated construction of large-scale water works in modern times have been largely legitimized by a managerial discourse

Nevertheless, the geographic scale of water governance is not static, it is always changing along with economic, political and social processes. Especially in the process of industrialization and urbanization, the state has to reallocate water resources in order to sustain the pace of its domestic economic development. In this process, however, the state has to negotiate or command local governments to re-build the governance system. This transformation of water control system thus indicates the state’s power is being rescaling to meet the new demands generated from various sociopolitical and economic processes.

As it is commonly understood in the social sciences that scale is "socially constructed, historically contingent and politically contested" (Reed and Bruyneel, 2010), this transformation of environmental governance nowadays in the democratic societies tend to involve not only governmental agencies and social groups, but also the engagement of NGOs in the operational procedures in key issues, so as to gain legitimacy in democratic decision making (Barak, 2002;Reed and Bruyneel, 2010).

Therefore, current social scientists in the West find that decision making process on environmental governance has been changing from government to governance modes, indicating the transformation from one that exercising power by formal, hierarchical, and centralized authority to one that is based on mutually agreed upon coordination made by multiple horizontal, decentralized political and social actors. Water

governance thus becomes decentralized, de-territorialized, and re-territorialized.

The Chinese case on water governance nonetheless has its own specific features.

Following the economic reform logic, in which local states were granted the power to develop the economy by their own interpretation of central state policies (Oi, 1995).

Local states thus tend to exploit the natural environment, especially land and water, in order to boost local economies and which was fully supported by the central state.

Indeed, as the local state corporatism thesis (Oi, 1995; Edin, 2003) has found that local governments had very strong incentive to develop local economies, especially in the initial stage of economic reform in which many local cadres were pioneers in leading the local economies to develop away from decadence. In the 1990s, because of the central state’s tax-sharing reform (Oi, 1995), local cadres had very strong incentive to create ‘extra-budgetary fund’ (mainly by selling the land development right to real estate developers) for local authorities and develop the local economies. This strong economic activism of local bureaucrats has deeply related to

assigned as a hard target and priority that local cadres have to pursue for (Edin, 2003).

As local states’ incentives are strong in keeping their rapid economic growth, water is channeled from rural areas to satisfy the metabolic ecological environment of big cities. Local states are competing among themselves for water supply. All the neighboring provincial and municipal city governments intend to reserve

cross-provincial river’s water flow in order to feed the demands of city and industry within their own territory. On the other hand, the central state also aims to maintain water supply to feed and balancing regional needs at the national scale; while in doing so, it may change water supply of the natural course and create tensions among

various levels of state authority. In fact, water conflicts among local states beget the central state to step in so as to solve the water supply issue. Water governance thus is never a conflict-neutral process, it is in fact a multi-scaled articulation of institutions and actors with varying degrees of power conflict and negotiation. In the process, water is de-territorialized and re-territorialized by various levels of state power.

We will argue in this paper, China’s water governance has changed from mainly central state’s command and control mode to a local competitive mode. Now, because of the draught situation in the north has been worsening, and the water wars among local states become severe, the central state launched its SNWTP in order to solve the water supply problem and especially for the need of Beijing. In the process of the construction, a new collaborative governance mode has been in developing, in which central state has re-centralized its power as to work with local states to facilitate the formation of a new water governance structure in order to ease the tensions among local states, as well as to solve the problems of water supply and water pollution, which we discuss as follows.