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66 1 bbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbb 4 Technocratic approaches to irrigation development and management have gradually given way to participatory but still largely instrumental approaches, with a focus on how water users should perform local irrigation management tasks and functions. Thus, joint management is often characterized by devolution of day-to-day managerial tasks and responsibilities to local water users’ associations (WUAs) of the tertiary units (TUs) in irrigation systems. In the same way, water rights are often paid attention to in an instrumental manner on the basis of preconceived assumptions about the efficiency of exploitation and management under specific property regimes (F. von Benda-Beckmann et al. ; Spiertz ). The ultimate objective of such approaches is to create supposedly ideal conditions of governance, management, and exploitation through combinations of physical and sociolegal engineering. From the s on, these issues were increasingly approached from an economic point of view: deregulation and cost reduction have put management turnover, cost recovery, and the introduction of market principles high on the irrigation management agenda. Fortunately, there is also a growing attention to the sociolegal aspects of irrigation (see also chapter ).1 Many studies on irrigation and water rights are now openly posing the question of how to cope with legally complex water use and management situations and the new forms of interaction and problems of governance and management emerging from them.2 Such studies often focus on farmer-managed irrigation systems and problems of rehabilitation, incorporation , and redefinition of water rights against a background of increasing pressure on water resources and competition between multiple uses and user groups. In these settings, the existence of multiple sources and definitions of rights—for instance between state law and customary law—is the rule rather than an exception. In the Shadow of Uniformity Balinese Irrigation Management in a Public Works Irrigation System in Luwu, South Sulawesi, Indonesia DIK ROTH IN THE SHADOW OF UNIFORMITY 67 Less attention has generally been paid to the sociolegal aspects of irrigation systems designed, built, and operated by state agencies (see Meinzen-Dick and Bruns ). However, the seeming uniformity of such systems based on modern engineering technology, in which rights to land and water are allocated, and material infrastructure and users’ organizations designed and built by state agencies, should not blind us to the fact that these systems may hide a considerable diversity of norms and rules, forms of knowledge, organizational arrangements , and practices that do not by definition neatly and harmoniously fit in with “the system.” Engineering norms, rules, and definitions of rights emerging in such systems may differ considerably from those of the users. The existence of an ethnically heterogeneous farmer population within one command area as a consequence of migration, for instance, may add to these complexities. This chapter explores the sociolegal landscape of irrigation management in such a setting. I describe and analyze the role of the traditional Balinese irrigators ’ institution of the subak in irrigation management among Balinese settlers in the command area of the Kalaena irrigation system, a public works system in Luwu, South Sulawesi, Indonesia (see figure .). I transcend (sub-)disciplinary boundaries that select either “the legal,” “the technical,” or “the organizational” as an exclusive focus of analysis. Approaches that stress the socially constructed or heterogeneous character of technology are one way out of such disciplinary approaches. Any human use of technology entails processes of sociotechnical stabilization. Bijker and Law (: ) remark that “the concern with sociotechnical stabilization . . . is close to . . . the problem of securing the social order.” Irrigation systems can also be analyzed as sociotechnical systems, intricate complexes of physical-technical, organizational, and normative-legal dimensions of water control in a wider agroecological, economic, sociopolitical, and cultural context.3 There is a strong interdependence among social norms, technology, and the organization of irrigation management. A functioning irrigation system requires a sufficient degree of stability among these dimensions of norms and rights, infrastructure, and organization (see Boelens ). The normative and legal dimensions of irrigation, then, are important in processes of stabilization at work in irrigation systems, but should not be analyzed in isolation .4 In Indonesia, so-called technical irrigation systems based on civil engineering technology were built on a large scale from the s.5 This type of irrigation development is characterized by a top-down modernization approach with a focus on standardized physical construction. Contrary to “traditional” irrigation systems, the normative-legal, technical, and organizational properties of these systems are basically a product of blueprinted approaches to design, construction , and management, and therefore largely external to the...

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