Message 5: Juana responds to Manirul

Juana Vera responds to the comments of Manirul Islam. She addresses Manirul’s critique of the application of feminist approaches to development in water management and also clarifies with an example.

Dear Manirul,

Thanks for your comments and you are right in your observation, about the theoretical content of my input and what I am writing for water you can also apply to other development discussions, but now we are trying to open the window of water management activity and explain why and what has to be accomplished on gender issues with this specific activity.

In fact, water management is a sociotechnical, sociolegal and very highly political issue. That is why most of the approaches to manage water (technical biased) fail to integrate gender, ethnic and cultural issues when they do not take into account these dimensions of water management.
I would like to explain to you with an example what I wrote: water management is the result of the confrontation and negotiation of the interests, power relations, knowledge..... In de Andes of Latinamerica, when water has to be distribute for irrigation, first the husband has to talk to his wife about where they will start to irrigate, which kind of crops they will select, etc. Usually it is the husbands who have a preference for growing commercial crops (for instance potatoes) which at the main time require lot of water. Women have to think of different crops for cooking at home, and usually they have preferences for traditional and very high quality crops, which usually do not require very much water. Then they both must negotiate on which crops will be prioritized, even though the men tend to decide at the end, women are not passive actors, and they do defend their positions on the basis of their experience, knowledge and expertise. Well, I hope this short example can explain what I wrote about in my previous statement. I will send more examples and also maybe some case studies to GWA.

Regards,
Juana