Conviviality Under Pressure of Market-Modernist Expertocracy: The Case of Water Commons in Rural Switzerland

Abstract

Citizens outside of the built-up zone in the Canton of Lucerne, Switzerland are selfresponsible to establish and maintain their water services. In response many independent, collective water schemes emerged in rural areas. We describe these schemes as commons, since citizens organize legal, institutional, and infrastructural aspects of water access in a collective manner. Since the late 19th century such commons serving farming households have been subsidized by the State. In this article, we develop a conviviality lens to analyze how water commons are being supported and regulated by public institutions. We show how the introduction of neoliberal policy reforms summarized under the term New Public Management (NPM) put pressure on this public support. By describing a specific project in detail, we demonstrate how the failure of a market-modernist expertocracy to recognize these commons as alternative forms of social organization negatively affects their viability. We argue that for the proliferation of these commons their complexity, networked autonomy, and rooted notions of belonging need to be recognised.

Community, markets, and conviviality: a political ecology of rural water supply

“…This interpretation of the commons as an alternative form of economy has more recently been complemented by scholars, who perceive the commons as an organisational and political alternative (de Angelis and Harvie, 2014; Dolenec and Žitko, 2016;Esteva, 2014). These scholars reject the idea of humans solely taking rational decisions to maximise their own benefit and perceive them as subjects who, through "other-than-capitalist" (Villamayor-Tomas and García-López, 2021) forms of collaborative organisation, shape their commons -a process called commoning (De Castro, 2012;, Dupuits et al, 2020Hoogesteger et al, 2023aHoogesteger et al, , 2023bBoelens et al, 2023).…”

“…Boelens (2015: 133) defines water user commons as "a group of internally differentiated water users bound by mutual dependence to develop, use and manage their water sources, by a sense of collective (culture-space bound) hydraulic identity, and who are determined to realize their interdependence and materialize their collective and individual water rights by engaging in collective action strategies". Their water commoning experiences are messy and power-charged processes, and "include distributive and decision-making conflicts, such as over water access or fishing grounds, and over legitimate territorial rules and authority" (Boelens et al, 2023(Boelens et al, : 1132. Water commoning processes are struggles to shape collectivity from difference and divergence, ordered around a resource that, if to be managed by vulnerable groups, by nature requires shared action (Sanchis- Ibor et al, 2017;Aubriot, 2022;Veldwisch et al, 2013).…”

“…While chapters 2 and 3 were framed from the perspective of a willing development agent, who wants to improve the outcomes of projects that seek to enhance rural water supply access and delivery, in the subsequent chapters 4 and 5 my perspective changed to that of a critical researcher questioning the developmental framing of rural water service access and delivery. I did so by introducing the concepts of commoning and the commons, which allowed for greater attention to questions of values, justice, equity and power (Agrawal et al, 2023;Boelens et al, 2023;De Castro et al, 2016;De Castro, 2020) and allowed for the analysis of the way that these collectives are imagined and motivated. By also introducing the concepts of modernism, neoliberalism and conviviality, I described the influence that market-modernist actors (both public and private) exert on these organisational alternatives (e.g.…”