The Work of Water

Pakistan's Punjab Irrigation Department manages one of the world's largest irrigation networks. Such bureaucracies are typically considered paradigmatic sites of corruption, inefficiency, and depoliticization, particularly in post-colonial settings. The Work of Water turns this assumption on its head, arguing that the postcolonial promise of welfare and development hinges not on elite policy or expertise but everyday bureaucratic labor. Drawing on a decade of ethnographic and archival research, Maira Hayat offers a historical ethnography of irrigation infrastructure and its administration in the Indus basin, showing that bureaucracy is a key site where the political and ethical are navigated. Moving from irrigation offices and outlets to courtrooms, archives, village council gatherings, and international treaty arbitrations, the book traces how the materiality of water is produced through disputes, ethical conundrums, rules, calculations, files and development projects. Attending to law, religion, gender, authority and corruption as they are navigated every day, the book reveals how the flows and stoppages of water might enable or frustrate human designs. The Work of Water offers a powerful rethinking of environmental governance at a moment of intensifying climate strain. At stake, Hayat demonstrates, is not only the governance of nature, but the nature of governance itself.