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Toward a socio-political approach to water management: successes and limitations of IWRM programs in rural northwestern China

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Abstract

In rural north-western China, the tension between economic growth and ecological crises demonstrates the limitations of dominant top-down approaches to water management. In the 1990s, the Chinese government adopted the Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM) approach to combat the degradation of water and ecological systems throughout its rural regions. While the approach has had some success at reducing desertification, water shortage, and ecological deterioration, there are important limitations and obstacles that continue to impede optimum outcomes in water management. As the current IWRM approach is instituted through a top-down centralized bureaucratic structure, it often fails to address the socio-political context in which water management is embedded and therefore lacks a complete treatment of how power is embedded in the bureaucracy and how it articulates through economic growth imperatives set by the Chinese state. The approach has relied on infrastructure heavy and technocratic solutions to govern water demand, which has worked to undermine the focus on integration and public participation. Finally, the historical process through which water management mechanisms have been instituted are fraught with bureaucratic fragmentation and processes of centralization that work against some of its primary goals such as reducing uncertainty and risk in water management systems. This article reveals the historical, social, political, and economic processes behind these shortcomings in water management in rural northwestern China by focusing on the limitations of a top-down approach that rely on infrastructure, technology, and quantification, and thereby advances a more holistic, socio-political perspective for water management that considers the state-society dynamics inherent in water governance in rural China.

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Acknowledgements

This study was funded by the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (2016-JX07) and the 2017–8 CLA Professional Development Program of Colorado State University. The authors have no conflict of interest to declare. The first author would like to thank Dr. Arthur Tzao of Taipei Medical University for saving his life in October 2018.

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Correspondence to KuoRay Mao.

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KuoRay Mao received his Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Kansas, Lawrence, Kansas in 2015. His research areas are environmental sociology, rural sociology, and green criminology.

He is ASSISTANT PROFESSOR of Sociology at Colorado State University-Fort Collins, Colorado, USA. His research interests concern how the myriad socio-economic and environmental disjunctions caused by globalization have engendered patterns of resource and risk allocation, which have in turn shaped structural inequality in East Asia. He was awarded the Community Action Research Initiative (CARI) Award from the American Sociological Association in 2015, the 2016 Outstanding Emerging Scholar Award from the Western Social Sciences Association, and the Best Journal Article Award from the American Society of Criminology Division on Critical Criminology and Social Justice in 2019. He has published 14 peer-reviewed articles in Journal of Agrarian Change, Society & Natural Resources, Critical Criminology, and other journals.

Dr. Mao is a member of the American Sociology Association, American Society of Criminology, and the Western Social Sciences Association.

Qian ZHANG received her Ph.D. in Environmental Sciences from Peking University in 2008. Her research specialization is natural resources management and rural development from the perspective of environmental sociology.

She has worked as Associate Researcher in the Institute of Sociology (IOS), Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS), Beijing, China. She currently serves as the deputy director of the Rural Sociology Department of IOS. She has published on rangeland protection policy in China, impacts of climate change on rangeland adaptive governance, as well as the management of the socioecological system in Northern China. Her most recent project is a comparative study on rural development and natural resources management in East Africa. Her book, titled Understanding Grassland Management as A Wicked Problem: An Environmental Sociology Perspective was published by China Social Sciences Publishing House in 2019.

Dr. Zhang is affiliated with the Chinese Sociological Association and is a member of Professional Committee of Grassland Economy and Policy of the Chinese Grassland Society.

Yongji XUE, obtained his Ph.D degree of management from the School of Management and Economics at Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing, China in 2010. The major field of study was enterprise management.

He is Full Professor at Beijing Forestry University, China, and the Executive Director of the National Simulation Center for Agriculture and Forestry. He has published more than 40 papers in Chinese Management Studies, Sustainability, Journal of Cleaner Production and other journals. His current research directions are innovation and entrepreneurship in Agriculture, marketing in Agriculture and Forestry.

Dr. Xue is a committee member of the Forestry Economic Professional Committee, the Chinese Society of Forestry, Animal Husbandry and Fishery Economics; Engineering Economics Professional Committee, Chinese Society of Forestry Economics. He received the Outstanding Tutor Award of Innovation and Entrepreneurship in Beijing City (2015, awarded by Beijing Education Committee), Outstanding Member of Teaching and Research (2015, awarded by the School of Economics and Management, BJFU), Jiaqi Yunlong Special Award in Teaching and Research (2013, awarded by Beijing Forestry University).

NefratiriWeeks received her MA from Colorado State University in Fort Collins, CO, USA in 2017. Her major field of study is sociology and political economy.

She is a Ph.D. Candidate, Research Assistant, and Instructor at Colorado State University. She studies how processes of inequality are institutionalized and maintained between and within nations in the globalized capitalist economy, focusing on how and why capital markets often fail to fairly distribute scarce economic goods, perpetuate inequalities, and maintain unsustainable production, exchange, and consumption. She works as a research assistant for the Center for Fair & Alternative Trade. In 2018, she was awarded the Ingrid H. Rima Scholarship from the Association for Social Economics for a theoretical paper that approaches the crises inherent in the globalized economy. She is the first author of a forthcoming chapter in the Handbook of Eating and Drinking: Interdisciplinary Perspectives, titled “Fair Trade Foods.”

Ms. Weeks is a member of the American Sociology Association and the Association for Social Economics.

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Mao, K., Zhang, Q., Xue, Y. et al. Toward a socio-political approach to water management: successes and limitations of IWRM programs in rural northwestern China. Front. Earth Sci. 14, 268–285 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11707-019-0795-3

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