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Abstract
In this article, we show how a rainwater harvesting system is made to work. Located at a school in the rural outskirts of Cochabamba, Bolivia, the performance of the system depends on ongoing forms of sociotechnical tinkering: it works well because of the continuous fine-tuning, adaptations, negotiations, and adjustments that people engage in. Acknowledging this hinges on accepting that infrastructures are more fragile, emergent, and contingent than is normally allowed for in engineering textbooks. The language people mobilize to explain their acts of tinkering is also different from how engineers express what they do: they talk about care and caring – care for each other, for their children, for plants – and emphasize reciprocal responsibilities and collective concerns. For them, making water flow is not just about meeting goals of productivity and efficiency, but also about restoring and sustaining the infrastructure itself as well as the relations it supports and makes possible. It is a way of talking that expresses concerns of sustainability and justice. Our conclusion from studying this rainwater harvesting system is that there is merit in expanding and complementing prevailing notions of engineering as optimizing forms of control, with theorizations of engineering as forms of tinkering care.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Buen vivir is an idea derived from Andean cosmologies, particularly from the Quechua and Aymara indigenous peoples of Bolivia, Ecuador, and Peru. The notion emphasizes the deep mutual dependence between and interconnectedness of all living beings, also including mountains, rivers, and much else among those. Buen vivir emphasizes reciprocity and complementarity as the guiding principles for organizing relations between humans and between humans and other-than-humans (Altmann, “Good Life as a Social Movement Proposal for Natural Resource Use”; Villalba, “Buen Vivir Versus Development”; Vanhulst and Beling, “Buen Vivir”; Merino, “An Alternative to ‘Alternative Development’?”; Artaraz, Calestani, and Trueba, “Introduction: Vivir bien/Buen Vivir and Post-Neoliberal Development Paths in Latin America”).
2 See Kemerink-Seyoum et al., “Attention to Sociotechnical Tinkering”.
3 Other authors have mobilised other concepts – such as bricolage (e.g. Benouniche et al., “Making the User Visible”), patchworks (e.g. De Coss-Corzo, “Patchwork: Repair Labor”), calibration (e.g. Chahim, “Governing Beyond Capacity”), pressure (e.g. Anand, “The PoliTechnics of Water Supply in Mumbai”) – to describe similar observations of everyday engagements with and in-situ, often improvised, adjustments of (water) infrastructure. Our ambition in this paper is not to define sociotechnical tinkering vis-à-vis these other concepts to validate its analytical value, but rather to loosely use this concept to think with our empirical data and study the rationales of actors involved in such processes.
4 See also Benouniche et al., “Making the User Visible”; Kemerink-Seyoum et al., “Attention to Sociotechnical Tinkering”; Russell and Vinsel, “Make Maintainers”; Leonardelli, Kemerink-Seyoum, and Zwarteveen, “Obliqueness as a Feminist Mode of Analysing Waterscapes”.
5 See Jensen and Morita, “Introduction”; Anand, Gupta, and Appel, The Promise of Infrastructure; Russell and Vinsel, “Make Maintainers”; Silva-Novoa Sanchez, Kemerink-Seyoum, and Zwarteveen, “Water Infrastructure Always in-the-Making”; Reddy, “Crying ‘Crying Wolf’”; Chitata, Kemerink-Seyoum, and Cleaver, “Engaging and Learning with Water Infrastructure”.
6 See De Coss-Corzo, “Patchwork: Repair Labor” and Chahim, “Governing Beyond Capacity”.
7 See Merino, “An Alternative to ‘Alternative Development’?”.
8 This makes it interesting to read this project against wider feminist conversations about care and caring, see for instance De la Bellacasa, “Matters of Care in Technoscience”, “‘Nothing Comes Without Its World’”, and Matters of Care; Mol, Moser, and Pols, Care in Practice; Mol and Hardon, “Caring”. For reflections about care in relation to water infrastructure, see Dominguez-Guzman et al., “Caring for Water in Northern Peru”.
9 See for instance Mol, Moser, and Pols, Care in Practice; and Mol and Hardon, “Caring”.
10 Reddy, “Crying ‘Crying Wolf’”.
11 Russell and Vinsel, “Make Maintainers”.
12 Government of Bolivia – Decreto Supremo N.2472, “Cosechando Vida - Sembrando Luz”.
13 We would like to provide some additional reflections on the positionality of the first author of the article in view of his close, personal connections to the selected case study. The aim of the research was explicitly not to assess the interventions in which he took part and as such formulating claims of success or failure of the project was not the scope of the research. Rather, the objective of this study was to study the intimate relations and everyday engagements between infrastructure, water flows, and people who design, construct, use, modify, and operate the infrastructure. The first author’s personal relations to, and knowledge of, this case (e.g. the language, the people, the culture, the NGO, the infrastructure) made it possible to collect the detailed empirical data and to recognize other rationalities than economic motivations, which so often are foregrounded as almost indisputable in studies and education on (community) development and infrastructure – including in the education followed by the authors. These empirical insights collected by the first author have further strengthened the engagement of the authors with literature on care (see also note 4).
14 The field research was carried out according to the research ethics protocol of IHE Delft, The Netherlands, and the research proposal was approved prior to the fieldwork by the Examination Committee of the same institution. All interviewees were fully informed about the purpose of the research and data handling methods prior to the interviews and have given oral consent to participate in the research. Potentially sensitive data has been anonymized to ensure that it cannot be traced to individuals.
15 See Braun and Clarke, “One Size Fits All?”.
16 See amongst others Zwarteveen and Rap, “Guest Editor’s Introduction”.
17 Interview ParentO&M.
18 Interview ParentO&M.
19 Interview ParentO&M.
20 See Laurie, “Gender Water Networks”.
21 See Figure .
22 Interviews ProfA, ParentA, ParentO&M.
23 Interviews ParentC, ProfA, ParentO&M.
24 Interview ProfD.
25 See Kemerink-Seyoum et al., “Attention to Sociotechnical Tinkering”.
26 Interview ProfB.
27 Interviews ProfA, ParentO&M.
28 Interview ParentA.
29 Interview ParentD.
30 Exchange rate of 6.96 (date: 10 January 2020)
31 Interview ProfD.
32 Exchange rate of 6.96 (date: 10 January 2020).
33 Interview ParentO&M.
34 Interviews ParentA, ParentG, ParentH, ParentI.
35 Interview ParentB.
36 Interview ParentG.
37 Interview ProfD.
38 Lo and Gould, “Rainwater Harvesting”; Musayev, Burgess, and Mellor, “A Global Performance Assessment”.
39 See Kemerink-Seyoum et al., “Attention to Sociotechnical Tinkering”.
40 Interview MT.
41 Interview MT.
42 Interview OO.
43 Interview OO.
44 2016.
45 see Boelens, “Cultural Politics and the Hydrosocial Cycle”.
46 Interview ProfessorD.
47 Interviews ParentG, ParentH.
48 Interview ParentG.
49 Interviews ParentA, ParentI, ParentL.
50 Interview OO.
51 See Date and Chandrasekharan, “Beyond Efficiency”; De Coss-Corzo, “Patchwork: Repair Labor”; and Chahim, “Governing Beyond Capacity”.
52 Vera Delgado and Zwarteveen, “Queering Engineers?”, “The Public and Private Domain of the Everyday Politics of Water”; Furlong, “STS Beyond the “Modern Infrastructure Ideal””; Zwarteveen et al., “Transformations to Groundwater Sustainability”.
53 For water, see among others Silva-Novoa Sanchez, Kemerink-Seyoum, and Zwarteveen, “Water Infrastructure Always in-the-Making”; Kemerink-Seyoum et al., “Attention to Sociotechnical Tinkering”; Dominguez-Guzman et al., “Caring for Water in Northern Peru”; Chitata, Kemerink-Seyoum, and Cleaver, “Engaging and Learning with Water Infrastructure”; Leonardelli, Kemerink-Seyoum, and Zwarteveen, “Obliqueness as a Feminist Mode of Analysing Waterscapes”; for more general reflections on the fragility of infrastructure see Meehan, “Tool-Power”; Anand, “The PoliTechnics of Water Supply in Mumbai”, Anand, Gupta, and Appel, The Promise of Infrastructure; Jensen and Morita, “Introduction”; De Coss-Corzo, “Patchwork: Repair Labor”.
54 See Rap and Oré, “Engineering Masculinities”; Vera Delgado and Zwarteveen, “Queering Engineers?”; Zwarteveen and Rap, “Guest Editor’s Introduction”; Zwarteveen, “Engaging with the Politics of Water Governance”.
55 See Vera Delgado and Zwarteveen, “The Public and Private Domain of the Everyday Politics of Water”; Dominguez-Guzman et al., Verzijl, and Zwarteveen, “Water Footprints and ‘Pozas’”.
56 For a detailed analysis, see e.g. Zwarteveen, “Men, Masculinities and Water Powers in Irrigation”; see also Martykánová, “Shaping a New Man”; Date and Chandrasekharan, “Beyond Efficiency”; Liebrand and Udas, “Becoming an Engineer or a Lady Engineer”; Rap and Oré, “Engineering Masculinities”.
57 See Russell and Vinsel, “Make Maintainers”; Reddy, “Crying ‘Crying Wolf’”.
58 See also Zwarteveen et al., “Accounting for Water”.
59 Sundberg, “Decolonizing Posthumanist Geographies”; Kothari et al., A Radical History of Development Studies; Zwarteveen et al., “Transformations to Groundwater Sustainability”.