Out of one, many: hydro-economic logics in a World Bank-financed irrigation project in Romania

Abstract

The study of irrigation systems has been relatively absent from research into socio-ecological transitions in ex-socialist countries, with a few exceptions. Using a World Bank designed and financed irrigation system constructed by a British contractor in 1974 in southern Romania as an entry point, we work with what we term hydro-economic logic to understand the economic and ecological transformations supported by large-scale irrigation systems in the context of rapid post-socialist change. While the socialist-era hydro-economic logic reflected the property regime over land during state-socialism, post-1990 processes of government-backed land restitution and land privatization, the collapse of the vertically-integrated economy that accompanied the network of the canals, pumps and pipes, and the advent of European Union farm payment schemes, created three distinct hydro-economic logics: independent vertical irrigation by small landholders; land grabbing next to the canals; and water grabbing by large agro-industrial business. This suggests that a long-term analysis of infrastructure systems yields unique insights into their changing techno-political rationalities and world-making capacities and may help future efforts to assess the ecological legacies of high modernist infrastructural mega-projects.