Water, technology, and the courtroom: negotiating reclamation policy in territorial New Mexico

Historical investigation of arid landscapes and communities in the American West has long focused on the pivotal influence of federal reclamation policy, typically characterizing its implementation as the application of scientific and technological methods to a variety of water resource management issues. This paper departs from traditional views of reclamation by highlighting the highly variable and contingent ways in which new science-based forms of water management were proposed and negotiated in specific local places with particular cultural, legal, and historical geographies. Drawing theoretically from literature on the ‘geography of science,’ the paper probes the ways in which authority for a scientific approach to water management was created, negotiated, and expressed in local and regional contexts in the Territory of New Mexico, where authoritative systems of practical resource use and administration had been in long use before the U.S. government initiated its federal water reclamation program in 1902. Specifically, the paper examines two disputes entered and argued in front of northern New Mexico’s Rio Arriba District Dourt between 1903 and 1905. By departing from the geographical and scalar perspectives typically applied to environmental histories of the West and its reclamation landscapes, this ‘microgeographical’ approach promises a fresh perspective that emphasizes the highly contingent ways in which science-based water policy was implemented in multiple and complex environments.     

Conflicting images of the Zuider Zee around 1900: nation-building and the struggle against water

In 1918, the Dutch government decided to enclose and reclaim the Zuider Zee (later called the IJsselmeer). The preceding decades had been marked by broad public debate about the utility and urgency of the project. Around 1900, its proponents constructed images of the region and of the Dutch nation in which the Zuider Zee was no longer a crossroads. They emphasized the backwardness of the area and depicted the sea as a domestic enemy, its violent storms posing a threat to the nation. Cornelis Lely’s Zuider Zee proposal (1891) promised a bright future for both the region and the Netherlands as a whole. The struggle against the water would revitalize the nation (by stimulating nation-building) and modernize its international image (perceived as a picturesque but archaic country). Opponents of the project feared the high costs and developed a counter-image: the Zuider Zee region as heartland of ‘authentic’ Dutch culture, a heritage that would be jeopardized by the project. The article concludes by highlighting the synchronicity of the non-synchronous: the Zuider Zee region was envisioned as a region living in the past, thereby constituting an ‘internal Other’ in a country undergoing rapid modernization around 1900.     

Journeys to Italian East Africa 1936–1941: narratives of settlement

During the 1930s a huge amount of writing was produced on Italy's imperial activities and colonial possessions. The article centres on the written accounts of journeys to the empire which were made in the wake of its conquest.These texts were written by influential correspondents of the time; by writers of colonial literature; by Fascist ideologues and by occasional, though highly curious, visitors to the empire. All these official and semi-official commentators participated in the rapid settlement of East Africa specifically as observers. The article isolates the different narratives which run through each of the many travel texts: the transition from military to civilian rule,the population of a supposedly empty land surface; the implementation of an empire of work; the translation of Italian culture from the mainland to the colony. It explores the relationship between these paradigmatic narratives of settlement and shows how the vision offered by the travel accounts converged with the institutions and practices of the new empire. The article concludes by analysing the subject positions adopted by Italian men and women within the system of Fascist imperial discourses and some of the ways in which the indigenous population was represented within different narratives of settlement.     

The Cold War, the US Bureau of Reclamation, and the technopolitics of river basin development, 1950–1970

This paper examines the links between Cold War geopolitics and economic development to explain the relatively rapid proliferation of the concept of river basin development throughout so-called “developing areas” of Asia, the Middle East, Africa and Latin America during the latter half of the twentieth century. The research focuses on the United States Bureau of Reclamation, the most significant water resource development agency of the US government, and its engagement in what it termed “foreign activities” beginning in the aftermath of World War II. Grounded in recent work on technopolitics, the constructed scales of water resource development, and histories of the “global” Cold War, this research examines the advancement of water resource development in the Litani River basin in Lebanon—as guided by staff of the US Bureau of Reclamation—during the period from 1950 to 1970. The Bureau operated as a geopolitical agent attempting to implement a universalized model of river basin development, but encountered continuous difficulties in the form of political and biophysical contingencies. The Bureau’s efforts, centred on the basin as the most appropriate unit of development, were consistently undercut by scale-making projects related to global and regional geopolitical concerns. The research concludes that understandings of the technopolitics of development interventions would benefit from a closer engagement with recent discussions regarding the construction of spatial scale within political geography and related fields. River basin development and its material transformation of multiple locales remains one of the largely neglected, but vitally important, legacies of Cold War geopolitics.     

Building the Reservoir to Nowhere: The Role of Agencies in Advocacy Coalitions

The purpose of the advocacy coalition framework is to explain policy change over time through an examination of the stability of advocacy coalitions within policy subsystems. Recently, scholars have confirmed that advocacy coalitions are held together by shared belief systems, specifically in distributive policy arenas. We contend that federal agencies, in distributive policy arenas, provide both the anchors and support systems for the development and maintenance of belief systems. This anchoring helps provide adequate resources, access to political institutions, ability to control administrative process, and/or the capacity to deliver public goods and services. We conducted an analysis of the policy changes that occurred during the implementation of the National Environmental Policy Act for the construction of the Bureau of Reclamation's Animas‐La Plata project. This is an example where administrators, through the management of information, were able to control the policy process. The analysis provides a needed replication of previous findings regarding policy change and offers new insights into how institutions are critical to subsystem stability over time.     

清代淮安府荡地开垦与政府治理的互动

伴随着海势东迁,明代淮安府沿海荡地已出现盐场与民户相互争夺的态势,一方面是盐场为维护既有的盐利而竭力遏制沿海的农业开发,另一方面则是新淤的荡地往往吸引一批批新来的开发者。清初已淤为内陆的安东县垦荡行为在得到康熙帝首肯后,又有了进一步发展。清中期亭场商办这一市场行为也使得灶丁由制盐转向耕田,从而造成了狼在当地的绝迹。两淮盐场民众面对环境变迁积极调适生计,成为清代海州升为直隶州,庙湾、东台由盐场升格为县及清末民初"废灶兴垦"的内在动力。