A Thirst for Change: Can Irrigation Technologies Reach Nepal Poorest?

Abstract

In this thesis, I ask a deceptively simple question: Who is able to irrigate, and on what terms, in a landscape shaped by agrarian inequality? Grounded in mixed-methods fieldwork, conducted between April 2023 and January 2024, in two wards of Shambhunath Municipality in Nepal's Madhesh plains, I approach groundwater irrigation not as a neutral technical input but as a socio-material field shaped by land relations, institutional practice, and everyday power. Drawing on political ecology, science and technology studies, I develop the concept of a bundled architecture of access to theorise irrigation as a layered achievement rather than a discrete act of "adoption". Combining a 401-household survey with prolonged ethnographic immersion, in-depth interviews, and visual methods, I show that irrigation unfolds through sequential thresholds. Secure land enables fixed infrastructure. Tubewells condition access to electric pumps as material devices. Electric pumping becomes affordable, stable, and institutionally recognised where enrolment in the electricity system, via a subsidised electric meter, is possible. Each layer presumes the previous . Multivariate analysis reveals that landholding scale is the strongest predictor of access to fixed groundwater infrastructure, particularly tubewells, yet land operates differently across technologies. For tubewells, land serves as both a gateway and a gradient. For electric pumps, infrastructural alignment and social position outweigh land size among landowners. Diesel pumps concentrate where electrification is absent, clustering among socially marginal households as a costly technology of coping rather than a step toward inclusion. Access accumulates rather than diffuses. I find that households cultivating small or insecure plots irrigate through borrowing, renting, and negotiation, assembling water through relations and labour rather than ownership. Women in migrant households increasingly manage electric pumps and fields in practice, while constrained by norms of asset control and institutional recognition. Irrigation support programmes intended to expand access are frequently reinterpreted and captured by locally powerful actors, concentrating infrastructure in areas where land, capital, and institutional visibility already exist. I reframe groundwater irrigation as a lived politics of access. What appears as non-adoption is often structural misalignment rather than individual reluctance. Technology does not travel freely. It settles along lines of property, recognition, and power, reproducing agrarian difference even as it promises transformation. By situating irrigation within everyday relations of land, labour, and recognition, this research points toward a different future for water governance. In an era of climatic uncertainty, the challenge is not only to extend infrastructure but to redesign the socio-technical systems through which groundwater becomes available. Equity will depend on whether irrigation can be organised as a shared livelihood foundation through tenure, electrification, and institutional recognition that accommodate mobility, informality, and collective use, rather than as a privilege secured through position. Show more