Creating Livability Under the Burden of Biopower: Water security through participatory resource management in Kenya

• In Event: 3540 - Development and Global Environmental Change: Challenges and Opportunities

Abstract

This paper contributes to the literature on women’s empowerment through an investigation of how participatory resource management (PRM), a policy meant to empower community members by involving them in decision-making over a collective natural resource, affects local power relations and household gender relations. The study employs data from 32 in-depth interviews with male and female community members involved in PRM in two water-rich and two water-scarce communities in rural West Pokot County, Kenya. An analysis of the patriarchal constraints that hinder community members’ use of PRM as a resource to improve livability reveals that while both men and women are engaged in water management through PRM, because the responsibility to procure water belongs to women, the power to manage local water resources has greater implications for women than men. An analysis of biopolitical constraints reveals that an individual’s position within their watershed affords them different levels of biopolitical protection from the Kenyan state, which in turn allows them to use PRM as a strategy to either directly mitigate or adapt to changes in the local hydrologic cycle. Thus, gender and watershed position intersect in this context to create unique outcomes for those who engage in PRM in West Pokot County, Kenya. Furthermore, the findings of this study indicate that the concept of burdened agency in women’s empowerment literature should be expanded to include both intentionally violent and unintentionally violent forms of control that can be exerted over individuals’ bodies.

Author

• Alaina Marie Bur, Michigan State University