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Water Management, S panish Irrigation Communities and Colonial Engineers
Author(s) -
Garrido Samuel
Publication year - 2014
Publication title -
journal of agrarian change
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.63
H-Index - 56
eISSN - 1471-0366
pISSN - 1471-0358
DOI - 10.1111/joac.12042
Subject(s) - irrigation , colonialism , argument (complex analysis) , mythology , work (physics) , democracy , irrigation management , political science , water resource management , economic growth , history , economics , law , engineering , ecology , environmental science , mechanical engineering , biochemistry , chemistry , politics , biology , classics
In the nineteenth century, S panish irrigation was studied by a number of B ritish and French engineers, who sought to acquire knowledge that could be applied to I ndia and A lgeria. In their reports, they said that S panish irrigation communities were run by the irrigators themselves in a totally democratic way, which was not true. Although such ideas had hardly any practical consequences in colonial I ndia and A lgeria, they did have important repercussions in S pain, where the irrigation institutions came to resemble the image they had been given by the reporters, with the best results. Through the work of E linor O strom, the myth created by the nineteenth‐century reporters has also eventually become an argument in favour of irrigation projects in today's developing countries being managed by water users’ associations.