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The Work of Water offers a powerful rethinking of environmental governance. Pakistan's Punjab Irrigation Department manages one of the world's largest irrigation networks. Such bureaucracies are considered paradigmatic sites of corruption, inefficiency, and depoliticization. This book turns this assumption around, arguing that the promise of welfare and development hinges not on elite policy or expertise but on everyday bureaucratic labor. Hayat reads the Indus Basin as an infrastructural ecology—an archive of human design and environmental response—within which infrastructures of conflict are sustained by the labor of peace, bureaucratic work is ethical labor, politics is tempered, and authority is gendered. Moving between offices, courtrooms, village council gatherings, treaty arbitrations, canal outlets, and archives, this book traces how the materiality of water is produced and invites reflection on how futures of public goods might be held open in times of intensifying climate strain. At stake, Hayat demonstrates, is not only the governance of nature, but the nature of governance itself.
"Maira Hayat unsettles assumptions about what bureaucracy entails and how it comes to shape the materiality of water for the Pakistani state. Ethnographically rich and exhilarating, The Work of Water is an important book for scholars interested in the bureaucratic intersections of politics, law, infrastructure, and technicity."—Sarah Vaughn University of California, Berkeley
"This lucid, textured account of 'infrastructural ecologies' illuminates Pakistan's Indus river basin in all its social and political complexity. In recognizing the pivotal importance of the petty bureaucrat to environmental governance, Maira Hayat proposes a novel approach to postcolonial statecraft."—Ajantha Subramanian, CUNY Graduate Center