M. Anwar Hossen - Water Policy and Governance in South Asia: Empowering Rural Communities

Dr. Hossen carried out an exceptional program of research in Bangladesh which focused on water governance in relation to human rights, international water law and environmental sustainability. His major argument is that eco-agricultural system encounters major disruptions due to a number of factors including regional hydropolitics and neoliberal and highly centralized approaches to water resource management that follow the principles of ecocracy. In this context, Dr. Hossen explores three major questions: (i) How can local ecological knowledge be incorporated into national water policy? (ii) What strategies and reforms are required at the international watershed governance level? and (iii) How can human rights principles, including the principle of water as a human right, be used to formulate more effective water policy and governance?

To answer these questions, Dr. Hossen explores the effects of regional hydropolitics on water management, focusing on three large engineering projects, the Farakka Barrage built by India on the Ganges River, and the Ganges-Kobodak (GK) Project and Gorai River Restoration Project (GRRP) Project in Bangladesh. To find out the effects of these projects, Dr. Hossen used his PhD research with one year fieldwork in 201112 based on focus group discussion, in-depth case study and social survey methods. In addition to this primary data, he looks at extensive secondary documents from the government of Bangladesh and research organizations pertaining to water management, agricultural modernization and institutional structures. The arguments herein are applicable particularly to the Ganges-Brahmaputra Basin countries in South Asia but also to the river basins of other parts of the world.

M. Anwar Hossen (PhD, UBC, Canada) is Professor of Sociology at Dhaka University, Bangladesh.

Routledge Studies on Asia in the World will be an authoritative source of knowledge on Asia studying a variety of cultural, economic, environmental, legal, political, religious, security and social questions, addressed from an Asian perspective. We aim to foster a deeper understanding of the domestic and regional complexities which accompany the dynamic shifts in the global economic, political and security landscape towards Asia and their repercussions for the world at large. Were looking for scholars and practitioners Asian and Western alike from various social science disciplines and fields to engage in testing existing models which explain such dramatic transformation and to formulate new theories that can accommodate the specific political, cultural and developmental context of Asias diverse societies. We welcome both monographs and collective volumes which explore the new roles, rights and responsibilities of Asian nations in shaping todays interconnected and globalized world in their own right.

The Series is advised and edited by Matthias Vanhullebusch and Ji Weidong of Shanghai Jiao Tong University.

1 Chinese State Owned Enterprises in West Africa

Triple-embedded globalization

Katy N. Lam

2 Water Policy and Governance in South Asia

Empowering Rural Communities

M. Anwar Hossen

First published 2017

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2017 M. Anwar Hossen

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Empowering Rural Communities

Water policy and governance is currently the central point of protecting river bank communitys livelihoods as river water resources are transferring from local community specific to uniform management system. Local communities are mostly agricultural based and their traditional farming practices are deeply embedded in local culture, history and ecology. In this context, the Ganges River water based on the agro-ecosystems is everything to local communities, natural environment, ecosystem health and human rights in the Ganges Dependent Area (GDA) in Bangladesh. However this system encounters major ecocracies due to hydropolitics in the Ganges Basin countries and power structure in the global and national levels. Due to the Farakka diversion, for example, the GDA communities encounter major challenges for accessing ecological resources like cropland siltation, wild vegetables, vegetation, local seeds and irrigation water. Based on supports of global political economy, the government in Bangladesh established water and agricultural management systems to overcome the effects of Farakka diversion; however, because of top-down nature of these systems, the marginalized farmers face further survival challenges. Those challenges result in human rights abuses, since they mean that many households are now unable to secure basic human rights, as defined by the United Nations (1948), to food, water, education, housing and health care. Based on the UN (2002) definition of access to water as human rights, my argument is that the Ganges River water right and ecosystems are the prerequisite for maintaining these human rights. Only water governance at local, national and bain-wide levels can overcome the current challenges and can protect the human rights. Based on this argument, this study employed ethnographic methods, informed by the fields of environmental anthropology and political ecology, to gather information about traditional farming practices, water management, local ecological knowledge, local economy and human rights issues.

M. Anwar Hossen is Professor of Sociology at University of Dhaka, Bangladesh. He is co-editor of Springer Journal, Bandung: Journal of the Global South. He published an edited volume in 2016 on Water and Ecological Resource Governance as Guest Editor with this journal. Dr. Hossen has extensively published research articles at international level (e.g., Asiatic Society, Brill, Routledge and Springer) and at national level (e.g., Social Science Review). He is the recipient of Nehru Humanitarian Award in 2010 from the University of British Columbia, Canada and of doctoral research award in 2011 from International Development Research Center (IDRC) Canada.