Learning from groundwater: Pragmatic compromise planning common goods

Abstract

Planners often struggle with the ethical ambiguity of compromise in the preparation of development plans. The plans they make face the resistance and criticism of powerful economic and political interests competing for status, resources, and authority. What help can planning scholarship offer to practitioners seeking reassurance and guidance for their efforts to make plans serving a public good? In this essay, we take a pragmatic approach that avoids the effort to secure a theoretical foundation for moral judgment; and looks instead to the practical arts of compromise seeking common ground. Instead of pursuing ideal rules or principles to guide judgment, we argue that practitioners should look to the ways in which people make plans to bridge the political challenge between economic competition and social cooperation. Distinguishing the relevance and value of moral goods along a continuum from private to public with the middle ground tied to common goods frames the analysis. Four episodes of groundwater use in northwest India exemplify both the importance of compromise for reconciling the competing moral claims and the significance of pragmatic planning for making better development plans.

Keywords

Planning groundwater northwest India

Introduction

In this essay, we study the role of compromise in the making of development plans. Adopting a pragmatist line of thinking, we argue that rather than a moral problem, compromise offers an important moral resource for making future-oriented plans that seek to anticipate and cope with complex development issues such as those involving environmental and social change. Paying attention to these purposeful, albeit often incremental and gradual, efforts for public improvement offers practical options for social learning that may improve the planning for complex public goods, such as freshwater and clean air, practitioners routinely deal with.¹

Pragmatism rejects the quest for moral perfection whether tied to moral integrity, optimal utility or heroic virtue. In this line of thinking, the modern promise of self-development both as a resource and product of purposeful inquiry and practical experimentation adopts different meanings in disparate circumstances (Unger, 2007). Thus, instead of relying upon moral ideals to guide planning, we argue that practitioners can and should focus upon constructing forms of compromise that improve the provision and allocation of complex goods. The efficacy and meaning of better planning, when seen from this perspective, depends on how well those sharing the consequences of the plan comprehend, consent, and benefit from inescapable practical tradeoffs.² The ethical compromise becomes a common horizon that different sorts of people make enabling each to pursue different goals in parallel as they travel together.

Scholars have distilled philosophical approaches to moral thought into three types of moral judgment: rules, consequences, and conduct (MacIntyre, 1990). MacIntyre contends that these arguments about the ethics of cultural identity, legal obligation, and justice focus on transcendent universal norms. The books written about planning ethics acknowledge these intellectual contours (Thomas, 1994; Wachs, 1985), even as they recognize that practitioners make practical judgments that fall short of ideals. Practical compromise appears a moral failure.³

The pragmatic approach embraces practical reason that combines the cognitive and emotional powers of memory, imagination and feeling to compose plans sensitive to conduct and consequence; virtue, and purposeful good. This approach does not offer rational generalizations about what to do as rules or principles. Pragmatic rationality treats plan making as part of the very architecture of judgment. The critical assessment of consequential interaction effects for select combinations of goals and methods among stakeholders makes ensuing compromise more intelligent and ethical (Fesmire, 2003).

Pragmatist planning weaves compromise into the very fabric of any practical proposal composing, judging and selecting a joint project or action. The meaning of a ‘good’ plan emerges from the practical efforts among those involved to include the many intentions and interests at play. Instead of imposing rational conventions, norms, and purposes from outside or above, the pragmatist studies how prior conventions and practices unperturbed by the disruptive challenge at hand (e.g., drought, flooding) might be leveraged to construct alternative solutions. The judgment of moral salience flows less from norm fitting or legal compliance and more from involvement with those involved conceiving how combinations of purpose, interest, and practice might resolve the situation so those involve gain security and responsibility. The merits of these proposed efforts combine sensitivity to damaging or complementary consequences for persons and places with prudential consideration of how actors use precedent, causality, context, and circumstance to compose plans for action (Ansell, 2011).

Instead of handing off moral standards to an external judge or transcendent ego, the pragmatists turn to the practical historical efforts of civilization celebrating efforts to expand the breadth and diversity of membership in communities that support individual development. Here, it is important to note that the invention and adaptation of inclusive social practices and attendant cultural norms has emerged unevenly across different places while the variety, scope, quality, and form of democratic deliberation as a resource for these places remains a work in progress (Bohman and Rehg, 1997; Knight and Johnson, 2011). Individual freedom and flourishing routinely struggle with the powerful constraints of traditional cultural prejudice, capitalist economic excess, nation state political hegemony, and technological instrumentalism—as all these play crucial roles shaping prospects for democratic governance. The pragmatist viewpoint casts the prospect for moral improvement within the complex interaction of these constraints imagining actions that people can do widening the path to freedom within the landscape of inescapable constraint. This makes the practice of critical reform an inherently practical effort that takes shape as historical compromises. But it also elevates the status of plan making from a blueprint means focused activity to a resource for imagining what improvements might be done, evaluating their consequences and reconsidering the possibilities for meaningful choice and purposeful action together with others in different situations (Unger, 2007). The plans foster and improve political compromises that advance joint projects and policies that fall between what each party expects and what they can currently accept.⁴

Instead of conceiving the public interest as aggregate instrumental benefits, which might ensue from a policy or as a form of legal or moral right inspiring and directing policy compliance, the pragmatist focuses on the meaning of consequences or rules for practical judgments about what to do in specific situations. For spatial planners these situations often emerge as breakdowns in conventional habit require attention to the conflict over the use and disposition of common goods. The pragmatist frames these situations attending to the context of social relationships that shape the contours for moral judgment. The sources of suspicion and trust flow from these relations (Graham et al., 2013; Holden and Scerri, 2014).

There exist plenty of nasty social conventions, institutional practices, cultural habits, technological systems, economic inequalities, and political conflicts that undermine social learning and environmentally adaptive change. The complexity of competing values frame every practical judgment people learn to make while imagining and comparing their impact before taking action. The pragmatist outlook casts this effort in functionally adaptive terms that dovetail with the concept of capability introduced by Amartya Sen (1999).⁵ But how can individuals and communities use these insights for making plans that both tackle social complexity and foster common good?

Instead of using moral ideals to guide planning, pragmatists argue that people can and do construct compromises as they imagine how to provide and allocate complex public goods (Margalit, 2010). The efficacy and meaning of development plans, in this line of thinking, depends on how well those sharing the consequences of the plan comprehend, consent, and benefit from inescapable practical tradeoffs.⁶ Compromise describes the practical moral horizon people reach as they make plans for the future together. Compromise combines a good act (cooperating on one goal) and a bad act (subverting another goal). But if the good for some promotes enslavement, subjection, exploitation and other nasty consequences for the others then the compromise is rotten (Margalit, 2010). In contrast, good compromises fit strategy to local conditions balancing consequences among current and future parties. The threshold for good compromises falls along a continuum of moral judgment. The meaning of the consequences changes as natural and cultural conditions change. Pragmatists believe that adopting democratic practices improves the quality of political compromises for public goods better than other institutional arrangements (Hoch, 2002, 2007; Innes and Booher, 2010; Knight and Johnson, 2011).

The contrast between public and private good, however, tends to dominate moral debate about planning. But most of the goods that spatial planning addresses fall in between—or what we generally call common goods. That people and their institutions may deplete common goods need not be a tragedy (Hardin, 1968). Systematic study of historical examples of common pool resources such as fisheries, irrigation, and forests has uncovered different forms of adaptive governance that seek to balance use and recovery (Dietz et al., 2003). Elinor Ostrom (1990), for example, argues that experimentation among users foster learning that adjusts strategy to produce increasingly adaptive compromises balancing rules and trust. Trust provides a threshold of assurance for members to voluntarily adjust their plans for resource use and so coordinate successfully with others. Extensive research has sympathetically and critically studied such efforts for individual cases and systematic comparisons of cases across the world (e.g., Agrawal et al., 2013)

Informed both by trust and a plan (even if tacit, spontaneous or provisional), such collaborations work as each coordinates use fairly and competently. The combination of knowledge and solidarity tied together in coordinated plans for future use aims to avoid the tragedy of depletion. Collaboration emerges as a strategic resource giving purpose to the underlying reciprocity (Fung, 2007; Goldstein and Butler, 2009; Unger, 2007). The practical compromises combine moral, political, and technical features that improve practical plans used to coordinate and modify resource use (Schwartz and Sharpe, 2005).

The provision of complex common goods among cooperating individuals and communities requires social, economic, and political coordination as those cooperating usually take steps to monitor and manage use (Agrawal and Chhatre, 2006; Chhatre and Agrawal, 2009). Bouamrane et al. (2016) put this succinctly in their conclusion about biodiversity planning in western Africa:

Dialogue and coordination in a biosphere reserve should make it possible to reach a compromise between those who wish to conserve the resources and those who live off them, making it possible to ensure the future and find a shared focus based on a sustainable development objective.

Knowing how to choose the proper kind of practice to fit the common good problem requires practical wisdom and prudence. Additionally, external ecological, market, government, and demographic or technological changes can disrupt sustained cooperative use of a finite collective good. The moral quality of the plans and their legacy on this account will rarely reach the threshold of moral perfection (just, efficient or beautiful) but offer up compromises among those using the common good and other external changes (Deyle and Schively Slotterback, 2009; Kamm, 2007).

In the narrative below, we use these insights to interpret how gradually changing conceptions of planning influenced the historical interplay between public and private power for the provision of water in the dry and arid landscape of northwest India over more than a century. Focusing on four historical episodes shaped by different planning contexts, we offer a segmented developmental tale of moral and political conflict in the practical efforts to plan for the provision and protection of scarce water resources. We avoid using the vocabularies of power because these routinely treat plans as tools for subjection missing how plans enable people to anticipate and prepare for future actions. They detail how exploitation, domination, and subjection constrain and shape how people live and work, but they rarely offer practical advice about what these people can do that might reduce and remedy their suffering. We do not believe that the varieties of repression so well documented permanently and completely dominate nor do people uniformly subject themselves. People everywhere cope with the messy uncertainties generated in the places each inhabit. The pragmatist focuses on how people make plans to guide the actions they take together to try and resolve these problems.

The following section discusses each episode’s distinct sector, plan, and strategy that we use to frame the account of how compromise emerged along a different moral continuum. The pragmatist analysis provides a plausible interpretation of changes in the mix of plan, sector, and strategy tied to improvements in the political and moral compromises guiding water provisioning and use. We then conclude by summarizing the importance of compromise for making better development plans.

Planning for water in northwest India

Constituting one of the World’s largest irrigation systems (Government of India (GOI), 2005), the rapidly expanding array of more than 6 million (and many more undocumented) mechanized wells and tube wells of northwest India represent a remarkable human endeavor illustrating many concerns of the twentieth-century development planning movement: general public welfare, poverty alleviation, famine mitigation, peasant empowerment, sustainable use of natural resources and more. In the following four planning episodes, we describe how the changing conceptions of groundwater as a public, private and common good not only entailed complex social and institutional involvement of many actors over many decades but, similar to much planning work, also involved ethical compromise in the plans for water provision and use.

Episode 1—Colonial compromise: Extraction/innovation

Although South Asia has historically comprised one of the most densely populated regions of the World, many agricultural lands went unclaimed until about 150 years ago (Shah, 2009). Given the region’s distinct monsoonal climate, characterized by either heavy rains or dry months, this was no surprise because peasants preferred to settle upon the hydraulically most opportune sites for stable and productive agriculture. Vital for survival, cooperation between individuals, households, and communities characterized the overall pattern of water storage and use before the rise of British colonial enterprise in the eighteenth-century (Sutcliffe et al., 2011).

Using “colonial forms of knowledge,” like the various kinds of survey and census that made the colonized country and its people intelligible to the rulers (Cohn, 1996), the imperial British recognized and quickly seized upon the potential opportunity to expand the cultivable area. Starting as early as the 1830s, the colonial land development policy began to mobilize state legitimacy, resources, and the new discipline of engineering for building a public irrigation system across the arid parts of northwest India (Whitcombe, 2005). The target area comprised parts of British provinces of Punjab and Sindh and the modern Indian states of Haryana and Rajasthan, traditionally home to a pastoralist society and associated forms of living. Since most of the arid zone was uninhabited, all unclaimed land was simply taken over as Crown waste and, after the development of irrigation system, auctioned in large blocks or sold as family farms against the project cost and accrued interest (Darley, 1941).

The shrewdly conceptualized irrigation scheme exemplified the notion of “constructive imperialism,” which according to SB Saul, a leading scholar of colonialism’s economic history, meant careful planning and building of large-scale infrastructure projects with profound monetary implications for the colonial empire (Saul, 1957). The imperial irrigation undertaking, for example, encompassed a comprehensively planned and spatially integrated network of downstream canals and strategically located barrages on Himalayan-fed perennial rivers. Employing cutting-edge irrigation technology, these diligently located projects were constructed with an explicit aim to enhance the cultivable area and extractable surplus because various forms of taxes upon the land and its produce provided a sizable and steady stream of revenue for the British Raj. The centralized project involved developing regional-scale land-uses incubating the emergent agricultural economy as well as the building of new settlements or the so-called Mandi towns that also served as tax collection points (Gidwani, 2002). These central places housed services, amenities, and markets for labor, implements and produce for the peasant-proprietors, many of whom migrated from populated areas further north and were allowed to pay for newly opened farms in easy installments as they earned money from the land (Gidwani, 2002).

In this respect, the centralized water system provision instituted a grand land development compromise, arranged and superintended by the colonial state, combining (the good act of) technological innovation that enhanced the cultivable area, landownership, employment opportunities and food production and (the bad act of) extracting extra revenue and—since it was a colonial project—ultimately, most of the available surplus. Important to note that the colonial compromise combining innovation and extraction played out along the moral continuum of liberation and subjection, where the erstwhile landless peasants acquired property and relatively secure livelihoods even as they were exposed to new forms of colonial subjection.

But the opening of new farmlands and the exciting combination of lush greenery and steadily flowing fresh water, which stood further out in contrast against the desolate backdrop of parched landscape and unpredictable monsoons, quickly buoyed the system’s popularity among the peasants and the landlords alike. Witnessing the tangible developments firsthand, even customarily old-fashioned princely states with dry climatic conditions like Muslim ruled Bahawalpur in southern Punjab and Hindu dominated Bikaner in the adjoining region of northwest Rajasthan set aside historically fraught relations and begin to collaborate in order to expand the irrigation canals through their territories by the early twentieth century.⁷ Little surprise then, by the time the colonists were preparing to leave in the mid 1940s, the irrigation boom had increased the canal irrigated land use in India from practically nothing to over 15.2 million hectares with Punjab and United Provinces commanding a major share (Bagchi, 1995).

Despite the imperial imperatives of colonial rule and the command focused planning, the large scale engineering used for the irrigation projects demonstrated the powerful role science could play taming the bank-bursting rivers and barren lands together and so deliver public improvement on a massive scale (Shah, 2009: 14). The engineering efficacy and impressive achievements of state-sponsored regional-scale master planning survived the empire’s end and dominated irrigation thinking in the states of India and Pakistan that succeeded British India in 1947.

Episode 2—Nation building public sector: probity/fairness compromise

With the bulk of colonial irrigation system going to Pakistan after the partition of British Raj, the independent Indian state adopted the policy of building a string of irrigation projects in quick succession (Briscoe and Malik, 2007). These centrally planned public sector projects ranged from sizable but locally oriented schemes such as the augmentation and expansion of a canal network through the desert districts of northwest Rajasthan (popularly known as Indira Gandhi Canal Project). At the other end of the spectrum, these included multipurpose river valley development schemes targeting integrated regional improvement like the Bhakra-Nangal project in Eastern Punjab, which sought to simultaneously control floods, provide irrigation, generate power and catalyze industrial development—along the lines of its role model the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA).

These “top-down” initiatives played a key role in the larger project of nation building and spanned many domains of India’s economic policy. Prime Minister Jawahar Lal Nehru, for instance, famously declared mighty dams like the Bhakra-Nangal as the “temples of modern India” (Guha, 2008). Indeed, more than 90 percent of public investments in agriculture during the first 40 years of India’s independence were devoted to building government sponsored dams and canals that continued to expand the cultivable area (Kishore, 2002 cited in Shah, 2009). The state’s affirmative policy of allotting these new farmlands to deprived social groups, like landless peasants, marginal farm workers, and partition refugees that had migrated to India leaving their properties behind in what was now Pakistan, spread land ownership and prosperity beyond the traditional landholding groups such as the high caste Zamindars or hereditary aristocrats (Kishore, 2002).

More importantly, and despite its often-forgotten imperial origins, northwest India’s irrigation system engendered a lasting influence and enduring public significance. This is perhaps most evident in one of the rare compromises, the so-called Indus Water Treaty brokered by the World Bank in 1960 for sharing the river waters, that the neighboring Pakistan and India have assiduously upheld. Notwithstanding the rather acrimonious relations between the two states, the steady compromise ensures secure water flows in the colonial and postcolonial canals on both sides of the heavily militarized border even today. When seen from this perspective, the post-independence irrigation plans not only built on the colonial compromise of extraction and agricultural innovation but also added a layer of mutual interdependence between the two sparring states along with the legitimacy of irrigating arid lands for an increasingly prosperous farming constituency that benefitted from the technological innovations on both sides of the border.

However, the situation in northwest India began to change from the 1960s due to several reasons. First, the transition from the extraction-oriented colonial regime, which relied on the threat of force to assure predictable income streams, to welfare-oriented governments, which relied on a complex hierarchy of rent seeking bureaucrats to collect irrigation levies and maintain public canals, proved strenuous (Bhatia, 1991). Second, the irrigation infrastructure began to fall into disrepair due to the poor state of government finances, expanding budget deficits, and the rise of populist policies from the late 1960s (Frankel, 2009). Growing environmental awareness added to these factors as policy support for large dams and canals gradually diminished. Finally, mechanized pumps and tube wells (collectively called water extraction mechanisms (WEMs) henceforth) began to gain popularity reducing reliance on centralized water provision (Acciavatti, 2015).⁸

After almost a two decade-long hiatus, as straggling investment slowed down the development of public irrigation between the two great wars (Roy, 2007), many Indian states setup public corporations to realize the potential of irrigation using WEMs. Some received external aid from the Netherlands and the World Bank (Pant, 1991). The prototypical model pioneered by the United Provinces in the 1950s had state employees managing both the large capacity government-owned tube wells and the water distribution system. Besides assuring water supply using public tube wells, the model program promoted equitable access to irrigation flow (especially for farms farthest from the canals), reductions in secondary salinity (often caused by canal irrigation in areas without adequate drainage) and wide spread use of WMEs among farmers (Shah, 2009).

In this respect, the post-independence plans for expansion of public irrigation and tube well programs adopted and improved the lopsided colonial compromise (extraction/innovation) into a progressive compromise between what good bureaucrats might do (probity) and what joint resource use required (fair).⁹ Here, the policy focus shifted from investing in effective exploitation to assuring efficient provision and fair distribution of groundwater positioned as a public good. As long as state officials possessed adequate funds and confidence in future development plans they acted with probity enabling participating farmers to each improve their economic prosperity in a manner fair to compatriot farmers. Combining the (good act of) progressive development and the (bad act of) centralized control over local water resources, the probity/fairness compromise was, however, predicated upon serious and sustained state intervention.

For example, in the state of Rajasthan, which was formed by the amalgamation of 19 princely states with very different histories and cultural practices, the postcolonial state took over the control of all water resources including groundwater from local institutions that had customarily managed and maintained them over time (Birkenholtz, 2008, 2009). Even if this decision was largely notional in nature, since the state lacked resources and administrative reach to control local water sources on the actual ground, the act clearly illustrated the moral continuum, spanning the ideal of progressive development at one end and the postcolonial state’s ambition to exercise dominant control over the modalities of development at the other end, that underpinned the probity/fairness compromise.

Moreover, given the small size of family farms and capital-intensive nature of the operation, the public irrigation and tube well programs required heavy state subsidy (Shah, 2009). As fiscal aspects of the state budget weakened through the 1970s, government revenue fragmentation and institutional weakness intensified rent seeking among bureaucrats, some of who began to sacrifice integrity in order to assure their own economic welfare (Pant, 1994). The good compromise was spoiled as illicit diversion and unauthorized extraction of public water supply threatened farmer prosperity and future growth. Additionally, the politicization of water distribution, unreliability of power supply and reductions in maintenance, especially in the remote areas of far-flung districts (districts are political divisions of Indian states, akin to a county in the US), spoiled the progressive compromise (Pant, 1994). Private tube well owners subsequently gained importance from the 1970s as they began to fill the emergent gap in the water demand-supply chain by selling irrigation services to neighboring farms.

Episode 3—Private sector provision: Reciprocity/Autonomy compromise

The increasing availability of efficient and affordable technology, such as the cheap and reliable water pumps and localized drilling rigs, from the 1970s helped pave the way for a system of privately owned WEMs. The provision and distribution of well water by farmers for farmers sidestepped state control. The system enabled cultivation of lands in arid regions and outlying areas beyond the reach of irrigation infrastructure. For the first time, these peasants were not dependent on the vagaries of monsoon, and could use electric or diesel pumps to lift water from boreholes, open wells, rivers, ponds, or even ditches to water their crops. A growing number of small famers added millions of hectares of productive farmland at modest expense. According to official estimates in 1998, 82 million cultivator households in India owned at least 21.3 million WEMs, 120 times more than the estimated 200,000 that they owned in 1960, with crucial implications for the political economy of the agriculture sector (Shah, 2009: 33).

For instance, after about 200 years of supply-driven irrigation expansion, irrigation management had by the 1990s become a market sensitive coordination scheme (Shah, 2009). This was important because even in the relatively predictable canal-fed areas, farmers had to wait for water to be released from barrages at the bequest of elected politicians and state bureaucrats. In the decentralized system water could be purchased and applied as crops needed it. In the arid and the semiarid parts of northwest India, especially those not served by the canals, tube well irrigation became the mainstay of smallholder agriculture. Paying the price was worth the assurance of predictable delivery. The small landholders avoided dependence on the government officials, thus improving their autonomy while the state agencies reciprocated the ensuing increase in food production by discreetly overlooking the use of a public good for private purpose.

When seen from this perspective, the farmers tapped the underlying aquifers as a private good shifting the terms of the compromise from tradeoffs in probity and fairness to reciprocity and autonomy. This new compromise, combining the (good act of) farmers’ autonomy with the (bad act of) officials’ tacit reciprocity, emerged along a moral continuum which, at the one end, was pivoted by the promising prospect of enhanced food production and, at the other end, by the potentially unchecked exploitation of a public good for private purpose. Not surprisingly, many small landholders expanded irrigation increasing gross irrigated land threefold in 30 years, much more quickly than the government system had done in the previous 150 years (Shah, 2009: 34).

This was a profound change compared to the pre-colonial period when cooperation at the community level was the dominant irrigation institution (Sutcliffe et al., 2011). Taking care of common water resources ensured the availability of water for diverse social and economic groups through the dry months and unpredictable droughts that could last several years. Then, as explained earlier, collaboration between the colonial state and the engineering profession had advanced irrigation development with the postcolonial state continuing many of the same practices. Tushar Shah (2009) identifies the post 1970 period as the new era of “atomistic irrigation” characterized by the ubiquity of small pumps and tube wells in which the public officials and government engineers became passive onlookers while the millions of private individuals each with his own tiny captive irrigation system, ostensibly unconnected with the rest, became the managers of irrigation.

Positive changes in household incomes and village economies attracted political interest and a range of subsidies for the development of new wells and provision of cheap energy. Enhancing farmers’ access to groundwater irrigation became an important feature of India’s poverty reduction policies and programs (Pant, 1991). The shift to groundwater also played well with farmers’ attempts to increase land productivity as India’s population growth incentivized continuing investment in boreholes and pumps. The intensification of agriculture in turn helped absorb surplus labor while permitting a higher frequency of land use (Pant, 1991).

Working in tandem with better quality seeds and fertilizers (or the so-called ‘green revolution’) and the ever-increasing capability to dig deeper, private control over groundwater helped the grain importing country became food surplus within the short span of last quarter of the twentieth-century. But the aggregate effect of unconstrained individual pumping began to deplete shared aquifers and threaten future sustainability of the hard won gains (Gopinath, 2013). The threat to the commons asserted itself along with the growing reliance on environmental exploitation enabling private gains from a shared good. When seen from this perspective, the widespread and relentless exploitation of finite groundwater not only endangered the autonomy/reciprocity compromise but also threatened to turn it into a rotten one; promoting deprivation, subjection, and other nasty consequences for the general public poised to face the brunt of worsening situation.

Episode 4—Coordinating the commons: Interdependence/Sharing compromise

While there is little doubt that the increasing availability of groundwater enhanced public welfare and individual prosperity, it also boosted the pressure on aquifers as several parts of northwest India began to draw unsustainable amounts of groundwater. A recent hydrogeological study, for example, estimated that groundwater development had reached alarmingly high figures exceeding 100% in the states of Delhi (170%), Haryana (109%), Punjab (145%), and Rajasthan (125%) which meant that the average annual groundwater consumption is that much greater than the average annual groundwater availability (Kumar et al., 2003).¹⁰ Complicating the situation further, aquifer depletion is concentrated in many of the most populated and economically productive areas.¹¹

A diverse range of factors including an ever-increasing demand, growing public concerns about environmental issues and many informal and subversive practices at play, supported the emergence of a new moral continuum spanning sustenance or depletion of the finite groundwater at the two ends. Some community-based organizations took initiative trying to adopt and improve the autonomy/reciprocity compromise into a progressive compromise between what good compatriots do (share) and what joint resource use should rightly acknowledge and embrace (interdependence) in order to promote the sustainable use of groundwater.¹²

Gram Vikas Navyuvak Mandal Laporiya or Village Development New Youth Council (GVNML), an award-winning NGO based at village Laporiya in the state of Rajasthan, for instance, has done innovative policy and planning work promoting and sustaining the interdependence/sharing compromise. On the one hand, it has identified and rejuvenated dormant watershed-oriented systems and practices that local communities had traditionally used and jointly sustained for centuries before state and market-focused frameworks displaced the customary perception of water as a common good. On the other hand, organized and led by Laporiya residents, GVNML has focused upon improving local water storage and consumption practices that improve the balance between private appropriation and shared use of a common good (Ashoka, 2006).

The founder of GVNML is around 60 years old Laxman Singh Laporiya (LSS hereafter), a high school dropout and a non-English speaking local elite born, raised and based in village Laporiya about 90 kilometers south of Jaipur. The area is dry, perched on the edge of the Thar dessert that occupies the northwest part of India. Over the course of a lifetime spent planning and pursuing watershed management on a micro scale, LSS and his organization has transformed the landscape of a 50 kilometer long and about six kilometers wide stretch, bounded along the edges by a ridge and a seasonal rivulet. In sharp contrast with the parched and desolate settings of the surrounding area, his village and many adjacent ones where GVNML has worked, stand out as an oasis marked by enhanced agriculture productivity and rising incomes (Ashoka, 2006).

Three aspects of GVNML’s planning work centered upon promoting the interdependence/sharing compromise stand out.¹³ First, the overall planning approach aims at substituting the state-centered water system with a clever and pragmatic combination of new egalitarian ideas and elements from the past with a marked sensitivity for social conventions and cultural practices around water issues. For instance, LSS first began by leveraging the combination of the modern idea of non-profit civic organization (NGO) and the public legitimacy of his own elite background in order to promote the GVNML. Placing the local-lifestyle center stage, the GVNML then gradually started putting together a collaborative water management system that relies upon jointly catching, storing, and sharing the seasonal rainfall of unpredictable monsoons for a variety of local uses like farming, dairying, and household consumption.

Not surprisingly, use of context-specific knowledge about crop patterns, watershed flow, and traditional rainwater harvesting techniques typify the plans made by GVNML’s members. These are mostly private farmers who coordinate, limit, and police water use while working with the state and other NGOs to support larger scale recharge and conservation efforts. Institutionalizing the compromise between the yield of each farmer and the sustainability of the common resource required that individuals trust each other and voluntarily surrender some autonomy altering their personal plans to fit shared constraints fostering a sharing/interdependence compromise.

Second, deftly deploying the command over local languages and familiarity with social practices, GVNML uses local idioms and cultural symbols both to communicate with fellow villagers and foster collective thinking through complex ideas about social solidarity and technical issues like topography, hydrology, and water recharge. For example, employing the local cultural practice of shramdan (a Sanskrit word describing voluntary labor for civic purpose in which one member from Laporiya’s each beneficiary household typically participates) and the mapping of contours and water flows through rudimentary tools like a ‘water-level’ concocted with a simple plastic tube and two wood planks, which many villagers can easily use, is central to GVNML’s work. Similarly, GVNML’s built projects build upon relationships and interdependencies between diverse social and occupational groups like farmers, herders, and households that share these resources. In this respect, GVNML’s planning approach is neither teleological nor driven by a linear view of development or betterment, but built around a pragmatic combination of elements both from the past and the contemporary local context derived through collaborative back-and-forth discussions among the many planning actors.¹⁴

Finally, GVNML’s planning work is sensitive to both the context and scale of the project at hand. Examples include trenching for individual farms (or the so-called chauka system that entails digging box trenches to facilitate rainwater percolation in a specific field), a shared small pond or an Anicut (small check dam) or a dug well—depending upon the topography—serving a group of farms, followed by large ponds for village-level needs that overflow during monsoon into smaller ponds reserved for auxiliary purposes. This was often not easy because it required beneficiaries to surrender private lands and contribute voluntary labor for building these communally owned projects. State water officials routinely felt excluded and, frequently impeded progress, as villagers and their organizations began to exercise control over water.¹⁵ But, perhaps most importantly, many obstacles gradually melted away as these disparate projects began to collectively recharge Laporiya’s underground aquifers ensuring water availability even during a drought year. A similar planning approach pursued in neighboring villages, carefully conceived to suit particular needs of each participating individual and community but cumulatively improving the entire region, ensured that different planning efforts came together feeding the entire hydraulic system and not wasted in isolation.¹⁶

Witnessing the shared commitment firsthand, which cuts across long existing social and economic divides in Laporiya, makes it clear that few human demands have a universal reach matching the need for freshwater. Residents’ shared need and appreciation for this common good, therefore, fuels a diverse range of ancillary collaborations, which sustain the interdependence/sharing compromise in important ways, by fostering locally-conceptualized planning efforts for secure water supply in the arid region. Important to note that, just like the other compromises described in previous episodes, the durability of sharing/interdependence compromise remains contingent on a range of contextual factors including the continuation of current natural and cultural conditions, willingness of those involved to collaborate and continuing adaption of strategy to fit the local conditions balancing consequences among current and future parties.

Among other things, the efficacy and meaning of GVNML’s work also underscores how policy-makers and local communities anticipate and tackle India’s deteriorating groundwater situation will ultimately depend upon how well those sharing the consequences of their future-oriented purposeful actions (or spatial plans) comprehend, consent, and benefit as they coordinate shared tradeoffs that keep their common water resources intact. This brings up a suitable point to recapitulate the compromises around water provisioning in the four episodes described above.

Table 1 summarizes the differences in key features of each historical episode. Reading across the rows describes the milieu of planning effort (sector), nature of planning effort (plan), adopted approach (strategy), form of compromise, and the moral continuum at play in each episode. We derive these categories from a combination of our reading of the four episodes of water planning described previously as well as pragmatic scholarship, which argues that, instead of using moral ideals to guide planning, planners should pay attention to the manner in which plan-makers construct compromises as they imagine how to provide and allocate complex public goods like water.

Table 1.

A summary analysis of compromise for each historical episode.

Episode	Sector	Plan	Strategy	Compromise	Moral continuum
Colonial compromise	Colonial	One external	Command	Extract + Innovate	Liberate/Subject
Nation-building public sector	Public	One central	Invest	Probity + Fairness	Develop/Dominate
Private sector provision	Private	Many compete	Exchange	Reciprocity + Autonomy	Enable/Exploit
Coordinating the commons	Common	Many allied	Coordinate	Interdependent + Share	Sustain/Deplete

Juxtaposing key features of the four historical episodes together helps highlight the changing nature yet constant occurrence of compromise across different kind of planning efforts that took place over a century-long period. The pragmatist analysis below provides a plausible interpretation of how changes in the mix of sector, plan, and strategy tied to segmented improvements in the compromises guiding water provisioning and use. This mode of analysis also helps us frame the account of how compromise emerged along a different moral continuum in each episode and how the attempts to plan and compromise shifted according to changing circumstances and shifting moral considerations.

Discussion

In this section, we analyze the four episodes of water planning compromise, summarized in Table 1, distinguishing how the plans adopted strategies that relied upon moral compromise. Important to note that the compromises that developed were not uniformly pursued in any of the cases. Our analysis is, however, predicated on the belief that participants learned from prior efforts and that the meaning of these compromises shifted in response to new moral conceptions of the public interest or common good.

The conception of one central plan, pursued through the chain of colonial command, dovetailed with the focus of the colonial system. Seeking ever-greater extractions, the colonists introduced modern engineering and organizational innovation and subjected vast numbers of people to the demands of modern. On the one hand, the increasing scale and scope of water provision and opening up of new farmlands liberated some peasants, for instance, from local forms of oppression such as debt bondage and forced labor intimately associated with the feudal order prevalent in northwest India while generating enhanced economic opportunities for ancillary trades and businesses. On the other hand, the colonial regime subjected these peasants to new forms of state control and taxation. When seen from this perspective, the innovation/extraction compromise emerged along the liberation/subjection continuum that also underpinned similar developments in other walks of life in colonial India such as the dissemination of English-medium education and the introduction of capitalist mode of production.

The planning context changed, when the postcolonial state adopted the idea of public development oriented centralized planning as the prototypical approach for building the new nation while positioning itself in the driving seat (Khilnani, 1999). The underlying develop/dominate moral continuum permeated the thinking of Nehruvian India across various domains such as economic planning (e.g., planning commission’s five-year plans) and city planning (e.g., state-centered comprehensive master plans). Among other factors such as sustained state support and continuing public investment, the adopted approach relied equally upon the probity of state officials as well as fairness on the part of citizens, both of which Nehruvian elites perceived as critical ingredients for building the new nation (Khilnani, 1999).

Centralized plans did prove useful for pursuing some objectives such as national integration and security, but more problematic when bureaucratic experts sought to plan for regional and local infrastructure in remote and outlying areas (Frankel, 2009). The practical efficacy of expertise solving problems and alleviating need was further undermined by the imposition of centralized bureaucracy, overreliance on the central state and several unanticipated developments through out the 1960s. These included wars with China in 1962 and with Pakistan in 1965, Nehru’s death in 1964, and the failed monsoons of 1966 and 1967—that resulted in food shortages, a balance of payments crisis, the devaluation of the rupee, and runaway inflation (Frankel, 2009).

Deteriorating state finances combined with persistence of established social inequalities and inherent cultural complexities soon began to jeopardize the probity/fairness compromise as various forms of corruption undermined the pursuit of public good and the promise of all around development (Gupta, 2012). For instance, as the central funds for local irrigation plans began to dry up, many state officials and farmers took to safeguarding personal interest even as the officials acting with probity in following the plan learned the limits of centralized expertise in delivering water to remote villages and outlying individual farms (Pant, 1991).

The mix of sector, plan, and strategy changed with the emergence of private plans for water provisioning and use. Inadequate state capacity to deliver and growing demands for irrigation along with the easy availability of drillings rigs and efficient pumps supported the emergence of a moral continuum comprising enable and exploit at the two ends. On the one hand, private planning for water not only enabled a growing number of farmers to irrigate their own fields per need, and sale surplus water to needy neighbors, but also opened up the possibility that the mobilization of private investment would lead to social improvements. On the other hand, the prospect of unchecked pumping by millions of farmers increased the possibility of over exploiting a finite resource. Moreover, large landowners and investors could, and often, exploit marginal farmers while enjoying the protection of state officials (Shah, 2009).

As many private plans funded by a multitude of individuals began to compete with a central irrigation plan attracting must less public investment than required, the terms of compromise changed from probity/fairness to autonomy/reciprocity. The state not only turned toward supporting farmers’ newfound autonomy to control their own water supply by, for example, subsidizing the supply of energy and purchase of pumps but also reciprocated the subsequent increase in agriculture production by overlooking the private exploitation and sale of a public good. Even as many small farmers prospered on the back of enhanced productivity while others entered into business enterprises that offered mutually beneficial economic exchange and social outcomes, relentless exploitation of a finite source soon began to threaten the incipient prosperity.

India’s growing population, ever-increasing demand for freshwater and increasing public concerns about diminishing water supply then supported the emergence of a new moral continuum spanning sustenance or depletion of the finite groundwater at the two ends. Against the background of ongoing groundwater depletion in many parts of the country, the final episode focused upon describing how a community-based organization has taken initiative trying to adopt and improve the autonomy/reciprocity compromise into a progressive compromise encouraging sharing/interdependence in order to promote the sustainable use of groundwater. Such a shift tied closely to attendant changes in the mix of sector, plan, and strategy in significant ways.

For example, the sectoral focus changed, from the perception of water as a public/private good, to the intermediate sector of common goods. This change not only required coordination among many disparate plans, which needed to be allied and reoriented toward the common cause, but also mutual trust and voluntary surrender of individual autonomy over water provisioning and use. The growing recognition of inescapable interdependency among users of shared water resources motivated village planners to study the regional watershed and organize the complex allocation of water in minute detail. Using practical wisdom and prudence, informed by local needs and cultural preferences, the adopted strategy entailed working closely at various spatial scales ranging from individual farms to the settlement’s collective water need.

Such a practical approach weaved the notion of compromise into the very fabric of any planning proposal composing, judging and selecting a joint project or collective action. It also elevated the status of plan making from a blueprint focused activity to a resource for imagining what improvements might be done, discussing and evaluating their consequences and reconsidering the possibilities for meaningful choice and purposeful action together with others in different situations. The judgment of moral salience flew less from norm fitting or statutory compliance and more from involvement with those involved conceiving how combinations of purpose, interest, and practice might resolve the situation so those involve gain security and responsibility. Although not composed as formal plans, many of these collaborative yet provisional planning efforts fostered and improved sharing/interdependence compromise, while advancing joint projects and policies that generally fell between what each party expected and what they were likely to accept.

On the one hand, the devolution of state authority and control over water to those shaping local infrastructure and land use may still bring about resource depletion: a rotten compromise. But, on the other hand, diverse practical plans for shared reciprocity continue to offer decent compromises and incremental improvements in the face of pressing climate change and growing human population in the case of village Laporiya.

Conclusion

As shown in this essay, institutions concerning common goods like groundwater are usually shaped by multitude of adjustments across increments of time informed by monitoring, feedback, and adaptation influenced by the behavior of others in response to plan related rules, sanctions, and innovations.

In the context of liberal societies, provisional plans may fail to achieve ambitious goals and yet still offer incremental improvements and practical hope for the improved allocation (more efficient, just & sustainable) of a complex common good. The deployment of practices that rely upon increased trust and reciprocity improves the prospects for more deliberate and legitimate plans. The plans we described do not simply justify the judgments people make, but help people conceive and compare the meaning of future imagined effects. Justification flows from the prudential assessment of these consequences among those holding competing purposes and interests; as well as those witnessing these efforts (Hoch, 2002; Holden and Scerri, 2014; Innes and Booher, 2004).

The story of water provision and use in this respect show how some users have moved from state sponsored plans for water distribution toward a self-governing ecological model; one that focuses less exclusively on individual competitive gains and more on cumulative individual adjustment. We characterize these shifts as compromises formed over time that combined competition, conversation, and coordination—a mix of reciprocity and coercion.

Consider the continuum between moral horizons and ethical thresholds. The professional associations for planning create detailed codes about thresholds for ethical conduct and vague musings about the moral horizon (AICP Code; RTPI Code). The leadership expects most members to be morally decent, but recognize that only a few will be heroic. This distinction proves challenging however for planning practice. As professionals offer advice about what options to consider anticipating and preparing for the future they look to the horizon. This practical imaginative work often requires crossing many moral and political thresholds tied to social customs and cultural beliefs that rarely converge, but require sustained political effort to come together. The practical potential for change takes place in the middle range between threshold and horizon (Graham et al., 2013; Verma, 2009).

The politics of planning, in this sense, does not require that planners engage directly in the political work done by community organizers, elected officials, administrative executive officers, political activists, lobbyists, and common good users. However, it does require that planners attend to the practical nexus of social and political differences attending to different moral claims shaping different plans as well as the moral practices shaping the conduct of plan making. This means that planners will make compromises. When seen using the practical continuity of the compromise continuum, splitting the difference, scratching backs, rolling logs, and the other euphemisms describing political deal making represent both moral accomplishments as well as moral failures. Idealistic or cynical plans that fall at the extremes may justify the dreams of those who make them, but they tend to abstract from practical problems rooted in social and spatial complexities that accompany human settlements everywhere. As we have shown, plans that propose compromise attend to these details offering practical advice usually with mixed moral results. A pragmatist outlook evaluates the merits of such advice within the context of the evolving historical situation, but does so searching for incremental progress.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

Sanjeev Vidyarthi is an associate professor in the department of Urban Planning and Policy and a senior fellow of the Great Cities Institute at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He consulted as an architect and planner for over a decade at the Indian city of Jaipur and then came to graduate school wondering why practitioners plan the places the way they do. Vidyarthi studies how the spatial plan-making and implementation practices have shaped the development of India’s human settlements in the post-independence period and what that says about making better plans and places. His interests include planning history and theory, and globalization and development studies.

Charles Hoch is a professor in the department of Urban Planning and Policy, University of Illinois at Chicago. He studies planning activity across scale and discipline and has spent three decades studying and proposing that we treat planning as an inherently pragmatic enterprise. In the last five years Hoch has focused on plan making. Inspired by the practical collaboration of studio projects for the Chicago Housing Authority, Village of Oak Park and the UIC Provost (campus plan), Hoch designed a new course, Making Plans, that set out to teach how to improve plan making skills for professional urban planners.

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