Climate Change Narratives and the Politics of Climate Technologies in Rural Punjab, Pakistan

The irrigation network system built in colonial times and expanded substantially by Pakistan after independence have remained under criticism for falling short of providing effective water delivery to farmers. Despite massive investments in irrigation infrastructure development and institutional reforms, the challenge of access to sufficient irrigation water could not be overcome and is further accentuated by recent climate fluctuations. Recently the state has been making efforts to adopt modern irrigation technologies like drip irrigation, sprinklers, solar-powered tube wells, etc. by farmers to address the challenges of water scarcity, ignoring the historical and contemporary socio-political causes of unequal land and water distribution in the region. The paper is based on nine months of exploratory research having farming communities and related stakeholders as participants in two districts of South Punjab, a region that has emerged as a new climate frontier. Using a political ecology lens, it seeks to understand how and why the state policies and projects emphasize certain technologies and the various strategies farmers use to respond, negate, or negotiate in response to such initiatives in return. The argument raised in this proposed research is that climate change is being used as a legitimate tool to validate the ‘repackaged’ past state strategies in recent years to justify the adoption of modern technologies and new corporate initiatives. The thrust of the international community upon the national government to take action to address climate change has warranted the state institutions to forward their agenda of modernizing agriculture and irrigation practices, in particular. It is proposed in this research that in this apparent quest for addressing climate change, unattained past policy prescriptions have re-emerged under new labels of adaptation, resilience, or climate-smart agriculture. Moreover, the climate change narrative and climate technologies subsequently have enabled expanding control over lands categorized as “wastelands’.