5th ISA Forum of Sociology (6-11 July 2025)

Groundwater use for irrigation has boomed in many regions of the world over the past decades, leading to a major growth of “groundwater agricultural economies”. However, more and more aquifers are nowadays overexploited and the sustainability of these economies is increasingly fragile. Governance of groundwater resources and their use is often close to absent, sometimes underway but yet largely ineffective and only in a limited number of cases able to support sustainable pathways for the agricultural sector. The need to involve farmers in the design and implementation of groundwater governance is more and more acknowledged. However, their organization in collectives to enable this involvement is a challenge: access to water is often done individually, small-scale and large-scale farms coexist side by side in these agricultural economies but generally have few social links, farmers may have very diverse interest and willingness to get involved in groundwater governance, and in large-scale aquifers, organizing representative and accountable farmers’ organizations can be a daunting task.

The session will present and discuss experiences of building of farmers’ collectives to deal with groundwater overexploitation. Particular attention will be paid to the way the building of these collectives intertwines and interacts with social, economic and political dynamics and with evolving farmers’ organizations and collectives. The session will build on experiences in North Africa and in other regions of the world.