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Jeanne Perrier, Ph.D.
jeanne.perrier@sciencespo.fr
Researcher
Université Paul Valéry Montpellier 3
Year of PhD: 2020
Country: France
Social Media:
X: ap_jeanne
About Me:
I completed my PhD in Political Science at Paul Valéry University in France in June 2020. My thesis studies the socio-political transformations of territories located in the north of the West Bank (Nablus region), through the lens of the discourse on “efficiency” in water and agricultural projects, led by donors, local private investors and farmers. I carried out extensive fieldwork in the West Bank between 2016 and 2019 and conducted interviews with officials from the Palestinian Authority, Palestinian and foreign engineers, consultants, mayors, and farmers.
Research Interests
Water Politics
Sustainable Food/Agriculture
State-building
Wastewater
Coloniality
Countries of Interest
Palestinian Territories
My Research:
Summary of my PhD: This thesis analyzes the Palestinian state-building process through the study of water and agriculture governance in the West Bank. It investigates both the capacity-building processes supposedly strengthening the Palestinian Authority as a State, and the ways in which a heterogeneous Palestinian society evolves while interacting with the different political goals. This thesis arrays concepts from the theoretical fields of political science, science and technology studies and political ecology to explore the hydropolitical constellations in the region of Nablus concerning water and wastewater management. This approach allows the study of the coproduction, in the Palestinian context, of the natural order, on one hand, and the social order on the other hand. It allows as well the study of the power struggles, the territorialization processes and the different forms of violence that emerge. This research aims at understanding the socio-political transformations of spaces invested by efficiency discourses. It achieves this by following the decisional, institutional and spatial trajectories of water and wastewater and their reconfigurations. It investigates the construction, the circulation and the materialization of the dominant discourse on water and agriculture produced by the Palestinian Authority and development agencies. This thesis deconstructs and historicizes the concept of “efficiency” used to drive public water management policies and agricultural practices. It explores the representations of the Palestinian environment built upon this concept at the national scale, and the gaps with those articulated at the local level. This thesis sheds light on the mechanisms of appropriation, negotiation and contestation of those discourses at the local level by analyzing development projects targeting wastewater management, private investments and individual strategies. These dynamics fuel mechanisms of cultural, infrastructural and epistemic violence weakening the state-building process and contributing to the fragmentation of Palestinian society. They convert into an emerging regime of coloniality, defined as a form of indigenous government that integrated the colonial practices, ways of knowing, and of representing and managing the environment. This thesis is based on an inductive approach combining the analysis of grey literature, semi-structured interviews and observations made during thirteen months of fieldwork in the West Bank over a period of three years.
Publications:
Journal Articles:
Cet article explore les processus de réformes des lois palestiniennes de l’eau, en particulier la dernière loi de l’eau promulguée en 2014. Ces réformes législatives s’inscrivent dans un contexte international de modernisation des lois de l’eau, et dans un contexte national palestinien d’une réforme de la gestion de l’eau entamée en 2008. Celles-ci reprennent les idées clés formulées dans les Principes de Dublin en 1992. L’État et le concept d’efficience se retrouvent au cœur des dispositions des lois modernes de l’eau, et s’accommodent parfaitement du contexte conflictuel entre Israël et l’Autorité palestinienne. L’objectif de cet article est de déconstruire le processus de réformes de la gestion de l’eau palestinienne pour comprendre les véritables enjeux de pouvoir. Pour y parvenir, nous analyserons le contexte politique et discursif de production de la loi de l’eau palestinienne de 2014. Celle-ci a pour objectif de mettre en place une gestion plus démocratique des ressources en eau, notamment à travers un processus de décentralisation de l’Autorité palestinienne de l’eau vers de nouveaux acteurs, tels que les fournisseurs régionaux ou encore les associations d’usagers de l’eau. Cependant sa mise en œuvre s’avère un échec. Cet article montre comment elle a ignoré les constellations hydropolitiques locales et les enjeux de pouvoir entre les différents acteurs de cette gestion de l’eau. Le pouvoir de l’Autorité palestinienne de l’eau reste limité. Il se heurte à la réalité du pluralisme juridique, en pratique dans la gestion de l’eau palestinienne. L’occupation israélienne accentue ces difficultés. Cependant, les outils législatifs, tels que la loi de l’eau de 2014 et les récentes réglementations, permettent d’avancer petit à petit les pions d’une centralisation de la gestion des ressources en eau. Ainsi, les discours de décentralisation promus par les bailleurs de fonds et repris par l’Autorité palestinienne de l’eau pour justifier les réformes sur l’eau cachent une dynamique d’intégration verticale de la gestion des ressources en eau. Le règlement sur les associations d’usagers de l’eau en est exemple frappant. L’analyse des documents législatifs couplés aux stratégies palestiniennes et aux dynamiques internes nous permet de révéler ces dynamiques de centralisation qui menacent les pratiques locales de la gestion de l’eau.
This article explores how Palestinian-led, donor-supported water projects have transformed societal interactions concerning water since 1994. It distinguishes spatial, institutional and sectoral trajectories of water and explores the impacts on each type of trajectory. It demonstrates that the overall impact of these projects is more than the sum of the individual projects. All together, they entail territorial change. Wastewater and reuse projects transform the largest flows and have the greatest impact on water trajectories. Overall, the recharge of the upper unconfined aquifer is compromised, with negative effects for the grass-roots farmer institutions managing it.
In agricultural transformations, small scale farmer driven processes interact with globally driven processes. Donor-led or foreign investor-led irrigation development systematically interacts with local, farmer-led irrigation development. This article harnesses Kopytoff's concept of 'interstitial frontier' to study such interactions. It discusses the shape an agricultural frontier may have and its interactions with local forms of water and land tenure. It discusses the manner in which changing access to water may spur the development of agricultural pioneer fronts. It distinguishes surface water driven, groundwater driven and wastewater driven agricultural frontiers. It then explores the manner such frontiers are transforming water tenure in the West Bank. This is an important aspect of the globalization of Palestinian society. The method this article develops is applicable elsewhere. Within interstitial frontiers, investors, whether local farmers or outsiders, enroll a globally maintained scientific discourse of efficient water use to secure donor funding. Meanwhile, they try developing clientelist ties with the authorities to secure their new access to water. The impacts on neighbouring, peasant-run irrigated systems, food security, housing security and many other mechanisms that sustain a society, are important and too often neglected.
The idiom of virtual water feeds a prolific literature now shaping the policies of national administrations and international organizations, including donors. This article explores the manner in which Palestinian agriculture and the concept of virtual water shed light on each other’s coproduction. It opens the black box of virtual water to identify the underlying hypotheses. It invalidates these hypotheses using empirical research. Integrating structuration theory to an STS approach, it explores the manner the coproduction of an interpretive scheme, virtual water, is linked to the construction of a structure of power. Within the idiom of virtual water, flows exist only through the international trade of commodities while states are endowed with an annually renewed stock of water. We focus on the real flow of water from its emergence from the earth to its evapotranspiration by a cultivated plant. We demonstrate that social and political variables within water governance determine the volumes of virtual water flows far more than climatic or agronomic variables. The idiom of virtual water portrays Palestinian smallholders as inefficient water users while ignoring the manner they sustain food security and environmental sustainability. It legitimizes export oriented agribusinesses as their mode of production corresponds to the coproduction of the idea of efficiency underlying the concept of virtual water. These results allow us to reconsider smallholder agriculture as it exists in the Palestinian territories and what sort of policies can support it.
Book Chapters:
This chapter focuses on infrastructural violence in the planning process of a development project, bridging literature on infrastructural violence and land defenders. It analyzes the wastewater treatment plant project in Eastern Nablus (Palestine). We explore practices of resistance and negotiations deployed by land defenders, as well as practices of repression used by the Palestinian Authority. Palestinian villagers mobilize several forms of resistance against a state-led and donor-led development project. This chapter articulates the infrastructural violence in peri-urban areas, where marginalization and inclusion affect discourses and practices of land defenders. The protest mechanisms used in East Nablus are reminiscent of those mobilized against the Israeli occupation, while the repressive mechanisms envisaged and used by the PA also refer to certain tools used by the Israeli occupation. We argue that these constitutes signs of coloniality. Furthermore, epistemic violence represents a form of violence against land defenders as part of the overall infrastructural violence, adding up to practices of coloniality to discredit land defenders. Our analysis highlights the usefulness of thinking in terms of coloniality, to understand how the PA appropriated means of repression from its own experience as a colonized institution and people and is now using against Palestinian land defenders.
Other:
This article explores the process of reforming Palestinian water laws, in particular the last water law enacted in 2014. These legislative reforms are part of an international context of modernization of water laws, as well as a national Palestinian context of water management reform, which began in 2008. They reflect the key ideas formulated in the Dublin Statement of 1992. The purpose of this article is to deconstruct the process of Palestinian water management reforms to understand the real power struggles at play. To achieve this, we will analyze the political and discursive context of the production of the Palestinian water law of 2014, which aims to establish a more democratic management of water resources, notably through a process of decentralizing the Palestinian Water Authority in favor of new actors, such as regional suppliers or even water user associations. However, this has failed, and this article shows how it ignored local hydro-political constellations and power struggles between the different actors implicated in this water management. The power that the Palestinian Water Authority has remains limited. It faces the challenges of the reality of legal pluralism, which in practice translates to the management of Palestinian water. The Israeli occupation exacerbates these challenges. However, legislative tools such as the 2014 water law and recent regulations are paving the way for the gradual advancement of the pawns involved in the centralization of water resource management. The analysis of legislative documents, coupled with Palestinian strategies and internal dynamics, reveals these dynamics of centralization that threaten local water management practices.
This article proposes the deconstruction of the decentralization process by analyzing Palestinian regulations on Water User Associations (WUAs): contrarily, this analysis instead reveals dynamics of centralization and the concentration of power, which threatens the existing modes of local water resource management and ignores the legal pluralism at play. The Palestinian water law of 2014 and the WUA regulations of 2018 are part of a policy to decentralize water resource management. This policy was promoted on an international scale with the concept of Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM). It consists of encouraging users to participate in the decision-making process related to irrigation management. This is materialized in a desire to create WUAs, which are supposed to increase the participation of local actors. Local associations of irrigators or farmers existed long before the implementation of decentralization policies in the 1990’s, but they had no formal presence with regard to public authorities. This formalization, however, was not necessary for them to continue their activity. The case of Palestine reflects a strong investment by state institutions in water management rather than an increase in the participation of local communities in decision-making processes. The reform of the water sector in the Palestinian territories does not occur in an institutional and legal vacuum: several rules relating to irrigation management have coexisted in the past and continue to do so today. The regulation on Palestinian WUAs institutionalizes a specific type of association and delegitimizes informal irrigator institutions that do not meet the imposed criteria. Analyzing the new regulation on the creation of WUAs and comparing the decision-making trajectories of different modes of water management reveals that the so-called decentralization process actually leans more towards a centralization of water resource management.