Hydro-Heritage for Healing? Examining the Gendered Experience of Water in Post-Conflict Swat, Pakistan
Publisher: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space
Author(s): Daanish Mustafa, Muhammad Salman Khan, Helmut De Nardi, James Caron, Arab Naz, Mohsin Ullah, and Aneela Gul
Date: 2023
Topics: Gender, Public Health, Renewable Resources
Countries: Pakistan
Water has been formulated as a resource or a hazard within water resources geography. The authors propose that reframing of water as hydro-heritage opens up richer analytical possibilities for examining the pluriverses and multiple ontologies that animate gendered experience of water. The authors are concerned with how hydro-heritage has or could have contributed to healing in the post-conflict Swat valley of Pakistan. The authors highlight how the Taliban insurgency and the reconstruction following its military defeat displaced people's worlds of meaning in Swat. We find that the pre-conflict mountain springs were a site for an enchanted affective encounter between humans and non-humans, where a multifaceted gendered experience of water was enacted. The developmental imaginaries of the Pakistan state in the post-conflict reconstruction phase and the accompanying social changes deracinated water and springs from their pluriversal moorings towards ‘modern water’ with damaging material and emotional consequences for the people of Swat. This was particularly pronounced in terms of gendered access to water, health and mobility. We suggest that water as hydro-heritage has the potential to heal, provided people's worlds of meaning and experience of water are recentred in developmental imaginaries.