7. Empowerment Through Participation: Women in the Water Discourse

The contemporary discourses on water management in India, as in other developing countries, increasingly emphasise on community participation in general and women’s participation in particular. Although, most often such participation is sought for in the name of empowerment, the taken-for-grantedness behind such assumption has been extensively critiqued. That said, this chapter engages itself with the question as to how the discourse of ‘participation’ work towards (re)producing specific meanings of ‘water’ and ‘women’ and to what extent such meanings translate into women’s empowerment. In doing so, this chapter calls for a feminist political ecological framework to expand scholarly conceptualisations of both ‘participation’ and ‘empowerment’. It argues that empowerment is not only an end which is materially manifested through such indicators like membership in water users associations (WUAs), attending community meetings, participating in gender-ascribed roles such as generating awareness and arbitrating community practices regarding water and sanitation, ownership of assets and so forth. It also entails expansion of choices for functioning and it is in this context that the women’s embodied experiences and the manner in which they make sense of such experiences must be given due recognition in any analysis of empowerment.