欧盟水政策.docx

1、欧盟水政策Policy legends and water policy in the Union Territoryof PuducherryAaron MulvanyReceived: 4 January 2013 / Accepted: 9 July 2013 / Published online: 25 July 2013 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2013Abstract When the French ceded their Indian colonies to the Republic of India in 1954 .

2、they left in place a system of waterworks and flood mitigation strategies that had antecedents traceable to Indias medieval period. Faced with the process of integration into the Indian democracy the new administration of what was to become the Union Territory of Pondicherry let languish many of the

3、 infrastructural improvements built by the fomer French colonial government. Over the course of the following half century a series ofnarratives developed within the administration surrounding French water control and flood mitigation mechanisms. Rooted in a flawed understanding of the colonial hist

4、ory of flood control in the French territories of India these beliefs ossified and have negatively shapeddevelopment aimed at flood mitigation and resilience across the post-colonial Union Territory of Puducherry. This paper uses a category defined by Gary Alan Fine and Barry ONeill to explore how p

5、olicy legends about French water control infrastructures shaped both popular and official understanding of flood vulnerability in the administrative made up of the former French territories of India.Keywords India French India Water management Syndicats agricoles Flood mitigation Policy legendsIt cr

6、eates as symptoms of its presence characteristic patterns of policy, of misjudgment and misperception and of collectively self-defeating behavior within the policy process.Lloyd Etheredge, Can Governments Learn?IntroductionOn 11 November 1977 a cyclone struck the Coromandel Coast of India near Pondi

7、cherry.Official weather bulletins released by the Meteorological Department in Madras1 warnedof squally weather, tidal surges of up to two meters, and sustained winds in excess of100 km per hour (Report on Cyclone and Flood Damage, p.1). In response, All India Radiobegan broadcasting warnings up and

8、 down the coast of Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, andthe Union Territory of Pondicherry. Despite what was a relatively modest forecastwhatamounted to only a category one stormauthorities of the territorial administration inPondicherry deemed the risk sufficient enough to take measures to limit the impa

9、ct of thestorm on those coastal communities most likely to be affected by the storm.According to the Report on Cyclone and Flood Damage written by the Union Territoryof Pondicherrys Revenue Department, as the cyclone was to cover a wide area and itscourse could not be predicted with any great accura

10、cy, this Administration took all necessary steps to warn the people and also to evacuate them to safer places (1977, p. 2).Among the steps taken were repeated warnings through mike-fitted jeep and also bybeat of drum (2009, p. 3) in the Pattanavar maritime fisher communities around Pondicherry and a

11、lso at Karaikal, the Union Territorys southernmost district located on theArasalar River some 130 km to the south.There is no reason to challenge the truth of the claims put forward by this report,compiled as it was in the weeks immediately following the storm. But older members ofthe Pattanavar fis

12、her communities, particularly those in Karaikal, do tell a different story.In interview after interview conducted between 2008 and 2010 fishermen insisted that therehad been no warning before the storm, at least no official warning. There was no priorwarning given by the government, said one, but pe

13、ople in the community sensed thesymptoms of the cyclone and avoided going into the sea to fish. 2 Others who remembered the 1977 storm insisted that flood had not been a problem at the time but had onlybecome so more recently: Before when storms came there was no danger in this place.Floods did not

14、come here (inke vellam vantille). 3 Because coastal villages had beentraditionally sited on high, quick-draining sand dunes the effects of seasonal/cyclonic floodwas greatly mitigated and, as a result, these fishers have developed a very different sense ofwhat constitutes flood.It should come as no

15、surprise that marginal, traditional communities like those of thePattanavar fishers would maintain various types of folklore about their community. Theclaim that floods did not affect the regions around Pondicherry and Karaikal is onecommon bit of local folklore. It is demonstrably false in purely w

16、estern-historical terms,but its hold on the community is just as evident. Similarly, the folklore surrounding thesymptoms of an oncoming storm highlights ways of knowing that are peculiarly suitedto the needs of these specific communities. We do not necessarily expect such notional1Many place names

17、in India have been changed and/or localized in the post-colonial period. Madras did notofficially change its name until 1996, and since I am referencing a period source that uses its colonial name Iretain it here. Similarly, Pondicherry retained its colonial spelling until 2006, when its name was of

18、ficiallychanged to Puducherry, and in common speech many people still use the older name. Here I will usePuducherry when referring to the entire Union Territoryconsisting of four administrative units:Pondicherry, Karaikal, Mahe, and Yanamand Pondicherry when quoting direct speech or referring tothe

19、district/city of Pondicherry, the largest administrative unit in the modern-day Union Territory ofPuducherry.2Tandavasamy, Karaikal Medu, January 9, 2009.3Puthupattan, Vambakirapalaiyam, August 5, 2010.approaches to knowing the world to be as evident within the rational apparatus ofmodern governance

20、 as they are within folk communities, yet this can indeed be the case.Within the contemporary administration of the Union Territory of Puducherry there aremany facts that are commonly mobilized for policy ends and articulated in the language ofrational knowing, but the ways of knowing certain of the

21、se facts can be decidedly nonrational.Alternative ways of knowing policy historyGovernments are rarely characterized as dynamic agents of vibrant and forward-thinkingchange. At our most cynical, those of us engaged in thinking about such things might seegovernment as characterized by nothing so much

22、 as inertia. In the absence of dramaticevidence to the contrary, certain issues are treated with a polite inattention, or policydecisions are based on what Lloyd Etheredge long ago called imagination systems(1985). Developed and refined over more than a decade, Etheredges description of theeffects o

23、f imagination systems on U.S. policy in Latin America holds that nations (orpeople or communities) captured within such an imagination system are rendered invisibleunless some crisis brings them to administrative attention. They are too lacking in powerand status to be noticed and to engage motivati

24、on for any long-term policy, he writes (p.195). Among his unpublished papers4 Etheredge notes further that these systems aregenerated by the inherent nature of the state, that they are self-limiting, and that each suchsystem exhibits some gap of necessary knowledge. In other words, something is miss

25、ing onwhich to base intelligent and effective policy. Within the Union Territory of Puducherry(UTP) these gaps have been filled with other kinds of knowledge, knowledge which thoughbased on fact is not necessarily factual.In the years immediately following their 1954 merger with the recently indepen

26、dentRepublic of India the former French territories of IndiaPondicherry, Karaikal, Mahe, andYanamfound themselves adrift in the sea of their own bureaucratic history. But wherethe United States is possessed of an enormous archival apparatusfor all of Etheredgescritiquesthe modern Union Territory of

27、Puducherry lacked from its inception thearchival tools necessary to maintain or create meaningful links to historical decisionmaking, and the post-merger administration was in no position to create such an apparatusout of whole cloth. Once the decision to withdraw from their Indian territories was m

28、ade,the French administration began removing documents belonging to the premier and deuxie me Bureaux, the records of the Bureau des affaires politiques, and other files related tothe political and military affairs of their former colonies. Less sensitive documents wereeither destroyed out of hand o

29、r left to rot in attics, beneath staircases, or under leakingpipes.5 Within a decade the administrative record of the French colonies left in India werein utter disarray, a situation my own fieldwork in the state archives in Pondicherry confirms. The result was a bureaucracy built less upon a cohere

30、nt understanding of past policythan on a set of shared beliefs about what the on-the-ground realities of the colonialadministration had been.What arose amidst the weeds of the collective memory of the old bureaucracy growinginto a new administration is a web of narratives constituting a policy legen

31、d (Fine andONeill 2010). According to Fine and ONeill, policy legends are texts that describe an4See 5Interview with F. Cyril Antony, July 15, 2009.institutions action in a context that supports a particular policy choice or presents socialconditions in a context that calls for government or collect

32、ive action (p. 151). In short,they present whatever are perceived to be facts relevant to an ongoing public debate orpoint of policy. They are legends in the folkloric sense of the word, insofar as they presentan account of a happening in the world which the narrator or an immediate personalcontact was not directly involved and is