 I'm going to thank our first keynote speaker yesterday, Professor Hans Rosling, for actually setting us on our right track of trying to understand society before we understand the technology that we try to bring to bear on society. As an engineer who's become a social scientist and in the process of minister handling politics, I've had to see water and the problems of water, not just from the technical side, but also from the social side where things really go wrong. Technical problems we can solve. I think we've got greater capacity to solve technical problems than we have to solve social problems where things come apart. Even the best of technologies do not really work when society does not accept it. In my experience, there are three basic problems, speciality of water. First, barring the promise of desalination which has not crossed the energy barrier yet. Water, unlike energy, cannot be manufactured. In most places in the world, we just have to live with what is there. At best, we can transport it in very clever ways, but in the Himalayas, we can't even do that. It's just the heights are too great. The energy cost is too high. The second is water is life and it's linked to just about everything else. I've always joked that water is a subject of every department in a university, not just the physical sciences, but right up to literature. So water has to be dealt by everything. It also means that water has a very long history and history is what determines our institutions. So when you try to intervene into water, you are intervening and disturbing in a sense, institutions of various types with long memories and sometimes even longer knives. And that's where all the water projects come to grief and we haven't learned how to handle that properly. This brings me to the third point, the specificity of water. And this is very critical in the institution and politics of water, which is water needs harvesting. Energy is often mined, petroleum, coal and so on. Yes, there's a thin sliver of renewables that are harvested, but water needs harvesting and what harvesting means, it means it has to have constant socio-systemic involvement. Mining means you can take your seventh fleet, you can take your armies around an area and just take out anything you want. You can't do that with water. You have to work with society, you have to work with them every year, season to season, flood to drought and so on and so forth. And to this kind of water and to the institutions that manage this water, something is happening. It's what is happening is it's coming under great stress and most of that stress is often socially generated. Yes, there is climate change, but if you ask me as a minister from one of the southern countries, what we used to be called Third World is politically no longer correct to say that, I would say that climate change, yeah, it's interesting to talk in international forum, but it really has no impact on any decision making at national level, at political national levels because too many other social issues override any concerns of climate change and other things. Important, yes, but when you have a place where there's no scarcity of water and there's a riot in a town, you're not really worried about climate change. You're worried about the social consequences. I give an example, we did a study once to see what the models, different global models of climate change are doing in Nepal Himalaya and we found interesting. There's no doubt temperature is rising, strangely it's rising in the higher faster, the higher altitude than the lower altitude, but on precipitation there's absolute uncertainty and these models, these global models, all of them, they showed that precipitation in Nepal Himalaya could decrease by minus 53% or increase by up to 135%. Now, if you were a minister like me, what would you do? If the opposition was raising hell about climate change, I would say, well, it's gonna increase by 135%, so why are you worried? If I needed to scare somebody, I would say you're gonna decrease by 50%. Well, that's how politics operates and thank you, climate scientists. Now, I'm gonna put before you two counterintuitive ideas in the same line that Professor Hans Roslin did yesterday so effectively. The first I'm gonna argue with you is there is no such thing as urban and rural. We've grown up thinking, well, this is urban development and this is rural development, but given that in most places in countries like mine that we come from, a generation back maybe 10 to 15% of the people lived in urban areas, so-called urban areas. A generation, hence, we're gonna have 60 to 80% of the people living in urban areas, what I call urban areas. In social terms, do you think that shifts automatically makes them suave urbanites? No, they bring all their rural habits with them into very, very congested urban areas and that behavior is gonna determine their water behavior, their water needs, their demand on water, their attitude to water and so on. The second point I'm gonna make, the counterintuitive one, is that there is no such thing as an organization. I can already see you saying what? I'll argue that there are only four basically different styles of organizing and each one of these styles of organizing is basically trying to destabilize the other styles. Now, if you look at this picture that's up in the screen, this is a Pakistani lady in Lahore selling strawberries on a donkey cart using mobile phones and the backdrop are 13th, 14th century pre-mogul, mogul ruins against the backdrop of high electricity transmission, high voltage towers. You could not be getting a better example of spanning technology across time, space and cultures. Now, is this lady rural? Is she urban? What is she? This is just across the border on the other side in India in some of the areas, the dry areas of the deserts of Rajasthan and Gujarat that we are working on and you think you see a truck. Unfortunately, it's not a truck. It looks like a truck, it quacks like a truck but it's not a truck. It's an irrigation pump. The story is very interesting. The Indian Development Bank, a rural development bank of the government of India gives farmers very cheap loans to buy three horsepower pumps for irrigation. The trouble is farmers pawn their wives' jewellery to add their own money and get a 10-horsepower pump. And all the engineers and economists in the banks say the farmers are stupid. They could do a three-horsepower where they're pawning their wives' jewellery to get a 10-horsepower pump. And then you find out that a three-horsepower pump would only pump water for 3,000 hours a year out of 8,000-something hours, whereas a 10-horsepower pump, after doing all the irrigation pumping, can be fitted onto a chassis and transport goods and repay loans within two years that you would not be able to do otherwise. It's the farmers who are very smart. It's the engineers who are stupid. Now this kind of a counterintuitive example actually shows that it comes from something that we are not used to thinking. We think in these two binary terms, the reality is we have something like this. And the word desakota comes from Basha, Indonesia. And these are Sanskritic words, actually, of origin. It basically means desa country, like Bangladesh, rural, and kota, the center of the town. So desakota is something used by some of us researchers to refer to something that's neither rural nor urban. You go to Nepal, three days in a village walking from the last road, three days, and if you take a very high view, you'll say yes, it's rural. Of course, three days walking without roads. But if you look at the household income of that farmer there, you'll probably find that the farmer's 40% income comes from rural sources and 60% of his income is probably coming of that household, is coming from London, Dubai, Malaysia, why? Because a member of the family is out there learning money in one of these centers and sending money back. Is that farmer rural or urban? Well, 60% urban, 40% rural, even three days walking from the last road head. A study like this was done in Pakistan by some of us. Quetta, Balukistan, the badlands of Pakistan, Taliban area. You suddenly find out that there are two villages on two sides of that big city. And what these lines show you is declining urban influences and declining rural traditional values and influences. And that middle sector where they intersect is basically the point of Desakota. It's an institutional vacuum. But it's also an institutional incubation area where that truck, irrigated truck that you saw happens. It's a very fertile area where people experiment and do things. And important there is the informal economy. So we talk of the private sector very often, but at gatherings like this, when we talk of the private sector, we mean big multinational companies. Well, the informal economy is all private, very private. It's very much at the household level. And this is where much of the conflict lies when development agencies try to push privatization in the process they're only pushing big multinational companies, ignoring completely the private sector that actually exists on the ground and is doing some pretty creative things. Back in Nepal, the choice of technology and I'm making that second argument, here on the left, you see, is a traditional way irrigation is done in Nepali Hills. 80% of all irrigation is still done that way by brushwood dams. End of the monsoon, dry season starts, farmers get together cooperatively. You know, put up the brushwood dam, it provides a second and even third crop very cheaply. Come the monsoon again, the dam gets washed off. It's a disposable dam. Traditional technology, very environmentally friendly. But there's a problem. Labor is short, people are migrating out to Gulf countries for labor and all. So it's very difficult to get voluntary labor. So what happens? The managers of the system want simple help that would counterbalance their lack of labor. So they come to engineers like me in a department of irrigation or something and we've only learned cement technology. We were never taught brushwood dams. We don't even know whether brushwood dams exist. So what do we do? We build a big dam like this on the same rivers a bit further down. Well, the problem was this dam was built in 1961 and in 1962, the river moved away. Leaving the dam high and dry, a monument to man's stupidity or engineer's stupidity. Now, the funny part is, that's the comedy. The tragedy part is, we had carved up a farmer managed system below and when the dam did not work, there was no water down below because we destroyed the old and our new did not work. So the area degenerated into being a quite infested area as people had to do anything to survive. Their livelihoods of irrigation gone. Much like the Somali farmers whose waters got so polluted that they could not fish anymore. And so they started fishing for oil tankers. Same thing. However, another technology came in. This is voluntary technology of communities. This is agency managed specialized technology of engineers from departments of government. And this is the market that came in. You notice, it's the humble diesel pump. There are 60 million or something like that all over India is said. And it's even fitted right next to this hand pump. And it provides water. If you can't afford a pump like this, say you can rent one for 50 rupees an hour and it'll come to you on a bullock cart. Suddenly you see that the choice of technology and which technology you use is very much dependent on what kind of institution is there on the ground. A community technology, an agency technology of cement or a market technology of something else. I'm arguing this because we have a problem. And the problem is this. There are two types of sciences from the social science perspective. A toad's eye science and an eagle eye science. Of course, eagle eye science with satellite data and GIS positioning, it's all very sexy. Everybody wants to study that. The trouble is you got to do some toad's eye science to see how water is actually managed by the people down there and they're doing some pretty creative things. Now this cartoon here was drawn by a cartoonist in the Mekong when I was giving a talk. And there's a phenomenon in high mountain areas of Nepal, Tibet and also in Colorado. It's a phenomenon that it's so high up there it's so low pressure and so dry. It's a desert that you have thunder and lightning. You can drive towards it. A column of water is descending down a rain but the trouble is not a drop of rain hits the ground. Why? Because it evaporates before it hits the ground. There's a name for this phenomenon, meteorological phenomenon. I find it very symbolic in talking about million development goals, climate change and all these things that we're all concerned about at the national and international level. They're like drops of rain that never hit the ground. You go talk to any farmer in India, Nepal, Africa, I'll bet nobody's even heard of MDGs. They're the Millennium Development Goals. And most people have maybe heard of climate change but all that it means to them was yesterday was hot today is cold. Nobody relates it to CO2 and the changing behavior necessary. The argument I'm making is we need both Eagle Eye Science and Toad's Eye Science. Unfortunately, we are doing too little Toad's Eye Science when it comes to water. And that's where the problem lies. Groundwater overdraft, big problem in India, big problem in many parts of the world. The social response to groundwater overdraft that you can see is very clear. On the one side, you have the market. You have this guy who's got money, puts in a pump, high-powered pump pumps over the water and the groundwater table declines so much that all his neighbors' pumps go dry. The response immediately is the government type over here says, we've got to have more rules and regulations. The activist egalitarian here is probably the angry young man who thinks the government is stupid and the neighbor is greedy. These are all environmental activists and social activists. And of course, you have the poor fatalized voter and consumer doesn't know what to do. The next option for him is to migrate to the slums of urban areas. If you leave the fatalist out for a while, you end up with what I call a three-legged policy stool. You have three types of organizing styles. You have bureaucratic hierarchism, you have market individualism and you have activist egalitarianism. All three exist right from the village commons to the national level, to the global commons. I would almost be tempted to say at this point that you have IWA over here, you have IRC, International River Commissions over here and the International Rivers Network Activist Group over here. That's a temptation. You see that they have a very different perception of what risk is. We talk a lot in this conference about risk, but risk from a social science perspective is socially constructed. And different entities have a very different perception of risk. Market people are risk takers. Activists are risk sensitizers. Governments are risk managers. And this is a very different way of doing business. You also see the choice from the previous diagram, the graph pictures I showed you, that the choice of an agency of technology is modern cement technology. The choice of markets, they do some of the most creative things market people, very clever things. Diesel pump, donkey cart, mobile phone, strawberry selling, irrigated truck. And then you have the community which does brushwood dams and is concerned more about equity and so on. You see that three different types of power is being exercised by these three different entities. You have hierarchies coercive power. It's based on procedural, I would even say, fetishism, make more rules, make more things, procedures. And if that is violated, put people in jail, do whatever. Coercive power, bureaucratic coercive power. You have markets persuasive power. It's the networking, the freedom, the contracting, the creative ideas. Come on, just remove the constraints and we'll invent our way out of the problem. And egalitarianism is the moral power, the strategy of critique. And that's what gets them there, riles them up all the time. My last slide, I mean, if you put this together, put the three together, leave the fatalist out at one point, you will see that the definition of what the water problem is differs very much from the solidarities that you're dealing with. Bureaucratic hierarchism, because they are control freaks. What they will say is, you've got to get more controls in. This is the politics it generates. We like to call it the Nehruvian politics. It's the regulatory management solution. And their beloved social science is law. You come to market, and they believe in free innovation. They think resources are abundant, whereas the previous ones thought resources scarce. And we can invent our way out of the problem. And liberal economics is what they like. Efficiency is what they talk about. And then you come to the third leg of the stool, the activists, the egalitarians, the movements, the greens. And to them, resource degradation is the critical problem. And it gives rise to a very Gandhian politics, the previous market one being a Reagan or Thatcherite politics. Mahatma Gandhi's famous statement, the world has enough for our needs, but not enough for our greed. It's a classic egalitarian statement. And the social sciences they love here is critical anthropology. It's about reciprocal equity. So the point is, if you are talking about a water problem, these three entities define the water problem very differently. They see the problem differently. It's not the same definition of the problem. And if your definition of the problem is different, you can bet your boots, your solutions are going to be even more different. Now, what does this lead us to? In light of the uncertainties that we have, climate change, the social uncertainties that we are seeing all around us and all, what we need to do and think is to be more humble with our solutions, first of all, admit that the other guy's point might be right, and come forth with constructive engagement. There are very few polities, statements like polities, where people are brought together on a constructive engagement platform, more often than not, what we have is a flying apart, an impasse. Many water projects are completely stuck because these three different social solidarities can't even get together on the same table and talk. It's not enough just to bring them to a table, they must also be responded to. So this is where constructive engagement comes. And because each one is proffering a very different definition of the problem and proffering very different solutions, the way out would be to have many 10% solutions on the table rather than to have one perfectly optimized solution that we are all taught as engineers and economists to go for. This brings me to the core conclusion I'm making. And this is this, we're here in Portugal and somebody mentioned to me that there's this wonderful foundation here called Gulbinke and Foundation. This foundation brought out a very interesting book in 19, the book came out from Stanford University Press in 1996. It's called Open the Social Sciences. It was headed, it was a commission headed by the eminent economist Emmanuel Wallerstein. It had Ilya Prigogi in the Nobel Prize winning chemist and so on, 10 very eminent people. And what they argue is that the social sciences as have developed currently into different disciplines, economics, political science, anthropology, sociology, law and so on and so forth, area studies. These all developed for very specific purposes in five locales of Europe and America. And they conclude they are next to useless for countries like ours in the South. We need more integrated social sciences which has not been found yet but it's an exciting journey ahead. What this leads me to is to argue that we first of all need more toad's eye science, more grassroots based understanding of what is happening out there and to be able to project that understanding to a higher policy level. Unfortunately what we have is too much very eagle eye science and a ramming down of solutions down everybody's throats down there and it just doesn't work because people start throwing up. And there are protest movements, there are impasse, there is conflict and so on. So we need more toad's eye science. We also need to accept plural and contradictory definitions of the problem at the same time. What this means is that innovations for solutions and innovations to emerge, we have to find managerial solutions up here, regulatory and managerial solutions, they have to come. We have to find technical solutions over here, clever devices and so on. But we also have to find very, very interesting solutions of behavioral change, value changes. And these are the people who have to do it over here at this third leg. So that is the core conclusion that I draw that we need to meet the new challenges of water, we need new managers of water, not just civil engineers and economists. We also need other disciplines to come in who can listen to and respond to the different definitions of what the water problem is. Thank you. Thank you.