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Despite decades of concerted efforts to address the problem, Nepal's rural water supply sector continues to be laced with gender and social exclusion. This study provides insights from community water-user groups in two geographically and socially diverse contexts to better understand, from a gender and social inclusion perspective, and through institutional bricolage, how some water-user groups adapt to local contexts, shaping varied group dynamics that are not always equitable. Findings reveal that policies promoting social inclusion are difficult to implement amid the complex web of social and economic factors associated with community-managed water supply systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Large-scale male outmigration has placed new pressures on both men and women, especially regarding labour division in farm households and involvement in Water Users Associations (WUAs). This paper illustrates how the interplay between existing gender norms, male migration, remittances, and alternative sources of male labour influence women's agency and WUA decision-making processes in Nepal. Despite official quotas aimed at promoting women's participation in WUAs, some women prefer to monetise membership contributions rather than actively engage with the organisation. Others pursue strategic interests through changing WUA rules and, in the process, bringing about an adjustment of cultural norms. Women's agency is derived not only from their knowledge of irrigation systems features and their ability to manage them; it is also related to their ability to learn new organisational skills and to apply them in the WUA context to negotiate and mobilise rules and resources. Women (re)shape their WUA involvement in conjunction with their farming strategies, their view of the WUA's functionality, and whether they perceive the involvement as either an opportunity for productive engagement or as merely an increase in their already heavy workload. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Collective farming has been suggested as a potentially useful approach for reducing inequality and transforming peasant agriculture. In collectives, farmers pool land, labor, irrigation infrastructure, agricultural inputs and harvest to overcome resource constraints and to increase their bargaining power. Employing a feminist political ecology lens, we reflect on the extent to which collective farming enables marginalized groups to engage in smallholder agriculture. We examine the establishment of 18 farmer collectives by an action research project in the Eastern Gangetic Plains, a region characterised by fragmented and small land-holdings and a high rate of marginalised and landless farmers. We analyze ambivalances of collective farming practices with regard to (1) social relations across scales, (2) intersectionality and (3) emotional attachment. Our results in Saptari/ Eastern Terai in Nepal, Madhubani/Bihar, and Cooch Behar/West Bengal in India demonstrate how intra-household, group and community relations and emotional attachments to the family and neighbors mediate the redistribution of labor, land, produce and capital. We find that unequal gender relations, intersected by class, age, ethnicity and caste, are reproduced in collective action, land tenure and water management, and argue that a critical feminist perspective can support a more reflective and relational understanding of collective farming processes. Our analysis demonstrates that feminist political ecology can complement commons studies by providing meaningful insights on ambivalences around approaches such as collective farming. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]