The Ocean in a Drop

Why looking at details can improve understanding the world – an example from Switzerland

By Delphine Magara

The canton of Valais represents one of Switzerland’s most arid areas. Due to seldom rainfall during summer, Valaisan people created a sophisticated irrigation system called bisses (Suonen in German), dating back from the 13th century. This traditional system of water transport is still in place today, bringing water to the villages and to the cultivated fields of this mountainous region.

The bisses in Valais constituted the existential basis for the Canton’s agriculture before the first underground water pipes were installed. In the form of open-top, wooden channels (or today oftentimes as surface pipelines), the channels brought water from mountain creeks or glaciers over many kilometers towards the villages and their cultivated fields. ( See the bisses here )

Besides distributing water, the Bisses also constitute an important mechanism to prevent and reduce the impact of natural hazards. Through the open irrigation channels, the surrounding land remains humid, hindering wildfires. At the same time, the channels can store big amounts of water on occasion of heavy rainfalls thus avoiding dangerous landslides.

Obviously, such a complex and long system of channels requires maintenance and coordinated management among the different water users and villages. Therefore, Bisses have traditionally been governed with a Common Property Regime, organized in local water-users unions, or “sharingships” (“Geteilschaften”), with rotating responsibilities for maintenance and control over distribution.

In this climatically harsh and isolated area, all activities were centered on the production of rye bread (“Roggubrot”) for self-supply. However, the means of subsistence for the Valaisian inhabitants drastically changed with the structural changes of the 19th century. When intensive agriculture was expanded in the low-land and the industrial economy was growing, many mountain farmers gave up their activities partly or fully to make a living as wage workers in the industry sector. The monetization of goods and road connections from the mountains to the valley created the possibility to earn money and buy food instead of producing it.

An additional pressure on mountain farmers was represented by an increasing number of hydropower plants’ installations between 1940 and 1970. These two phenomena brought an enormous change in how life was structured in the mountain villages of Valais. As a consequence, social cohesion and collaboration for governing the locally available natural resources gradually lost its significance. The commitment to manage the bisses traditionally through a common pool system became difficult to keep upright. Nowadays, the remaining bisses are managed by the municipality and used for touristic purposes. Therefore, they are rarely employed for agriculture and, in most cases, are no longer governed through the common pool system.

The village of Embd has been one of the last few survivors of the shift towards industrialization. Here, the management of the bisses is formally held by three separate Geteilschaften. Due to the decreasing number of their active members, the village lacks capital and labour to invest in restoration works for the bisses. Therefore, the Canton has called for a merger of these three associations to provide coordinated financial support. One of the sharingships, the “Staldneri”, has repeatedly supported the merger, however, this fusion among the users’ unions turned out to be a challenging mission. While the aim of the merger is to maintain the original form of governance through collective cooperation, the group’s composition and  power relations play an important role in the realization of this project. It has been underway for many years and is still not accomplished.

Obviously, the Staldneri association, located downstream, depends on the upper stream parties’ management of the water, a condition that in the past years has caused conflicts and tensions between the users’ associations. The case of Embd shows how water inevitably connects people and requires cooperation in order for humans and nature to remain alive. An equitable water distribution is often hindered through differences in geographic location, monetary wealth, and political power as well as the different value systems between the actors. From the perspective of the farmers of Staldneri, the bisses embody multiple significances, including a social, an environmental and an economic dimension. These significances have changed over time and space, resulting in a fragmentation of the water users’ interests and opinions. This social fragmentation is probably the major obstacle to the collaboration between  users’ associations to keep the traditional irrigation system upright.

Just like in a relay race, organizing water distribution through a scheduled system of opening and closing irrigation deviators requires people to interact. In cases of extreme weather conditions, the cooperation of all users is important: with too much water, the channels might collapse and with too little water, the downstream users might lose their crops. This shows that the management of the waterflow not only requires communication, but that every water user has the responsibility of making the entire system function and provide sustenance for survival. A member of the community brings this fundamental role of the bisse forward:

“When you follow it [the bisse], you have the feeling that it is an artery with many small veins that go to many fields and make them green“.

(«Wenn du dieser nachläufst, hast du das Gefühl, es sei eine Pulsader, die mit vielen kleinen Adern auf viele Länder geht und diese grün machen»)

In this sense, thanks to the bisses, life is  possible in Embd at all. Especially in the summer drought and heat, without the open water channels the landscape would resemble a dry scrubland.

As many people are no longer fully dependent on the local water supply, fewer and fewer water users participate in the assemblies regarding the bisses’ management. The fact that the installation of pipelines for irrigation has become much easier further discourages participation in the maintenance of the traditional channels. The upstream parties, having mainly installed pipelines, are in a clear advantage in their access to water so they are not interested in putting effort and money into a merger: in their view, it would only benefit the downstream association of Staldneri. In addition, past conflicts between family clans and  difficulties in accepting recently settled village members further complicate negotiations about a merger.

The fading interest in maintaining the bisses goes along with a decline in social interactions and a loss of knowledge about an equitable, convenient and environmentally sustainable way of supplying water. Still, for the local farmers the persistence of the bisses is crucial for their own long- and short-term survival. For the rest of the village, the existence of this water supply system is important to protect their livelihoods from natural hazards. One of Staldneri’s remaining farmers has so expressed his desire for the future:

“Since a long time, I have been dreaming of returning to ancient methods… not just throwing in some pipes in a way that it just barely flows [the water]… but yes, [doing so that] there is also a positive energy into it. Something joyful, that would provide a common direction, that is constructive [for the community] and brings with it a certain degree of happiness.”

(„Eigentlich träume ich schon extrem lange, dass wir da eben nach alten Manieren… (d), nicht nur Rohre reinknallen und es einfach so machen, dass es gerade noch weiterläuft […] Und ja, dass einfach eine positive Energie daran ist. Etwas Freudiges […], dass es zusammen eine Richtung gäbe, die konstruktiv ist, und eine gewisse Freude darin enthalten ist.“)

Conflicts around  water-sharing are becoming increasingly important in the world. In general, water supply requires special efforts in organization, regulation and use – it all needs to be adapted to the dynamism of the flowing resource itself. Therefore, rules, regulations, and practices need to be established while still allowing some flexibility and spontaneity. It is a challenging undertaking when shared among stakeholders with different needs and preferences over the use of water.

A lesson from social anthropology is that what you see in social interactions at the scale of small human groups is often replicated at macro-level interactions, as for example in water conflicts between regions or states. Thus, looking at very small-scale scenarios of water conflicts can help unveil factors relevant to understand and solve problems of upstream – downstream disparities between bigger entities, which can similarly be observed in wider contexts. Our world is made of fractals; therefore, it is worth considering the details, devoting our attention not just to the vast and big phenomena but also to seemingly small and insignificant things, which might provide helpful insights. In this sense, we can at times recognize the ocean within one drop, if looking closely and attentively enough.

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Photo and Art by Charlotte Qin of QinTheory Studio.

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Between Clouds and Oceans is a collaborative series by the Water Initiative and the Geneva-based QinTheory Studio. Water is the origin of all lives but also indispensable to the identity and cosmology of our ancestors. Following where water flows between Clouds and Oceans, the collaboration aims to create an ethnographic collage about water tangential to the international discourse on water governance and natural resource management, and to unlock our long-sought answers to creating peace and living in harmony with one another.