TY  - GEN
TI  - Challenging the Coproduction of Virtual Water and Palestinian Agriculture
AU  - Trottier, Julie
AU  - Perrier, Jeanne
PY  - 2017
PB  - HAL CCSD; Elsevier
LA  - eng
KW  - Palestinian territories
KW  - Structuration theory
KW  - Virtual water
KW  - Water tenure
KW  - Efficiency
KW  - Coproduction
KW  - [SHS]Humanities and Social Sciences
KW  - [SDE]Environmental Sciences
AB  - International audience ; The idiom of virtual water feeds a prolific literature now shaping the policies of national administrations and international organizations, including donors. This article explores the manner in which Palestinian agriculture and the concept of virtual water shed light on each other's coproduction. It opens the black box of virtual water to identify the underlying hypotheses. It invalidates these hypotheses using empirical research. Integrating structuration theory to an STS approach, it explores the manner the coproduction of an interpretive scheme, virtual water, is linked to the construction of a structure of power. Within the idiom of virtual water, flows exist only through the international trade of commodities while states are endowed with an annually renewed stock of water. We focus on the real flow of water from its emergence from the earth to its evapotranspiration by a cultivated plant. We demonstrate that social and political variables within water governance determine the volumes of virtual water flows far more than climatic or agronomic variables. The idiom of virtual water por- trays Palestinian smallholders as inefficient water users while ignoring the manner they sustain food security and environmental sustainability. It legitimizes export oriented agribusinesses as their mode of production corre- sponds to the coproduction of the idea of efficiency underlying the concept of virtual water. These results allow us to reconsider smallholder agriculture as it exists in the Palestinian territories and what sort of policies can support it.
UR  - https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-02107699
DO  - 10.1016/j.geoforum.2017.10.011
UR  - https://www.pollux-fid.de/r/base-ftunmontpellier3:oai:HAL:hal-02107699v1
H1  - Pollux (Fachinformationsdienst Politikwissenschaft)
ER  -