The Work of Water: Infrastructure, Bureaucratic Labor, and the Postcolonial Promise in Pakistan

Pakistan's Punjab Irrigation Department manages one of the world's largest irrigation networks. Such bureaucracies are typically considered paradigmatic sites of corruption, inefficiency, and depoliticization, particularly in post-colonial settings. The Work of Water turns this assumption on its head, arguing that the postcolonial promise of welfare and development hinges not on elite policy or expertise but everyday bureaucratic labor.

Drawing on a decade of ethnographic and archival resea...