UC Santa Cruz

For over a century the enclave state of Lesotho has acted as a labor reserve for South Africa’s mining industries. With the decline of the migrant labor economy in the 1990s, many people in Lesotho lost their primary source of income: wage remittances from family members working over the border. During that same period, the Lesotho government hung its hopes on becoming another kind of reserve for South Africa: a water reservoir. A Treaty between the two countries initiated the Lesotho Highlands Water Project (LHWP), a multi-billion dollar effort to dam and divert water from the mountains of Lesotho to the arid industrial areas south of Johannesburg. However, the rise of the LHWP has raised concerns that degradation stemming from land mismanagement in the upstream catchment could imperil the water economy, prompting erosion control programs and land use reforms. This dissertation examines the logics and consequences of such programs, the water production infrastructure of which they form a part, and the broader ecology of life in an economic “periphery.” Based upon 15 months of ethnographic field research, I show how efforts to produce water commodities rely on colonial soil conservation techniques that represent modes of governance more than ecological measures per se. Following the colonial legacy of figuring Lesotho as a politically walled-off but economically dependent territory, the goal of governance then and now is to maintain a relationship between nonsustainable multispecies livelihoods, on the one hand, and political quietude, on the other. Elites in Lesotho construct water commodification as a national priority, thereby arguing that erosion control is necessary. Erosion control is presented as a technical matter when in fact it is a political one, as nonsustainability is not a failure of local management but rather an architectural feature of a regional political economy: land degradation stems from Lesotho’s historical experience as a “periphery” to the South African “core.” Settler colonialism by white Afrikaners; population growth and class struggle within Basotho society; and colonial promotion of wool and mohair production together put intense pressure on the mountain rangelands where LHWP dams are now sited. Today’s nonsustainable livelihoods are maintained through the innovative livestock production strategies of rural Basotho, and through a tenuous politics of distribution established by elites, whereby payments for water are channeled toward concentration and corruption but trickle down to rural livelihoods through development and environmental management programs. In making this argument, I present ethnographic and historical accounts of the symbolic production of water as a national natural resource; the development of soil conservation work parties called fato-fato; the establishment of rangeland management associations; peasant and state understandings of land degradation; and the development of a wool, mohair, and mutton export economy that promotes rural livelihoods but also rangeland degradation. My findings contribute to interdisciplinary literature on state-making, environmental conservation, and natural resource politics by describing the symbolic and material infrastructures required for water production, and by showing how history and political economy insinuate ecological processes.