Estrategias sociales de prevención y adaptación Social ... - La RED

Calvinism was a force for land reclamation in the Netherlands. Unlike Luther, Calvin
was in favour of merchants, urging them not to hoard but reinvest their profits. Interestingly,
the river Purmer was laid dry in 1622 backed by counter reformist investors.
Religious opposition to water policies remains today. The recent “horizontalisation”,
that is, the drive for democratisation and naturalisation of water management therefore was
not necessarily applauded by farmers, especially when the EU turned farmers into nature
stewards. Orthodox Calvinists however frequently resisted this felt they were there to make
the Earth productive. For orthodox Christians confronted by “Making Space for the River”
projects such as the interventions on the river Waal at Druten, stewardship of the land
means tilling it, not leaving it to nature (interview, van Vuuren, 2008).
What about the role of non-religious local knowledge and beliefs Several older citizens
in riverside areas still go by the signs of nature and the memory of earlier floods, and have
repeatedly beaten the “experts” on detail. “I never heard the dikes groan but now I do”, a
lady from Druten said (van Meurs, 1995). The people are not always right though: the examples
from interviews conducted after the 1995 high-water event by van Meurs, a critical journalist,
show that people’s local knowledge can be rather hit and miss.
One would expect local knowledge to be deployed to counter expert knowledge in resisting
spatial interventions, but in cases we researched, it proved more effective and expedient
not to. An interesting finding from different projects however (Warner, Roth and Winnubst,
2006; Warner, 2010) is that communities also gain access to expert knowledge to make their
point. In the context of the European-funded Freude am Fluss project, the local platforms I
came across in the Netherlands, Germany and France were almost invariably led by (semi-)
retired professionals with a lot of time on their hands and a very good social network,
through which they find counter-expertise, shooting holes in official models and reports, or
fighting the numbers with other numbers (e.g. Zutphen, Ooij, Cologne, Brehemont).
Farmers meanwhile find ways of liaising with farmers elsewhere to exchange professional
reports and strategies.
Resuscitating Established Institution: Water Boards. Monasteries and farmers developed
technologies for reclaiming 3 more and more land at the end of the first Millennium A.D.
Landowners gave floodable land to monks. Monks at that time were the only social group
with enough time and education to study technology. This laid the foundation for the thousands
of famed water management boards developing around the 12th and 13th century.
The water boards bring together farmers to arrange for flood defence and regulate drainage.
Dependence on the cooperation of everyone is believed to have fostered a fondness for consensus-building
and tolerance of minorities. Reclamation increased the number of water
boards from 2000 to 2500 between 1900 and 1950. Sometimes a single herder would build a
sluice and be the director and technical service of a water board (IJff, 1993). While often
presented abroad as a venerable model of democracy, the water boards were far from egali-
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“Reclaiming” itself of course is a modernist term suggesting something needs to be claimed back from the sea
that was yours all the while.
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