The people behind the machine: Street-level bureaucrats in the Bắc Hưng Hải irrigation system

This paper explores the everyday practices of street-level bureaucrats (SLBs) in Vietnam’s Bắc Hưng Hải (BHH) irrigation system, a vast hydrosocial machine in the Red River Delta. Drawing on interviews and detailed ethnographic fieldwork, we document how SLBs (hydraulic cluster managers, station workers and water guides) navigate multiple sociomaterial interfaces, in the course of which they deal with a diversity of day-to-day sociomaterial constraints to make irrigation and drainage work. Far from being faceless agents of a rigid hydrocracy, SLBs care for the infrastructure they manage and engage in continuous sociotechnical tinkering and ethical improvisation to balance competing demands that include farmers’ needs, infrastructure decay, electricity costs, and bureaucratic oversight. We stress how SLBs engage in processes of intermediation, negotiation and bricolage, thereby shaping a particular form of everyday politics that combines formal rules with practical fixes and is epitomised in specific locales, the pumping stations where professional and social lives intertwine. As the Red River Delta faces mounting socio-environmental changes, understanding the hard work, gendered dynamics and situated ethics that characterise SLBs’ daily realities is crucial to anticipating the future of water governance in Vietnam.