People’s Initiatives in Pakistan: Managing Water, Land, and Ethnic Issues

Across the arid uplands of Pakistan, where rain is scarce and rivers are seasonal, communities have spent more than a thousand years working out one of the hardest problems in human society: how to share a limited, life-giving resource fairly. Water in this region is not just an input for farming. It is the thread that binds social standing, communal identity and survival together. When outside technologies and state plans arrive without understanding these arrangements, the results are often conflict and decay. Yet the same communities have also shown that ordinary people, organising themselves, can defend their rights and manage natural resources sustainably. This post looks at how people’s initiatives in Pakistan have shaped the management of water, land and the ethnic tensions that run alongside them.

The karez system: water as a community institution 🔗

The clearest example of community-based water management in Pakistan is the karez, an indigenous underground irrigation network found mainly in Balochistan. A karez is a gently sloping tunnel dug into a hillside, fed by a series of vertical shafts that tap groundwater and carry it by gravity to fields kilometres away. Because the water travels underground, very little is lost to evaporation in the hot, dry climate. The technology is ancient, believed to have spread from Persia along trade routes into Balochistan over a millennium ago, and similar systems exist from Spain to western China.

What makes the karez remarkable is not just the engineering but the social system built around it. The water is owned communally through shares. As described in the Balochistan Conservation Strategy, a karez is owned by shares that each represent a fixed amount of time during which a shareholder may draw water for irrigation. A single karez can yield up to 200 litres of water per second and supports a maximum of around 200 shareholding families, irrigating roughly 10 to 20 hectares of land.

How water rights and shares work 🔗

The unit of ownership is time, not volume. Shares are organised into 24-hour cycles, and a karez may have anywhere from 18 to 32 such cycles distributed among its shareholders, with individual claims ranging from a few minutes to a full week of water flow. A shareholder is recognised as a person of standing in the community. In a region where status is not measured by how much land you own but by the size of your water share, holding a stake in a karez carries real social weight.

These arrangements are managed through customary institutions rather than government departments. Shareholders meet, often in a jirga (a traditional council), to take collective decisions about distribution, repairs and disputes. Local organisations of users handle the day-to-day scheduling, while state agencies have historically played a passive, hands-off role. The community, not the bureaucracy, runs the system.

Built-in fairness between upstream and downstream 🔗

One feature of the karez stands out for how cleverly it builds in equity. The water user with the first parcel of land along the channel also holds rights to the last parcel on the same channel, the second user holds rights to the second-to-last parcel, and so on. This pairing means that everyone has a personal stake in keeping the entire watercourse working, from the source to the very end.

This is a striking contrast with many canal-based systems, where those at the head of the channel take what they want and feel little responsibility for those at the tail. The karez design quietly removes that temptation. Fair distribution and shared maintenance are not afterthoughts; they are written into the structure of ownership itself.

When modern technology disrupts traditional systems 🔗

For centuries the karez held a fragile environment in balance. The trouble began when modern irrigation arrived. From the 1970s, internationally sponsored surveys often dismissed the karez as traditional, outmoded and not worth updating, just as cheap diesel-powered tube wells were becoming available. Subsidised electricity and fuel from the provincial government made it even easier for those with capital to sink their own wells.

The consequences have been severe. Researchers studying the shift from karez to tube wells in Balochistan found that the spread of tube wells places traditional communal forms of authority under stress and, in places, replaces them with the power of large farmers. A wealthy landowner who drills a deep well can pump groundwater independently, ignoring the shared schedule and lowering the water table for everyone else. The karez, which depends on a stable water table, begins to dry up.

Conflicts over water rights and the loss of social capital 🔗

This transition does more than damage the environment. It erodes the social fabric. The same research argues that the differential power of the modernisation narrative, combined with the influence of large farmers, is driving the rapid spread of tube wells, and that this is harming both social equity and environmental quality. As karezes dry out, the communal bonds maintained through joint upkeep weaken.

The human cost is real. The drying of karezes has reduced once-respected smallholders to working as day labourers or street hawkers in the slums of Quetta and Karachi. Over-pumping also gives only a temporary boost in productivity, because the groundwater is being drawn faster than it can recharge. The World Bank has documented how recurring droughts since the 1960s reduced recharge while demand grew, prompting farmers to install tube wells that depleted fresh water resources at an annual rate of around three metres in places. A system that survived droughts for a thousand years is being undone in a few decades.

People fighting back: the Benar weir 🔗

Communities have not simply accepted these losses. A recurring theme in the study of people’s initiatives is that local groups can and do resist unfair arrangements when their water rights are threatened. The case of the Benar weir is often cited as an example of successful collective resistance against unjust water distribution.

In such cases, the pattern is familiar. A diversion structure or new allocation favours a powerful upstream user or a particular faction, cutting off or reducing the share that flows to others who hold customary rights. Rather than wait for state agencies to intervene, the affected shareholders organise, assert their traditional entitlements, and press for a fairer division of the flow. The Benar weir episode illustrates how communities, drawing on the legitimacy of long-established customary rights, can push back against attempts to capture a shared resource and restore an equitable distribution.

The lesson is broader than a single weir. It shows that the rules embedded in traditional systems are not merely sentimental. They are a source of authority that ordinary water users can invoke to defend themselves when stronger players try to bend the system in their favour.

The Palas Conservation and Development Project 🔗

Water is only one part of the natural-resource story. Forests, biodiversity and land use raise the same question of who controls a shared resource and how local people can be brought into managing it. The Palas Conservation and Development Project (PCDP) in the Palas Valley of Indus Kohistan is a well-known attempt to answer that question through community participation.

The Palas Valley is one of the most biologically rich areas in Pakistan, holding what surveys suggest is one of the largest surviving populations of the vulnerable western tragopan pheasant in the world. Its forests, however, were under pressure from timber cutting and the poverty of the people who depend on them. Conservation that simply fenced people out was never going to work in a place where tens of thousands of residents earn part or all of their income from the forest.

Conservation through participation, not exclusion 🔗

The PCDP grew out of the earlier Himalayan Jungle Project and was supported over the years by international partners such as BirdLife International and WWF. Its stated aim was to safeguard biodiversity in Palas by enabling local communities to tackle the linked causes of poverty and natural-resource degradation through an integrated and participatory approach to conservation and development. In other words, the welfare of the people and the health of the forest were treated as a single problem.

This design connected directly to national policy. The project began its five-year operation in January 2001 and was framed to support objectives drawn from the National Conservation Strategy, the provincial conservation strategy and the wider poverty-alleviation programme. By tying conservation to livelihoods and to government strategy, the PCDP tried to make protecting the forest something the community had a reason to want, rather than a rule imposed from outside.

Land, ethnicity and the politics of resources 🔗

Resource management in this part of Pakistan cannot be separated from the question of identity. Balochistan and Kohistan are home to distinct tribal and ethnic communities whose social organisation is tightly woven into how land and water are held. Because a person’s share of water, and therefore their place in the jirga, defines their standing, control over resources is also control over status and political voice within the group.

This is why a technology like the tube well is never just a technical choice. When wealthy landowners gain independent access to groundwater, they escape the communal rules that previously kept them accountable to their neighbours, and the balance of power within and between communities shifts. The same logic plays out at a larger scale in Pakistan’s interprovincial water disputes, where lower-lying regions fear that upstream development will reduce their share. Long-running distrust between provinces over water distribution, combined with corruption and weak management, continues to challenge cooperation.

Why community-led approaches matter 🔗

The experiences above point in a consistent direction. Top-down projects that treat local people as obstacles tend to fail, while initiatives that recognise customary rights and put communities at the centre have a better chance of lasting. International conservation bodies note that the karez itself is valued precisely because it is a community-based, environmentally sustainable model for sourcing and distributing water in drylands that the rest of the world may need as water scarcity worsens.

The World Bank’s later work seems to have absorbed this lesson. When the Government of Balochistan restored independent karez systems, it did so in collaboration with farmer organisations, which helped resolve disputes over the schedule and share of water distribution. Bringing the users into the design, rather than working around them, made the rehabilitation more durable.

What these experiences teach us 🔗

Pakistan’s experience with people’s initiatives offers a clear set of insights. Traditional systems like the karez are not primitive leftovers; they encode sophisticated rules for fairness, sustainability and shared responsibility. Modern technology, introduced without regard for these rules, can degrade both the environment and the social order that protected it. And communities, when they organise, can resist unjust distribution and take a real role in managing forests and water. The thread running through all of it is participation: resources held in common are best looked after by the people who depend on them, working through institutions they trust.

What do you think? Should the state actively protect traditional resource-management systems like the karez, even if that means restricting individual landowners from drilling tube wells on their own property? And when conservation goals clash with the immediate livelihood needs of a poor community, whose priorities should come first?

References

1. https://whc.unesco.org/en/tentativelists/6110
2. https://www.jworldtimes.com/old-site/pakistan-affairs/karez-irrigation-in-balochistan-do-something-before-it-is-too-late/
3. https://mei.edu/publication/necessity-karez-water-systems-balochistan/
4. https://www.academia.edu/38773702/Rehabilitating_Traditional_Irrigation_Systems_Assessing_Popular_Support_for_Karez_Rehabilitation_in_Balochistan_Pakistan
5. https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/feature/2014/06/16/pakistan-small-scale-irrigation-large-scale-benefits-for-balochistan
6. https://www.pheasant.org.uk/regions/pakistan/
7. https://www.wildlifeofpakistan.com/Projects/projects.html
8. https://climate-diplomacy.org/case-studies/conflict-over-indus-waters-pakistan