Legibility grabs: Contesting hegemony and water governance in western Bahia, Brazil

This article examines how irrigated agribusiness interests in western Bahia, Brazil, are capturing the infrastructure of water governance itself — the basin committees, digital monitoring platforms, and fee structures through which water becomes visible and governable. Drawing on Gramscian theories of hegemony and James Scott's analysis of state legibility, we develop the concept of ‘legibility grabs’ to describe how dominant actors appropriate not only resources but the institutional mechanisms that render those resources objects of governance. Based on documentary analysis and 48 interviews conducted during fieldwork in 2024–2025, we demonstrate how agribusiness has waged wars of position within participatory institutions, achieving disproportionate representation through institutional multiplication, positioning industry-produced data as authoritative through new digital platforms, and configuring water use fees to subsidize rather than constrain irrigation. A massive mobilization in 2017, in which local communities broke into a large-scale farm and destroyed irrigation equipment, followed by thousands protesting decades of regulatory inaction, forced the creation of governance instruments that are now themselves subject to capture. The analysis contributes to debates on water grabbing, digital environmental governance, and the state in political ecology, demonstrating how control over what the state sees shapes whose interests it serves.