Water, politics and development: Introducing Water Alternatives

François Molle, Peter P. Mollinga and Ruth Meinzen-Dick

Water, politics and development: Framing a political sociology of water resources management

Peter P. Mollinga
Department of Political and Cultural Change, ZEF (Center for Development Research), Bonn University, Germany; pmollinga@hotmail.com

EDITORIAL PREAMBLE: The first issue of Water Alternatives presents a set of papers that investigates the inherently political nature of water resources management. A Water, Politics and Development initiative was started at ZEF (Center for Development Research, Bonn, Germany) in 2004/2005 in the context of a national-level discussion on the role of social science in global (environmental) change research. In April 2005 a roundtable workshop with this title was held at ZEF, sponsored by the DFG (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft/German Research Foundation) and supported by the NKGCF (Nationales Komitee für Global Change Forschung/German National Committee on Global Change Research), aiming to design a research programme in the German context. In 2006 it was decided to design a publication project on a broader, European and international basis. The Irrigation and Water Engineering Group at Wageningen University, the Netherlands joined as a co-organiser and co-sponsor. The collection of papers published in this issue of Water Alternatives is one of the products of the publication project. As part of the initiative a session on Water, Politics and Development was organised at the Stockholm World Water Week in August 2007, where most of the papers in this collection were presented and discussed. Through this publication, the Water, Politics and Development initiative links up with other initiatives simultaneously ongoing, for instance the 'Water governance -€“ challenging the consensus' project of the Bradford Centre for International Development at Bradford University, UK. At this point in time, the initiative has formulated its thrust as 'framing a political sociology of water resources management'. This, no doubt, is an ambitious project, methodologically, theoretically as well as practically. Through the compilation of this collection we have started to explore whether and how such an endeavour might make sense. The participants in the initiative think it does, are quite excited about it, and are committed to pursue it further. To succeed the project has to be a collective project, of a much larger community than the present contributors. All readers are invited to comment on sense, purpose and content of this endeavour to profile and strengthen critical and public sociologies of water resources management.

KEYWORDS: Water control, politics, development, political sociology, public sociology, social power, governance

A political economy of water in Southern Africa

Larry A. Swatuk
Programme on Environment and International Development, University of Waterloo, Canada; swatukinthebushes@yahoo.com

ABSTRACT: Southern Africa is a region characterized by extensive socio-economic underdevelopment. Given water'€™s key role in social organization, water allocation, use and management in Southern Africa is embedded in deep historical and structural processes of regional underdevelopment. Gini coefficients of income inequality in several states of the region are the most extreme in the world. Recent data from South Africa shows that Gini coefficients of water inequality vary directly with income inequality. Recent attempts to improve water resources management in the region through IWRM have failed to consider these facts, focusing instead on a mix of institutional, policy and legal reforms. The results of these reforms have been poor. In this essay, I employ a modified version of Allan'€™s (2003) '€˜water paradigms'€™ framework to locate and assess the positions and interests of actors involved in water resources management in Southern Africa. The essay shows that Southern Africa'€™s history of underdevelopment has created a dense web of powerful political, economic and social interests linked by a shared technocentric understanding of and approach to water use: i.e. water for '€˜high modern-style'€™ development, or as labelled by Allen, '€˜the hydraulic mission'.€™ What is less readily acknowledged is the wide-spread societal support for this mission. For this reason, ecocentric approaches to water management most commonly associated with influential international actors such as the IUCN and World Wide Fund for Nature have limited local support and are of minor relevance to Southern African decision-makers. However, actors supportive of an ecocentric perspective demonstrate considerable ability to inhibit water infrastructure development across the region. In the face of abiding poverty and inequality, and vulnerability to water insecurity, widespread societal support for a technocentric approach to resource use offers a pathway toward broad-based social benefits through the capture of the region'€™s water resources. It is up to those with an ecocentric interest to ensure that these activities do not reproduce the environmental errors of the past.

KEYWORDS: Southern Africa; Southern African Development Community (SADC); underdevelopment; Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM); technocentric; ecocentric; hydraulic mission

Water rights arenas in the Andes: Upscaling networks to strengthen local water control

Rutgerd Boelens
Irrigation and Water Engineering Group, Wageningen University, the Netherlands; rutgerd.boelens@wur.nl

ABSTRACT: The threats that Andean water user collectives face are ever-growing in a globalizing society. Water is power and engenders social struggle. In the Andean region, water rights struggles involve not only disputes over the access to water, infrastructure and related resources, but also over the contents of water rules and rights, the recognition of legitimate authority, and the discourses that are mobilized to sustain water governance structures and rights orders. While open and large-scale water battles such as Bolivia'€™s 'Water Wars' or nationwide mobilizations in Ecuador get the most public attention, low-profile and more localized water rights encounters, ingrained in local territories, are far more widespread and have an enormous impact on the Andean waterscapes. This paper highlights both water arenas and the ways they operate between the legal and the extralegal. It shows how local collectives build on their own water rights foundations to manage internal water affairs but which simultaneously offer an important home-base for strategizing wider water defence manoeuvres. Hand-in-hand with inwardly reinforcing their rights bases, water user groups aim for horizontal and vertical linkages thereby creating strategic alliances. Sheltering an internal school for rights and identity development, reflection and organisation, these local community foundations, through open and subsurface linkages and fluxes, provide the groundwork for upscaling their water rights defence networks to national and transnational arenas.

KEYWORDS: Water rights, legal pluralism, cultural politics, social mobilization, peasant and indigenous communities, translocal network alliances, Andean countries

River-basin politics and the rise of ecological and transnational democracy in Southeast Asia and Southern Africa

Chris Sneddon
Department of Geography and Environmental Studies Program, Dartmouth College, USA; christopher.s.sneddon@dartmouth.edu
Coleen Fox
Department of Geography, Dartmouth College, USA; coleen.a.fox@dartmouth.edu

ABSTRACT: In recent years, debates over 'deliberative', 'transnational' and 'ecological' democracy have proliferated, largely among scholars engaged in discussions of modernization, globalization and political identity. Within this broad context, scholars and practitioners of environmental governance have advanced the argument that a democratic society will produce a more environmentally conscious society. We want to make a volte-face of this argument and ask: to what extent does engagement with environmental politics and, specifically, water politics, contribute to processes of democratization? After reviewing some of the contributions to debates over 'ecological' and 'transnational' democracy, we explore this question within the context of conflicts over river-basin development in Southeast Asia and southern Africa. We argue that there are multiple pathways to democratization and that, in some cases, the environment as a political issue does constitute a significant element of democratization. But notions of 'ecological' and 'transnational' democracy must embody how both 'environment' and 'the transnational', as mobilized by specific social movements in specific historical and geographical circumstances, are politically constructed.

KEYWORDS: Ecological democracy, transnational democracy, Mekong river basin, Zambezi river basin, environmental politics

Lost in translation: The participatory imperative and local water governance in North Thailand and Southwest Germany

Andreas Neef
University of Hohenheim, Stuttgart, Germany; neef@uni-hohenheim.de

ABSTRACT: Water management in Thailand and Germany has been marked by a command-and-control policy-style for decades, but has recently begun to move slowly towards more inclusive and participatory approaches. In Germany, the push for public participation stems from the recently promulgated European Union Water Framework Directive (EU WFD), while participatory and integrated river basin management in Thailand has been strongly promoted by major international donors. Drawing on case studies from two watersheds in North Thailand and Southwest Germany, this paper analyzes how the participatory imperative in water governance is translated at the local level. Evidence suggests that in both countries public participation in water management is still in its infancy, with legislative and executive responsibilities being divided between a variety of state agencies and local authorities. Bureaucratic restructuring and technocratic attitudes, passive resistance on the part of administrative staff towards inclusive processes, and a trend towards the (re)centralization of responsibilities for water governance in both study regions undermines community-based and stakeholder-driven water governance institutions, thus calling into question the subsidiarity principle. State-driven participatory processes tend to remain episodic and ceremonial and have not (yet) gone beyond the informative and consultative stage. Meaningful public participation, promised on paper and in speeches, too often gets lost in translation.

KEYWORDS: Water governance, command-and-control, public participation, North Thailand, Southwest Germany

François Molle
Institut de Recherche pour le Développement (IRD), UR199, Montpellier, France; molle@mpl.ird.fr

ABSTRACT: Analysis of water policy shows the importance of cognitive and ideological dimensions in the formulation of policy discourses. Ideas are never neutral and reflect the particular societal settings in which they emerge, the worldviews and interests of those who have the power to set the terms of the debate, to legitimate particular options and discard others, and to include or exclude particular social groups. This article focuses on three types of conceptual objects which permeates policy debates: nirvana concepts, which underpin overarching frameworks of analysis, narratives -€“ i.e., causal and explanatory beliefs -€“ and models of policies or development interventions. It successively reviews how these three types of concepts populate the water sector, investigates how they spread, and then examines the implications of this analysis for applied research on policy making and practice.

KEYWORDS: Water management; water policy; policy making; IWRM; narratives

Distilling or diluting? Negotiating the water research-policy interface

Frances Cleaver
Bradford Centre for International Development, University of Bradford, UK; f.d.cleaver@bradford.ac.uk
Tom Franks
Bradford Centre for International Development, University of Bradford, UK; t.r.franks@bradford.ac.uk

ABSTRACT: This article examines some of the tensions in the generation of knowledge about water governance and poverty, and the translation of this knowledge into policy and practice. It draws on the experience of the authors in developing a framework for understanding water governance and poverty, their work on a project in Tanzania and their attempts to engage with policy makers. The authors propose that the negotiation of knowledge is a political process shaped both by power relationships and (often implicit) normative values. Such negotiation may be impeded by the contrasting positions of academics as uncertainty creators and policy makers seeking unertainty reduction. The authors critique instrumental approaches to the generation of knowledge and policy based on the amalgamation of perceived success stories' and 'good practice'. They favour instead approaches that attempt to understand water governance arrangements and outcomes for the poor within widerframeworks of negotiations over the allocation of societal resources. This implies the need to rethink the research-policy relationship and to build reflexive knowledge generation into the research‐policy interface.

KEYWORDS: water governance, success stories, research-policy interface.

Modern myths of the Mekong: A critical review of water and development concepts, principles and policies. (Kummu, M.; Keskinen, M. and Varis, O. (Eds). 2008).
Rajesh Daniel

A South African perspective on a possible benefit-sharing approach for transboundary waters in the SADC region

Anthony Turton
Council for Scientific and Industrial Research, Pretoria, South Africa; aturton@csir.co.za

ABSTRACT: The concept of benefit-sharing is emerging in the international discourse on transboundary water resource management with greater intensity than a decade ago. While it sounds simple, the concept is complex and benefits are difficult to quantify and thus the concept remains unconvincing to potentially sceptical negotiating partners. Any discourse on water resource management is based on a core logic. This paper tries to distil some elements of a proposed benefit-sharing approach, presenting an alternative core logic, showing how these differ from what can be thought of as the traditional paradigm. This work is linked to ongoing research at the South African Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), into benefit-sharing and processes of policy harmonization, within the context of developing countries.

KEYWORDS: benefit-sharing approach, hydro-political complex, inter-basin transfer (IBT), Integrated Water Resource Management (IWRM), Parallel National Action (PNA), River Basin Commission (RBC), sovereignty

The politics of model maintenance: The Murray Darling and Brantas river basins compared

Anjali Bhat
Center for Development Research (ZEF), Bonn, Germany; anjalipbhat@gmail.com

ABSTRACT: This paper explores river basin management in two highly developed basins whose basin governance arrangements are currently undergoing transition: The Murray-Darling basin of Australia and the Brantas basin of Indonesia. Though basin-scale management has been longstanding in both of these cases and the respective models for carrying out integrated river basin management have been considered noteworthy for other countries looking to develop basin institutions, these basin-level arrangements are under flux. This paper indicates some of the difficulties that exist for even widely favoured 'textbook' cases to maintain institutional efficacy within their given shifting contexts. This paper explores drivers behind policy reform and change in scale at which authority is held, concluding with a discussion of the nature of institutional transition given political realities in these basins.

KEYWORDS: River basin management, governance transition, Brantas, Murray-Darling, Indonesia, Australia

Liberalization reform, 'neo-centralism' and black market: The political diseconomy of Lake Nasser fishery development

Christophe Béné
WorldFish Center Regional Offices for Africa and West Asia, Cairo; c.bene@cgiar.org

Bastien Bandi
WorldFish Center Regional Offices for Africa and West Asia, Cairo; bbandi@worldfish-eg.org

Fanny Durville
Euro-Mediterranean Foundation, Alexandria Egypt; fanny_durville@yahoo.fr

ABSTRACT: Despite its relatively modest importance, and the current difficulties faced by the government in implementing liberalization in the rest of the country, the Egyptian authority decided to embark on a reform of the Lake Nasser fishery in the early 2000s. The objective of this article is to analyse the evolution of this reform from a political economy perspective. The paper looks retrospectively at the general context of the reform, describes the different institutional and economic changes that have resulted from its realization, identifies how the distribution of power between the different actors has altered the course of its implementation, and finally assesses the outcomes of the reform. The analysis shows that, while some major institutional changes have taken place, those changes have had little to do with a 'liberalization' as conventionally understood in neo-classical literature. Instead, the new status quo turns out to be one where the central government and its different parastatal agencies have managed to maintain their existing advantages. The failure to reform more thoroughly the system also led fishers and fish traders to engage in a large-scale black market activity in which a substantial amount of fish is smuggled through unofficial trade channels.

KEYWORDS: Small-scale fisheries, governance, political economy, reform, Africa, Egypt

Karen Bakker
Institute for Resources, Environment and Sustainability, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada; bakker@geog.ubc.ca

ABSTRACT: The concept of community has become increasingly important in debates over alternatives to privatization, and is invoked by both proponents and opponents of private sector provision of water supply. This paper presents a critique of the concept of community water supply when it is invoked as an alternative to privatization. The analysis presents a typology of proposals for community ownership and governance of water supply, and proceeds to critique some of the flawed assumptions in the concepts of community deployed in these proposals, together with references to more general debates about the viability of the 'commons' as enacted through community-controlled water supply systems. The paper closes with a brief discussion of the future evolution of the debate over 'community' alternatives to privatization, focusing on water supply.

Antonio A.R. Ioris
School of Geosciences and Aberdeen Centre for Environmental Sustainability, University of Aberdeen, UK; a.ioris@abdn.ac.uk

ABSTRACT: One fundamental limitation of the contemporary debate over water institutional reforms has been the excessive concentration on scientific assessments and management techniques, with insufficient consideration of the underlying politics of decision-making and socio-economic asymmetries. This article examines the 'sociology of water regulation' to demonstrate how the implementation of the European Water Framework Directive (WFD) in Scotland is profoundly influenced by broader political and economic circumstances. The ongoing reforms of regulatory institutions became entangled in the reorganisation of a devolved Scottish Administration in the late 1990s, which has directly influenced the channels of representation and the overall decision-making processes. It is claimed here that, despite a discursive construction around sustainability and public participation, the new institutional landscape has so far failed to improve long-term patterns of water use and conservation. The article also analyzes how the exacerbation of the economic dimension of water management has permeated the entire experience, serving as a political filter for the assessment of impacts and formulation of solutions. The ultimate conclusion is that formal changes in the legislation created a positive space for institutional reforms, but the effective improvement of water policy and catchment management has been curtailed by political inertia and the hidden balance of power.

KEYWORDS: Water institutions, water institutional reforms, Water Framework Directive, devolution, Scotland

Contested hydrohegemony: Hydraulic control and security in Turkey

Jeroen Warner
Disaster Studies, Wageningen University and Centre for Sustainable Management of Resources, Radboud University Nijmegen, the Netherlands; jeroenwarner@gmail.com

ABSTRACT: The article seeks to expand the understanding of the emerging concept of hydrohegemony (Zeitoun and Warner, 2006). Illustrated by Turkey'€™s strategy with respect to the Euphrates-Tigris it looks at the layered nature of water-related political strategies at different levels. The article therefore introduces hegemony as a layered phenomenon whose multi-level interactions impinge on each other. It zooms in on Turkish hegemony in its hydraulic control and security strategies, and the international repercussions of that strategy. The present analysis suggests that Turkey'€™s basin and regional hegemony is contested and constrained from different sides, not least at home. Its water projects are a flashpoint of domestic, basin as well as global politics. It argues that the need to access capital in the international market to realise these ambitions necessitated a 'passive revolution' in Turkey which opened a window of opportunity utilized by the internationalised counter-hegemonic moves against Turkey'€™s dam projects in Southeast Anatolia, notably the ongoing Ilisu dam on the Tigris.

The science-policy interface: perceptions and strategies of the Iberian 'new water culture' expert community

Jeanie J. Bukowski
Institute of International Studies, Bradley University, IL, USA; jbukow@bradley.edu

ABSTRACT: There is a normative consensus that science should contribute to decision-making in environmental policy, given that science provides a means of understanding natural systems, human impacts upon them, and the consequences of those impacts for human systems. Despite this general agreement, however, the means through which science is transmitted into policy is contested. This paper envisions several of the competing characterisations of the science-policy interface as a continuum with the endpoints of 'fortress science' and 'co-production', and applies this continuum in an empirical analysis of the transboundary expert community promoting a 'new water culture' on the Iberian Peninsula. In engaging directly with members of this community, the paper finds that these characterisations are better seen as strategies among which scientists and their communities may choose and over which they may disagree. These trade-offs and disagreements in turn have implications for policy impact.

KEYWORDS: Water resources management, science-policy interface, New Water Culture, Spain, Portugal

A paradigm confronting reality: The river basin approach and local water management spaces in the Pucara Basin, Bolivia

Vladimir Cossío
Centro AGUA, Universidad Mayor de San Simon (UMSS), Cochabamba, Bolivia; CSPR and Environmental Change Division, Department of Thematic Studies, Linköping University; vladimir.cossio@liu.se

Julie Wilk
Linköping University, Department of Thematic Studies, Environmental Change Division, Linköping, Sweden; julie.wilk@liu.se

ABSTRACT: The current Bolivian water policy incorporates the IWRM paradigm adopting the river basin as the space for water management in the country. The linkage of water management with communal territories in the Andes challenges the application of the river basin approach, bringing water spaces into the discussion. Considering the example of the Pucara River Basin, the article uses space theory to identify characteristics of local spaces for water management and to contrast them with the river basin concept. The river basin concept is applied by water professionals, mostly taking the perceived dimension of this space into consideration and sometimes in abstract terms. In contrast, the lived dimension of space is more important in local water management spaces and it is not represented in abstract terms. Local water spaces are flexible and strongly related to local organisations, which allows them to respond appropriately to the needs and demands of peasant society in the area, characteristics that cannot be found in the river basin space.

KEYWORDS: Space, water management, river basin, IWRM, Cochabamba, Bolivia

Viewpoint – Another well-intentioned bad investment in irrigation: The Millennium Challenge Corporation’s 'compact' with the Republic of Niger

Douglas J. Merrey
Independent Consultant, Gainesville, Florida, USA; dougmerrey@gmail.com

Hilmy Sally
Independent Consultant, Colombo, Sri Lanka; hilmy.sally@gmail.com

ABSTRACT: This commentary argues that the recently approved contract under which the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) is investing US$437 million dollars in Niger over the next five years, most of it on large-scale irrigation, is not a good investment. The paper explains why the programme is not likely to achieve the benefits anticipated. MCC had commissioned a detailed feasibility study, carried out by the authors of this paper, which strongly argued against investing in large-scale irrigation, in part because there is a poor track record for these investments in Niger, and in part because MCC has no comparative advantage in such investments. Instead, the feasibility study presented a strong case for investing in small-scale rainwater harvesting for agriculture and livestock at farm and watershed levels; and individualised small-scale irrigation for high-value nutritious crops and other water uses. The commentary concludes with suggestions on how the funds allocated for large-scale irrigation infrastructure (about US$250 million) could be reallocated to benefit a far larger number of people; and a recommendation that investors in African agricultural water management projects carry out an assessment of the performance and impacts of investment experiences over the past decade to identify lessons that could inform the next decade of investments in agricultural water management.

KEYWORDS: Irrigation investment, large-scale irrigation, Millennium Challenge Corporation, agricultural water management, Niger

Sociospatial understanding of water politics: tracing the multidimensionality of water reuse

Ross Beveridge
Urban Studies, School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, UK; ross.beveridge@glasgow.ac.uk

Timothy Moss
Integrative Research Institute on Transformations of Human-Environment Systems (IRI THESys), Humboldt University of Berlin, Berlin, Germany; timothy.moss@hu-berlin.de

Matthias Naumann
Institute of Geographical Sciences, Freie Universität Berlin, Germany; matthias.naumann@fu-berlin.de

ABSTRACT: Much social science literature on water reuse focuses on problems of acceptance and economic problems, while the spatial and political dimensions remain under-researched. This paper addresses this deficit by reformulating the issue in terms of sociospatial politics of water reuse. It does this by drawing on the work of Mollinga (2008) and the Territory Place Scale Network (TPSN) framework (Jessop et al., 2008) to develop an analytical approach to the sociospatial politics of water in general, and water reuse in particular. The paper argues that Mollinga’s understanding of water politics as contested technical/physical, organisational/ managerial and regulatory/socioeconomic planes of human interventions can be deepened through further reflection on their implications for the four sociospatial dimensions of the TPSN framework. Such a comprehensive, multidimensional approach re-imagines the politics of water reuse, providing researchers with a heuristic device to trace the interventions through which water reuse plans disrupt existing arrangements, and avoid a concern for individual preferences and simplified notions of barriers and enablers. The potential of the analytical framework is explored using an empirical illustration of water reuse politics in the Berlin-Brandenburg region in Germany.

KEYWORDS: Water reuse, TPSN, governance, sociospatial politics of water, Germany