.... and the Hidden

Jambo, unaendeleaje*?

“Too much attention is paid to finance mechanics, public - private partnerships, and to form user involvement and yet too little to social organisation” - Coles and Wallace, 2005

I’d been looking for a quote like this for a while. It represents too well the potential risk with the bottom up approach, what Franks et al (2004) describe as the “mythologising” of communities, where the intracommunity and intra-household relationships are more or less flattened by the development agencies (big or small). This can lead to power under-representation, if not complete bypassing of more structural inequalities -  like “elite capture” for example, aka the richest / most well placed in the village are better off with the project than the poorest households. Essentially, it’s as if communities are seen as being one uniform group of people. But I wonder, why would they be more likely to be unified any more than Western societies? In rural France, a current dilemma regarding the construction of wind powered structures is dividing communities, between those who must live right underneath, and have the constant noise / visual pollution, and those (usually local state agents also living in the villages) who receive grants to have them implanted on the communal land.  

Hence, the issue with IWRM and any form of what I would call a “bottom upped top down approach” - a new way (and probably unintentional) for Western development practitioners to centralise what looks like a bottom up approach in practice, be it through NGOs or a dominating actor, but adopting a centralised discourse through the implementation of western practices and epistemologies through said project -  is that we are too quick to fall in love with a community based management approach, whereby, based on simplistic assumptions regarding local relations, we invest in small scale projects only to leave a few months later, letting the community manage the project completely - and community management is not always the village majority’s choice. It was shown that a local committee would vote for a water project ownership only because they believed other projects such as schools would also be built in the aftermath.  

A case study in the Ushira Village, in Tanzania, at the foot of Mt Kilimanjaro studied the power dynamics between villagers. Although the project itself was a success in terms of lowering the costs of piped water (both public and private) provision, and Uchira as portrayed as a “better” place to live in (although better seemed to be here at a purely utilitarian basis ), success was presented by the authors as being a double edged sword. Yes, water no longer costed 200 TZS / bucket, and woman saved time collecting water, but it was the management / bureaucratic aspect  of the project which caused issues. 

Participatory development is essentially the idea of having the community participate to defend their interests, relinquish ownership and become independent, empowered actors. However, in this instance, it was more ownership in the interest of certain members rather than overall community. This revealed the politics embedded in decision making at micro-level. Notably - it was shown that only a minority of users chose to join the Ushira water community as members. Communal labour was required, and refusal to co-operate lead to internal pressures. 

Similarly, further research from Grant (2005) indicates that local management can be a driver, if not maintain or further entrenched inequalities. In a case study example studying different community projects in 7 villages in Western rural Kenya, the authors arrived at the conclusion that improved piped water systems may mean longer working hours for men (because this was tied to an increase in dairy production, so the men had to travel more to sell their products). Which further meant that when committee meetings were organised to vote on new or improved water projects, these were refused because of gendered or hierarchical elites who preferred preserving their interests. During their study, the researchers observed different community meetings, like in the case of this baraza : they noted that a man spoke up, saying “When water is available at home, what will the women do? Go and sleep around?” Following this, the baraza voted not to build a piped water system.

In that same example, it was shown women and girls observed a decrease in working hours through gaining time from water collection, giving them more time for education (girls) or gardening (women). 

The authors from the Ushira case study proposed external intervention as a way to resolve the reproduction of inequalities based on power differentiation and wealth. Through this, they suggest facilitating dialogue between different sections of the villages, in order to directly confront the “social prejudice”. Similarly, in terms of gender relations, Cornwall (2009) implied the same - having NGO agents act with small groups of men and women before bringing them to the public space. The key is then to find which organisations are best place to ensure the facilitation process is well done. Again, new issues arise: the time for the locals to participate in such schemes, as well as the delicate case of accepting outside interference. 

And again, this is only taking gender relations into account. In terms of wealth, different issues arise . One of my previous posts mentioned the issue relating to poorer villagers who sometimes only had access to poor services, in contrast to the richer ones with better citizens (Jaglin, 2002). 

Equality of access may hence be disregarded in the face of other priorities, such as the effectiveness and sustainability of a project. It could be through high costs to ensure maintenance security for example, too costly for the poorer households. 

CONTINUED IN NEXT POST

Kwaheri!

*how are you?