Participatory Development and Water : The good....

Jambo dear readers, karibu sana :)

This week’s class focused on the new water resource management paradigm, seeking to integrate multi-sectorial actors. 

When faced with the XXth century top-down water (and to a broader extent, development as a whole) management approach, it is true that in the comparison, the “people’s” approach, mixing indigenous knowledge and participatory integration, was bestowed with a much nicer reputation. “Do as you’re told” no longer, but “cooperate and decide”. 

Participatory development comes from the idea that the locals should have a right of word regarding decisions potentially completely modifying their lifestyle.  A solution where development by the people for the people arose, empowering and helping local communities (rural an urban) and promoting social change, driven by the use of their capabilities (Sen, 2008). As defined by the UNMDP (2005), “participation in the provision of improved water supply harks to achieve synergy and cooperation”.

This becomes strikingly relevant when looking at examples like a rural village in Sierra Leone, where studies showed that after having invested time and resources for the improvement of a well structure, only 10% of the villagers actually used it for domestic use, and 74% of the water used for drinking water came from traditional sources (such as swamp pits). Local realities had simply not been taken into account. Farmers were too far away from villages which made the distance and time to get water offset their need to get quality water (research shows time to get water is an important factor, and that hit has been going up over the last few decades - mostly because of queuing times, but the issue remains the same: time is money).

Potentially, as they live in a given environment, it is assumed that “they may know best” regarding how they manage resources. 

The new paradigm which started to emerge during the 90s - Integrated Water Resource Management - was based on the idea of multiplicity and a cross-sectoral approach.  

Amongst other considerations - such as the entire hydrological cycle, the users and stakeholders, the distribution and temporal scales - the principle of subsidiarity is viewed as being one of the guiding principled of IWRM. In other words, decision making at the lowest appropriate level. To avoid situations such as the one I described above, they believe lower level interests need to be carried to higher levels, so as to be integrated nationally and internationally.

According to what Dr. Thompson told us today in class, very few integrated water resources management actually seemed to be fully enacted, and it has been criticised for its “ticking the box” approach. Which is also why I chose to focus on a particular aspect of the whole design. It appears to be inclusive, in that it touches over everything, however, because it encompasses many topics, I believe it is easy to overlook certain the smaller, political aspects in the different branches of the Integration paradigm.

Van der Zaag (2005)  admits himself that it is a “fuzzy” concept, even if a key perspective for the future. However, he furthermore states that this IWRM requires a new form of management (as you may have guessed by now, you avid reader ;) ) seeking to facilitate consensus. In this instance, he draws upon the “African value” - which he portrays as being a way to find the right solution, a win-win between all interested parties, if you may. But to what extent is this even realistically feasible? 

The risk with participatory development is precisely that it just may appear as being romantic, simplistically overlooking the the complexity of ongoing relationships at the heart of the communities. And because participatory development is depicted as being the purest form of voicing local interests,  then the micro-level power relationships may end up being completely overlooked. Which is what I'm going to question in my next post. Stay tuned! 

Kwaheri !