Random thoughts on power and politics

Jambo!

On Monday (23/10) I attended a seminar for the Water and Development module, which proved to help me out in making sense of my different ideas considering I've been going through a lot of reading a the moment, for the blog and for the lectures. Add to that different perspectives on management and governance for protected areas in another module, and I just need to sit down, synthesise and process everything. Well Monday helped a lot for that.

Firstly, because when I went through qui a bit of articles about IWRM, I reached the conclusion that it was quite problematic in that i was such a broad notion. Not a method, but more like a guide. And I felt very critical towards its authors (my previous post summarises this pretty much - but because I'd never heard of it before starting this blog, I don't want to spend too much space analysing it considering it's not really what I chose to focus on).

Second, because it helped me understand that education is truly the key (I will definitely be touching upon that in my next few blog posts (in relation to power and politics of course). It's something I've been thinking about for a while in relation to conservation, but it's so crucial for decision making. Which is a key component in participatory development.

And finally, we talked about corruption. Corruption in Africa is probably the single most important issue relating to efficiency. It also happens to be very present everywhere. We discussed how easy it was to embezzle large sums of money with big-scale projects, because it "looked nice" for governments to launch centralised projects, whilst pocketing pretty sums with loads of zeros along the way. The thing is, corruption also exists at a very localised level too. Just an example from Robinson (2002) - state run smallholders irrigation schemes are tinted with favouritism and embezzlement : in his case study, 20 000 families from rural villages in Zambia and Zimbabwe found they had a guaranteed access to water, but poorer, peasant families had to figure out a way to get access to water. This complements other reading material from my first week - poorer families usually are worse off with as they have to pay for access to improved structures, which usually results in them digging their own boreholes or finding water from untreated or potentially unsafe surface water, therefore making them more at risk in the face of water borne diseases.

In a sense, this is also why I chose to focus this blog on community management and how NGOs / private actors and donors can potentially generate fairer schemes...but even these somehow, must be treated with caution.

Thanks for reading my quick rant. I guess it acts as a little complement for the posts to follow / my previous one :) This may seem obvious, but I needed it to click.

Kwaheri