Wendy Barnaby finds that politics provides solutions to water problems

In times of drought, people living in the Okavango region of Namibia cut down more fruit trees, and harvest more grass and firewood, than sustainability allows.

‘There are no rules if people go to collect the trees, grass and firewood,’ said one villager. ‘There were rules before, but we do not implement them anymore, but our forefathers implemented them and took care of the natural resources.’ (See 1 below). The villagers use what they do partly to meet their immediate needs, but also because of changing attitudes to the authority that used to curb excesses.

Traditional leaders used to make sure that their communities used natural resources sustainably. People either obeyed local rules or, if they broke them, accepted the fines the traditional authority imposed. Now, however, many people refuse to accept the authority of the traditional leaders, and current regional government legitimates harvesting that traditional leaders would want to ban.

The politics of natural resources is hardly recognised in research projects seeking to improve the living standards of people in developing countries. A new review of EU water research concludes that water allocation is an intensely political process, and that researchers must recognise and act on this if their work is to have the desired impact. 

The review is to be presented to the 4th World Water Forum meeting in Mexico in March.

The review
Over the last 10 years, the INternational science and technology COoperation (EU-INCO) programme of the EU has spent well above € 50 million (£34 million) on research into water resources management and water services more generally. 

A panel of 10 scientists has reviewed 60 EU-INCO research projects conducted since 1994 in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, Latin America, the Mediterranean, Russia, Eastern Europe and Central Asia. The period reviewed covered 1994 to 2005, broadly corresponding to Framework Programme (FP) 4 to FP6. The aim of the review was to identify strengths and weaknesses of EU-INCO’s past research and to guide future investment.

A political process
The fact that water allocation is political is obvious, given a moment’s thought. All stakeholders have vested interests in the way water is allocated between different groups. If one group gets more, others will generally have less. Farmers near a river may be ordered to draw less water from it to irrigate their crops, to allow more for the river’s ecosystem. Many will resist the policy, not wanting their immediate income to suffer for the sake of the river’s longer-term health. What actually happens will depend on the political tussle between the competing interests.

The review panel finds that this fact of life is hardly ever recognised in the way research projects are conceived. All EU-INCO projects demand participation by researchers in the EU and in developing countries, over a wide range of disciplines; but in an area traditionally dominated by geography, engineering, hydrology, climatology, soil science and ecology, it is unusual for the scientists to take on board sociological and political factors which may be crucial in determining what – if anything – happens to their results.

Water in context
Some individual research teams have recognised the importance of building politics in from the beginning. One project has converted an abandoned quarry and rubbish dump in a slum area of Havana into an environmental park. Working closely with the population, the researchers ran workshops which brought together local people, local leaders, local government institutions and regional and city planning authorities. During the last couple of years, they have marked out the area of the park, installed a fence, planted 150 seedlings to stabilise the slopes, and built an information centre. The project has not only converted the quarry, but cleaned up a section of the Quibú river and educated the district’s people about their environment.

Given the necessity of taking the political dimension into account, the panel concludes that we can no longer think in terms of a ‘water sector’, for no such unified sector exists.
In its last call for research applications, EU-INCO has demanded that projects become relevant to policy and also address the politics of water management. This, the panel finds, means that the latest projects reflect a deepening understanding of the way politics determines how water is managed. By analysing factors such as the Okavango traditional leaders’ loss of authority, future research may find more enduring answers to water problems in developing countries.

References
1.  Report from the WERRD project: “Water and ecosystem resources in regional development. Balancing societal needs and wants and natural resources systems sustainability in international river basin systems.”

Wendy Barnaby is the Editor of Science & Public Affairs. Her brochure on the review will be released at the 4th World Water Forum in March