Community based water management : an introduction

This week we’ll look at the history of community-based water development schemes.

 

The words, ‘community-based water management’ have warm connotations. Positive images of ‘empowered’ communities come to mind - people taking control of their own needs, triumphing over rapacious transnational corporations looking to commoditise water and maximise profits.

 

This view of service provision in Africa stems from the fact that the development community is ‘still enamoured - at least nominally - with the potential of participatory approaches’ (Cleaver & Toner, 2006: 207). However, community-led water management is often over simplified. Hailed as a ‘panacea’ to Africa water provision (Harvey & Reed, 2006:365), the reality is far more varied, far more human, and far more vulnerable. Widespread admiration for community-based projects often results in an ‘uncritical analysis of this type of development project’ (Page, 2003: 483), misrepresenting how they are deployed and what other types of management techniques they are used to compliment.

  

 

 

 A history

 

The history of community water provision is also innately political, finding its roots in 1940 colonial policies in West Africa. Post-war Britain had little money. Consequently, development officials encouraged ‘the people themselves’ to try and ‘do away with the drudgery’ of poor water provision, as a British Colonial E.R Chadwick officer put it in 1951. This almost neoliberal approach to development was reframed by the development sector in the 1980s, most notably in Robert Chambers’ book ‘putting the last first’.

 

So, the positive reframing of community level management, by and for the people, was initially colonial propaganda that excused European states from providing basic services. This colonial legacy, however, continues to influence our perception of “‘villagers’ who “who don’t understand things” (Escobar, 1995: 49), and who can be palmed off with more basic governance and water technologies as a result.  The cheapest, simplest forms of management today are associated with these ‘villagers’, whereas privatisation is associated with more modern technology, in large cities with higher levels of investment (Page, 2003: 484). I would argue rural areas shouldn’t always receive basic solutions, while cities won’t always benefit from large-scale, complex infrastructure developments. The separation of city and village, as modern and basic, is arguably part of a ‘wider agenda of commodifying water’ (Page, 2003: 496), more influenced by political agendas than empirical evidence.

 

Community- based water management is often presented as the antithesis of privatisation, instead they are instead two sides of the same coin. During the ‘cherry picking of profitable water supplies’ (Page, 2003: 496), responsibility for water management in the most unprofitable areas is shifted to local communities. This relieves private actors from their responsibility to provide water to everyone - not just to the middle classes. Thus, community-based management techniques can be criticised for ‘reproducing existing inequalities of wealth and power’ (Cleaver and Toner, 2006: 88), both on a larger scale, and also within any given community.

 

Next week, we will look at two examples, in Tanzania, to see how this plays out.