Hello and Welcome

Hello and welcome to my blog, Water and Politics. Over the following months I’ll be looking at the political issues surrounding Water and Development in Africa. This will include some past examples (both in Africa and, where relevant, from around the world), current discussions and views for the future. In this introduction I’ll introduce some of the ideas and topics that I will explore in greater detail in later posts, and hopefully uncover new areas for exploration.

When managing a resource as vital as water, there are a multitude of voices to be heard – each with its own insights, experiences and (potential) power. The political stage is where many, if not all, of these voices are heard. Some are put at the top of the pile, others at the bottom, and some voices are completely snuffed out. Politics is where the laws that enable land grabbing are carved out, the developments that dry the land are drawn up – it is the place where I believe you have the greatest opportunity to enact change and manage water effectively and fairly.

From approximately the latter half of the 20^th Century, in the aftermath of the World Wars, moves were made towards greater international cooperation, especially on the economic stage. Organisations including the United Nations, World Bank Group and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) were founded. For the management of water, large-scale, highly visible, structural solutions were proposed and pushed through, with loans provided to many developing countries around the world (e.g. the Inga Dams). These policies have faced considerable criticism, with some arguing this forms part of a neo-colonialism, engineering a laissez-faire world structure that does little to help the world’s poor. Whether these policies were indeed a new system of control, and what lessons we can learn from them in the future of water management, will be covered in the weeks to come.

Big, top-down projects persist, and some indications suggest the mega dams of the past are enjoying a resurgence. However, since the 1990s, there is increasing emphasis on switching to Integrated River Basin Management (IRBM). This approach attempts to tick all of the right boxes: holistic, long-term, sustainable, inclusive, multi-sectoral, iterative etc.

The question remains however, of whether this is a politically viable approach.

• Is it being adopted by political parties?
• Can governments survive elections if their management plans are not as striking as the dams?
• Is there a pragmatic, real-world strategy for implementing and sustaining these plans in Africa?

Agriculture is a major user of water in Africa (and around the world). When commodity prices rose in 2008, there was a rush to buy land (some have labelled this land grabbing) in Africa in the hope of significant returns from future agricultural projects. These investments have brought considerable criticism (Cotula et al., 2011) on companies and governments for uprooting people and offering inadequate compensation. Alongside this, there is a drive for a Green Revolution in Africa (backed by major organisations like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation). All the while, smallholder farmers continue to form a large proportion of the agricultural activity in Africa.

The agricultural situation therefore is highly complicated, with contesting priorities on the local, national, regional and international scales. A “Green Revolution” may only give rise to larger, unsustainable farms (Blaustein, 2008). Smallholder farms, in the medium- to long-term, are not predicted to fair well against this competition (FAO, 2009). Large-scale, irrigated agriculture poses several risks, such as the pollution of groundwater sources (Agrawal et al., 1999). As has been seen in the Indo-Gangetic Basin (MacDonald et al., 2016), water quality, as well as quantity, must be seen as a key consideration. However, if the pressures and promises of “Western”-backed, considerably-sized investments have not been resisted in previous decades, a strategy must be proposed for resisting them now.

As stated in the beginning, this post is just an introduction to some of the considerations that must be made in the management of water in Africa. Alongside these considerations, I’ll try to explore whether the integrated, holistic, sustainable solutions that have been proposed, in all sectors, for so long, appear to have any real chance of continent-wide success. Are our current political, social and economic structures amenable to such solutions, or are they an impossibility on a large scale? Are the approaches of the World Bank, the IMF and others, whilst flawed, far more pragmatic?

Please feel free to comment, correct and challenge my posts!


List of References

Agrawal, G., Lunkad, S. And Malkhed, T. (1999). Diffuse agricultural nitrate pollution of groundwaters in India. Water Science and Technology, 39(3), pp.67-75.

Blaustein, R. (2008). The Green Revolution Arrives in Africa. BioScience, 58(1), p.8.

Cotula, L., Vermeulen, S., Mathieu, P. and Toulmin, C. (2011). Agricultural investment and international land deals: evidence from a multi-country study in Africa. Food Security, 3(S1), pp.99-113.

Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations (2009). ‘The special challenge for sub-Saharan Africa’, High Level Expert Forum - How to Feed the World in 2050 (WWW) Rome: Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations (http://www.fao.org/fileadmin/templates/wsfs/docs/Issues_papers/HLEF2050_Africa.pdf)

MacDonald, A., Bonsor, H., Ahmed, K., Burgess, W., Basharat, M., Calow, R., Dixit, A., Foster, S., Gopal, K., Lapworth, D., Lark, R., Moench, M., Mukherjee, A., Rao, M., Shamsudduha, M., Smith, L., Taylor, R., Tucker, J., van Steenbergen, F. and Yadav, S. (2016). Groundwater quality and depletion in the Indo-Gangetic Basin mapped from in situ observations. Nature Geoscience, 9(10), pp.762-766.