AEGIS ECAS 2007 - View abstract

Panel	32. Water in Africa: policies, politics and practices. National and local appropriation of global management models and paradigms
Paper ID	111
Author(s)	Cascao, Ana Elisa
Paper	No paper submitted
Abstract	In the African continent there are 60 international river basins. Several countries share their water resources with riparian neighbours. In the last decades, mainstream analysts studying water politics focus on alarmist “water crisis” and foresee “water wars” among countries. This kind of analysis is based on pessimistic views about water management. There is however no single case of inter-state “water wars” in the African continent, although there is strong evidence of water conflicts at the local level. It will be shown that communities develop adaptive strategies to cope with water scarcities, often without the blessing of their own governments. Hegemonic global politics, international economic models, “westernised” initiatives and corrupted governments often play against the immediate water needs of communities. Several non-governmental organisations, environmental activists, academics, and common citizens are working on alternative agendas in terms of water rights and alleviation of impacts from environmental, economic and political disruptive policies. The case study presented here is the Nile Basin. It comprises 10 African countries – Egypt, Sudan, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Kenya, Tanzania, Burundi, Rwanda, Uganda and Congo. The Basin exhibits well the contained-dynamics of hydro-politics of a major river basin and the nature of hydro-hegemonic and counter-hegemonic relations. A new-Gramscian theoretical and methodological analytical framework will be deployed to answer such questions as – What are the specific water problems in the region? What is the role of international actors? How political economies adapt to water problems? Which are the current and potential alternatives to existing regimes at regional, national and local levels? The main goal of this research project is to develop a new theoretical framework in the field of water resources management, adopting neo-Gramscian conceptualisations to the field of hydropolitical relations. The main frameworks of analysis being used in the last decades to study this thematic come from the mainstream schools of International Relations – realist and liberal. My research aims to escape from the conceptualisations deployed by these schools, and introduce a neo-Marxist framework of analysis focused on the study of the political economy of water resources management. The major goal is to develop a non-deterministic and essentially critical analytical and methodological framework. I am currently in the fieldwork stage, and have been recently in Egypt and Ethiopia and moving soon to Sudan. The fieldwork activities consist of interviews with several epistemic groups directly or indirectly related to the management of water resources in these countries; it includes officials, academics, international and regional institutions, NGOs, local groups, media and opposition groups. Moreover the fieldwork includes extensive archive research of newspapers articles from the last three decades, in order to proceed to discourse and content analysis. This article aims to show evidence that hegemony and counter-hegemony concepts are useful – on one hand, to explore how governments and several institutions determine the “water agenda” and are promoting inequitable distribution and allocation of water resources; on the other hand, is useful to appreciate how groups at the local, national and international level are countering official policies and promoting alternative agendas, discourses and actions.

Political economy of water resources management in Africa – the case-study of the Eastern Nile River Basin