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AEGIS European Conference on African Studies
11 - 14 July 2007
African Studies Centre, Leiden, The Netherlands
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Property and Access to Irrigation Resources in Northern Ghana
| Panel |
32. Water in Africa: policies, politics and practices. National and local appropriation of global management models and paradigms
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| Paper ID | 555 |
| Author(s) |
Gensler, Marlis
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| Paper |
No paper submitted
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| Abstract | In Northern Ghana, many small-scale irrigation systems have recently been constructed or rehabilitated and their management transferred to local Water Users Associations. By conveying the local communities the right to self-govern technology and natural resources, the government agencies seek to promote effective, sustainable and equal resource use.
The paper addresses the following questions: How are new water management institutions adopted at the local level? What are the main mechanisms at work, shaping access to resources? The paper argues that the combined process – the expansion and upgrading of small dams and the management transfer – affects the figuration of property rights to land and water. Analysing the ideologies, laws, institutions and daily interactions, the paper elaborates for the example of local discourses of resource scarcity and social security to show, how gender and group identity function as the main mechanisms of regulation in rural Northern Ghana to access land and water.
Property is widely defined as a bundle of rights, powers and obligations, which refer to rights to use, regulate, control and decide. In Ghana, the sources of claims and rights are not limited to state law. Several legal orders and contradictory rules and principles coexist within one legal system and interact within a social setting or domain (legal pluralism). Such categorical rights have to be concretized as property rights in a social field. The concrete rights to control and use natural resources then have to be regarded as negotiated outcomes. Research on property rights is therefore highly political: it draws attention to the power struggles over rules and meaning, and legitimacy, in which varieties of actors are involved.
The analysis of rules, rights, and resource allocation practices in the context of irrigation management transfer shows that the institutional power of Water Users' Associations is limited. Restricted to their authority to open water valves, organise knowledge transfer from state agencies to village, and to figure as the gateway for future technological upgrading of the system, they do not function as a vehicle to access land. For one, irrigation does not only take place in small irrigation systems (surface water), but also in individually owned gardens (groundwater). Two, water is only partly conceptualised as an open access resource (e.g. rivers), but mainly understood as a riparian right based on land rights, and land rights in West Africa are mainly differentiated in terms of rights of individuals and groups, and gender. In an environment of land degradation, limited sources of income and seasonal migration, the main mechanisms at work to access irrigable land are gender and group identity. Water users equipped with different positional “bundles of powers” (economic and political power and authority) challenge and reconfigure water and land institutions.
Keywords: Irrigation management transfer, property, land, water, gender, identity, Ghana. |
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