Lyla Mehta

The Manufacture of Popular Perceptions of Scarcity: Dams and Water-Related Narratives in Gujarat, India

Abstract This paper critically examines some narratives of water scarcity in Kutch, western India. It argues that images of dwindling rainfall and increasing drought largely serve to legitimize the controversial Sardar Sarovar dam and manufacture dominant perceptions concerning scarcity. This manufacture has naturalized scarcity in the region and largely benefits powerful actors such as politicians, industrialists and large farmers. But the needs of the poor in water-limited areas are neglected. By exploring the various connotations of scarcity, the paper argues that scarcity is both a biophysical phenomenon as well as a powerful discursive construct. By distinguishing between the “real” and “manufactured” aspects of water scarcity, the paper attempts to enhance understandings of environmental change at the local level.

The Global Politics of Water Grabbing

Abstract The contestation and appropriation of water is not new, but it has been highlighted by recent global debates on land grabbing. Water grabbing takes place in a field that is locally and globally plural-legal. Formal law has been fostering both land and water grabs but formal water and land management have been separated from each other—an institutional void that makes encroachment even easier. Ambiguous processes of global water and land governance have increased local-level uncertainties and complexities that powerful players can navigate, making them into mechanisms of exclusion of poor and marginalised people. As in formal land management corporate influence has grown. For less powerful players resolving ambiguities in conflicting regulatory frameworks may require tipping the balance towards the most congenial. Yet, compared with land governance, global water governance is less contested from an equity and water justice perspective, even though land is fixed, while water is fluid and part of the hydrological cycle; therefore water grabbing potentially affects greater numbers of diverse water users. Water grabbing can be a powerful entry point for the contestation needed to build counterweights to the neoliberal, corporate business-led convergence in global resource governance discourses and processes. Elaborating a human right to water in response to water grabbing is urgently needed.

The politics of IWRM in Southern Africa

This article offers an approach to the study of the evolution, spread and uptake of integrated water resources management (IWRM). Specifically, it looks at the flow of IWRM as an idea in international and national fora, its translation and adoption into national contexts, and the on-the-ground practices of IWRM. Research carried out in South Africa, Zimbabwe and Mozambique provides empirical insights into the politics of IWRM implementation in southern Africa, the interface between international and national interests in shaping water policies in specific country contexts, and the on-the-ground challenges of addressing equity, redress and the reallocation of water.

Over the rainbow The politics of researching citizenship and marginality

This article deals with different methodological enquiries in researching citizenship and marginality in a developing context. It is based on reflections emerging from a five-year collaborative international research programme that focused on enhancing the efforts of the poor and marginalized groups to define and claim their rights and make citizenship matter. The article deals with the politics and dilemmas inherent in the different methodological stances and positions of action research and other sister approaches towards the question of citizenship. Reflections from the researchers are interspersed with theoretical issues to highlight the messiness of the research process. The article argues for the need to challenge dominant framings in development, to be more modest about and redefine what we mean by policy influence and research impacts, to be more process-oriented and reflexive and to engage more strongly in a pedagogy of the powerful.

The cost of a knowledge silo: a systematic re-review of water, sanitation and hygiene interventions

Divisions between communities, disciplinary and practice, impede understanding of how complex interventions in health and other sectors actually work and slow the development and spread of more effective ones. We test this hypothesis by re-reviewing a Cochrane-standard systematic review (SR) of water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) interventions’ impact on child diarrhoea morbidity: can greater understanding of impacts and how they are achieved be gained when the same papers are reviewed jointly from health and development perspectives? Using realist review methods, researchers examined the 27 papers for evidence of other impact pathways operating than assumed in the papers and SR. Evidence relating to four questions was judged on a scale of likelihood. At the ‘more than possible’ or ‘likely’ level, 22% of interventions were judged to involve substantially more actions than the SR’s label indicated; 37% resulted in substantial additional impacts, beyond reduced diarrhoea morbidity; and unforeseen actions by individuals, households or communities substantially contributed to the impacts in 48% of studies. In 44%, it was judged that these additional impacts and actions would have substantially affected the intervention’s effect on diarrhoea morbidity. The prevalence of these impacts and actions might well be found greater in studies not so narrowly selected. We identify six impact pathways suggested by these studies that were not considered by the SR: these are tentative, given the limitations of the literature we reviewed, but may help stimulate wider review and primary evaluation efforts. This re-review offers a fuller understanding of the impacts of these interventions and how they are produced, pointing to several ways in which investments might enhance health and wellbeing. It suggests that some conclusions of the SR and earlier reviews should be reconsidered. Moreover, it contributes important experience to the continuing debate on appropriate methods to evaluate and synthesize evidence on complex interventions.

Resilience as a policy narrative: potentials and limits in the context of urban planning

The aim of this paper is to analyse the emergence of the concept of ‘urban resilience’ in the literature and to assess its potentials and limitations as an element of policy planning. Using a systematic literature review covering the period 2003–2013 and a combination of techniques derived from narrative analysis, we show that diverse views of what urban resilience means and how it is best used (as a goal or as a conceptual/analytical framework) compete in the literature. Underlying these views are various (and sometimes diverging) interpretations of what the main issues are and what forms of policies or interventions are needed to address these issues. Urban planners need to be better aware of these different interpretations if they want to be in a position to use resilience appropriately and spell out what resilience can bring to their work. The review also highlights that the notion of urban resilience often lacks adequate acknowledgement of the political economy of urbanization and consequently does not challenge the status quo which, some argue, is socially unjust and environmentally unsustainable. As such it runs the risk to be seen as simply making marginalized urban communities more resilient to the shocks and inequity created by the current dominant paradigm.

REINVETING DEVELOPMENT RESEARCH

Abstract Development research, despite or due to its emergence out of the colonial and postcolonial era, seeks to make a difference by focusing on issues of power and marginality. This makes it even more loaded and contested than other kinds of research, along with the responsibility to have policy influence. Despite tremendous achievements in development indicators, which researchers must subject to critical scrutiny, several challenges remain. These include an outmoded concept of ‘development’, the lack of attention to issues concerning culture and identity, uneasy relationships with policymakers, the lack of genuine interdisciplinarity and macro/micro divides. To survive over the coming decades, development research needs to focus more squarely on the ‘pedagogy Lawrence Haddad of the powerful’, address the increasing interconnectedness between North and South, local-global linkages, social change in the north and more genuine interdisciplinarity.

Roads for water: the unused potential

Roads are generally perceived as infrastructure to deliver transport services, but they are more than that. They are major interventions in the hydrology of areas where they are constructed – concentrating runoff and altering subsurface flows. At present, water-related damage constitutes a major cost factor in road maintenance. Using ongoing research from Ethiopia, this article argues to reverse this and turn water from a foe into a friend and integrate water harvesting with road development. Optimized road designs are required – better planning of alignments, making use of road drainage, road surfaces, and river crossings, but also capturing freshly opened springs and systematically including developing storage and enhanced recharge facilities in road-building programmes. Equally important are inclusive planning processes that are sensitive to the multi-functionality of roads but also to the potentially uneven distribution of benefits and the diverse livelihood impacts. There is a need for closer integration of watershed and road-building programmes. With 5.5 million kilometres of roads in sub-Saharan Africa alone, and road building continuing to be one of the largest public investments, the potential of roads for water harvesting is great.

Rights-Based Freshwater Governance for the Twenty-First Century: Beyond an Exclusionary Focus on Domestic Water Uses

The UN recognition of a human right to water for drinking, personal and other domestic uses and sanitation in 2010 was a political breakthrough in states’ commitments to adopt a human rights framework in carrying out part of their mandate. This chapter explores other domains of freshwater governance in which human rights frameworks provide a robust and widely accepted set of normative values to such governance. The basis is General Comment No. 15 of the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights in 2002, which states that water is needed to realise a range of indivisible human rights to non-starvation, food, health, work and an adequate standard of living and also procedural rights to participation and information in water interventions. On that basis, the chapter explores concrete implications of the Comment for states’ broader infrastructure-based water services implied in the recognised need to access to infrastructure, rights to non-discrimination in public service delivery and respect of people’s own prioritisation. This implies a right to water for livelihoods with core minimum service levels for water to homesteads that meet both domestic and small-scale productive uses, so at least 50–100 l per capita per day. Turning to the state’s mandates and authority in allocating water resources, the chapter identifies three forms of unfair treatment of small-scale users in current licence systems. As illustrated by the case of South Africa, the legal tool of “Priority General Authorisations” is proposed. This prioritises water allocation to small-scale water users while targeting and enforcing regulatory licences to the few high-impact users.

Multifunctional Roads The Potential Effects of Combined Roads and Water Harvesting Infrastructure on Livelihoods and Poverty in Ethiopia

Rural roads are built to improve people’s mobility and to enhance access to markets, administrative centres, schools and health posts, and are credited with important socio-economic changes. A less studied aspect is the impact of roads on hydrological resources, as roads interact with existing surface and groundwater flows, redistributing water-related hazards and resources across space with significant consequences on people and their livelihoods. In Ethiopia, the government has embarked on a massive road construction programme over the last decade, mainly to serve the needs of an essentially rural population and agrarian economy. In parallel, the government has also been investing significantly in water harvesting and conservation measures and irrigation to serve the needs of a population whose livelihoods depend heavily on rain-fed agriculture. Based on fieldwork conducted in 2014 in the semi-arid region of Tigray, Ethiopia, this article explores the opportunities and potential for multifunctional infrastructures. We argue that the two distinctive objectives of improving road connectivity and water availability for irrigation are interlinked and can be served by the same infrastructure, which we call multifunctional roads.