The economic value of water: The contradictions and consequences of a prominent development model in Namibia

Abstract

Since the 1990s, access to water has profoundly changed in rural Namibia. The institutional transformation was informed by the then dominant discourse in the global policy debate on water, most importantly the idea of community‐based management (CBM). While the supporters of the development regime promised that it would bring sustainability, economic development, and water for all, ethnographic research in pastoral communities reveals that quite the opposite is the case. The aim of this article is to explore why this is so. We use the concept of traveling models as a theoretical guide. We trace the emergence of CBM since the 1970s and reveal how competing meanings became attached to it. Tracing the model's path, we further show how specific aims and strategies became salient when the CBM model was applied in Namibia, most notably by treating water as an economic good. The final implementation of CBM water policies in Namibia reveals contradictions with which the model became infused over the years of its development and application. Our theoretical intervention is to show how, in addition to translations between actors and sites, the growth of the model led to tensions and contradictions in the model itself. A focus on these contradictions helps to explain why pricing water did not become an accelerator of economic development in northwestern Namibia but became instead a field of social conflict.

A Place at the Well: The Imperative for Farmer Inclusion in Water Conservation Policy Design

“…As part of a wider literature that critiques the grounds that market-based solutions can provide lasting environmental improvements in water infrastructure and conservation, Hoag (2019) critiques how "engineers generate a type of water that is locally emplaced but unfamiliar to local people in Lesotho." These issues of misfit, or mis-design can lead to friction between stakeholders and government (Wells et al 2019), or even policies that contradict themselves in classic gaps between policy and praxis that can become a source of conflict rather than initiating improvements or development (Schnegg and Kiaka 2019) The issue of assumed farmer participation by policy makers at the policy development phase, followed by limited participation or rejection by farmers at the policy implementation phase, has been nearly universal (Hoag et al 2017;Tabaichount et al 2019). Over the last decade, WQT has experienced continued favor and growth among local and regional governance bodies in the United States and Canada (Ribaudo and Savage 2014;Shortle 2017).…”

“…Growing critiques from the literature on financializing water (Bayliss 2014;Wells et al 2019;Wutich and Beresford 2019) have joined wider critiques on ecosystem services and markets to question their validity as drivers of conservation goals (Bekessy et al 2018;Jesse et al 2017;Schr€ oter et al 2014). Despite these known criticisms and our own reservations regarding the long-term viability and ethics of such programs, WQT policies continue to multiply, sometimes in ways that are harmful to rural stakeholders (O'Connell et al 2017;Schnegg and Kiaka 2019). Accordingly, the aim of our research is to understand if this type of policy could be feasible in an East and Middle Tennessee context, and if so, under what parameters.…”

“…Accordingly, in this paper, we aim to address this gap in understandingbetween a more receptive population and policy parameters that are so broad that the individuals they are intended to reach find them unfeasible or undesirable. Although stakeholder consultation is recognized as beneficial to market-based ecosystem services approaches (Cleaver and de Koning 2015;Schnegg and Kiaka 2019), it is often not prioritized (Challies et al 2017;Hauck et al 2013). Stakeholder participation in program design has been scant for the nearly one hundred WQT initiatives underway in North America today.…”

The economic anthropology of water

“…Nonetheless, water has a long history of privatization, commodification, and management via market mechanisms (Babidge and Bolados ; Bakker ; Ballestero ; Derman and Ferguson ; du Bray et al ; O'Connell et al ; Ragusa and Crampton ; Schnegg and Kiaka ; Trawick , ). While many scholars have shown how the process of commodification extracts water from its rich and diverse inalienable meanings (Linton and Budds ; Orlove and Caton ; Strang ), others demonstrate that—even as a commodity—water is central to negotiating social and political relations.…”

“…Analyzing “traveling models of participation,” for example, Schnegg and Linke () show how global calls for women's participation in water management were translated in unintended ways in Namibian pastoral communities by drawing on women's authority as elders in local kinship systems and empowering them as financial managers (not leaders). Schnegg and Kiaka's () contribution, in this issue, examines another dimension of traveling models of water reform—the idea of water as an economic good—and shows how it failed to deliver on promises of economic growth but did produce considerable social‐economic conflict and the ultimate collapse of a community water‐point committee. Schnegg and Kiaka note that the imposition of traveling models creates opportunities for powerful actors to strategically modify water institutions and suggests the need for future work to explore how this can produce contradictory, inconsistent, and harmful new institutions.…”