The Hydropolitics of the Nile Revisited: Elites, Experts, and Everyday Practices in Egypt and Sudan

Abstract

Almost four billion people are projected to live in river basins experiencing severe water stress in 2050, according to the OECD's most recent environmental outlook (OECD 2012). Iconic rivers as diverse as the Colorado, Murray-Darling, Orange, and Yellow are closed or closing, often failing to meet downstream requirements for ecosystems and livelihoods (Grafton et al. 2013;Molle et al. 2010). These trends have been attributed to a confluence of factors: population growth, resource demands for food and energy security, and climate change. Increasingly, however, water crises have been framed as governance crises (OECD 2011).Unpacking the governance crises surrounding water requires confrontingand embracing-politics (Schlager and Blomquist 2008). The politics of water involve situating water as part of a wider web of relationships between the state and society and between nation-states sharing contested waters. Water has received attention for its role in statebuilding, particularly since Wittfogel's controversial "hydraulic society" thesis (Wittfogel 1957). The hydraulic society thesis holds that the challenges posed by arid and semi-arid water systems require a specialized bureaucracy that can breed totalitarian, or despotic, rule. The thesis has long been discredited for its association with environmental determinism and neglect of contradictory evidence of peasant revolutions and alternative forms of social organization; nevertheless, it remains deeply entrenched, as do the prescriptions for a strong state with centralized control over the resources required to master complex hydrological challenges.