Episode 2: Same river, different uses Transcript

Host: Olivia Brown
Guest: Nathalie Richards

Olivia: Hello and welcome to ‘Hearing above the roar’ a three part podcast series unpacking the complexities around the ongoing global boom in megadam construction in East Africa. In this series, we explore what this boom means for people living in its path.

I’m Olivia, and I’m a student at UCL studying Ethnography and Documentary. In today’s episode, I’ll be speaking to Nathalie Richards. 

Nathalie and Olivia chatting: 
NR: This is the first time I’d doing this…
Olivia: This is the first time I’m doing this too. So I just want to say, thank you for coming on, before hand, thank you so much for agreeing to doing this
NR: My pleasure

Nathalie is an International Advisor to the Ministry of Water in Tanzania, based at the GIZ, the German Society for International Cooperation. 

She has many years’ experience as a practitioner and researcher in the fields of water, climate change adaptation, and environmental policy. And she has conducted her PhD research with rural communities in the Great Ruaha River and the Pangani River Basins of Tanzania

In this episode, we’re moving away from the Rufiji River and the Julius Nyerere Hydropower dam to talk more generally about the challenges of developing fair water use policies in the context of Tanzania. 

Whether for electricity, sanitation and drinking water, or commercial irrigation, human demand for water is intense and increasing. And the needs of industry and urban populations are typically prioritised over those of rural populations who also depend on their rivers for farming, fishing, bathing and drinking, and as sites of natural beauty and cultural significance. 

As Nathalie will tell us, she’s interested in how decision-making policies around water use can be fairer, bringing in the voices of other communities as well as those of government, developers, and other stakeholders.

Although the people of Rufiji have not yet been afforded the opportunity to participate in decisions around the construction and future running of the Nyerere megadam, we will hear from Nathalie that tools and processes exist for them to be invited to the table.
In Tanzania, water use is primarily controlled by the state, but groups called  Water User Associations are designed to give the local community a say too.
I began by asking Natalie about these associations. 

Nathalie: So the water user associations are set up by calling a community meeting in the different villages. And then there's an election process of who will be chairman, secretary, accountant, etc., these different roles of these water user associations, and what we see is often that it is sort of people with pre-existing leadership, let's say, people that have some kind of legitimacy or authority about water resources, who come and volunteer. It's a volunteer position, to help the basin waterboard implement water allocation plans, water conservation initiatives. And the final aim is basically to sustainably use the water resource so it is about who's getting it when and how much of it is it to really give.

Olivia: Given that being part of the Water Users Association is a voluntary position, those who take part do so for other potential benefits and opportunities.

Nathalie: It's people that have been quite motivated and have also maybe gained authority thanks to the fact that they've helped people solving their water user conflicts, etc. So they're quite keen in continuing theirengagement, but it's also quite an opportunistic engagement in the sense that they know—and this is the perversity of development aid—is  also that they know that these water user associations are coming from ideas from integrated water resource management, or at least ideas from development partners. So they're coming from the global North, and there's a lot of dependence on development aid from the Global North. So the assumption is, if they're supporting the establishment of water user associations, then there's opportunity there to link up to networks that are financially more sustainable than some other networks that might be within the community, let's say so, there's this idea that let's apply for funds. Let's write proposals to get specific funds to work on climate change adaptation, or water use efficiency, etc. So there's this hope that more opportunities will come out of this volunteering,

And I think a lot of people are aware that that there's trade offs between what they have access to and what can be an access in the long term for economic opportunity. So people understand these, different trends that are happening at the same time and hope that latching on to the train will get them somewhere more prosperous or more opportunities, but also for those that are passionate about water. I mean, that they're also there. So some do it also because of their passion for the topic.

Olivia: But this process of community engagement is not necessarily meeting the needs of local water users. Throughout her research career, Nathalie has taken a critical perspective on institutional processes, including the hyper formalization of water management. Nathalie introduces the idea of “isomorphic mimicry”: when governments or institutions copy policies and operational guidelines but without considering how appropriate they are in this new context. 

Nathalie sees this happening within the hyper-formalised process of setting up Water User Associations in Tanzania.

Nathalie: So one thing that's been quite interesting is simply bringing awareness that the tick boxing exercise has been only a tickboxing exercise in a lot of cases. In setting up these water user associations, for example, there's the idea that the box within which they operate is neat and clean, just like the policy but then it's a messy everyday business of what really happens within that box, within that office. Because of systemic lags of funding and capacity, etc. So it's difficult to actually undertake the tasks that they're given, so for water user associations is really difficult to comply with what's expected of them from the basin authorities and from the communities to which they're also accountable because of their lack of financial capacities, human capacities, and the scale of the tasks that are required of them, which are things such as water conservation initiatives, managing conflicts between different water users, following up on water permitting procedures and payments.
 
To follow policy guidelines and to follow all these operational guidelines about how you should set up an institution and then that includes sort of, let's say, organisational development of the institution having an accountant and a bank account and an accounting system, nd regular meetings and minutes of those meetings, etc. So that's quite a formalised setup. And that process is quite difficult because of things like lack of digitization, for example of these services. People don't have computers to write down these things. And the accountability is also difficult. Now there's a mobile payment systems but until now, it was a bit difficult to transfer the cash. And a lot of Water Users Association leaders would take two day travel trips just to go to the basin office. That's how big the catchment is to go and give the documentation and the fees and then they wouldn't necessarily get paid for the transport and the days they spent doing this. So it's quite difficult to make a system work with no funding, and no follow up.
For the basin office to decide who would be granted a water permit or not, they need to know exactly how much water are you withdrawing which days of the year and to do that you need a measuring device! So it's really difficult to know who's using water atwhat time and the consequence of that is that people who are situated upstream, so at the top of where the river starts, they get to take as much water as they want, and then by the time you end up downstream, there's less and less water left for you. One way of dealing with that issue is to collect a lot of data about what water availability there is at what time of the year and then distribute by the amount of people that need it at the time they need it, but that’s very data heavy.
And the reason why this system is so heavy in these requirements about how to manage water is I think inherited by the colonial system or the global North obsession of data collection, decision-making based on quite specific data etc.

Olivia: It has been important to ensure those who have reduced access to water as a result of outside interventions are fairly compensated. One compensation scheme involved setting up beekeeping projects close the river, as a new form of income for users who had lost their access to the riverbank following an irrigation project being set up. 
However, it’s difficult to know if these types of projects are truly working for the people they are designed to compensate.

Nathalie: So a lot of these initiatives are repeated over and over in different areas of the country, for example, but for the same reason and to address the same issues, but we don't have an honest feedback about whether this is really working out for people that have been displaced, for example, and are they making the same amount of income or not? And what does this look like after five years, after 10 years?
So there's still a lot of open questions about how to manage those trade-offs between what the water resource actually offers which is economic opportunities, because land is an equal economic opportunity, and environmental sustainability andthen this aspect of equity because those who are being kicked out of riverbanks for example, will be kicked out for the benefit of someone downstream who will be able to use the water for irrigation, let's say with a permit. So those are the sorts of trade offs that are important to discuss, but they're not really recognised as trade-offs because Integrated Water Resources Management states that it works towards improving economic efficiency, environmental sustainability, and equity without mentioning that there's a trade-off between these three E's.

Olivia: These trade-offs affect people differently depending on their background, wealth, or whether they live in urban or rural areas. Hydropower projects, for instance, are often more of a benefit for urban populations who can access the electricity generated by the dams, while rural dwellers may remain unconnected to the grid. Gender matters, meaning men and women can also be affected very differently by changes to water availability.

Nathalie: A lot of people that are living maybe in these areas of irrigation, if they're in very rural areas, they won't even have access to electricity, despite the fact that they are told, let's say or they're negotiated to give up a bit of their water for electricity production. So then you have this divide between the different users. So at many levels there are different users and also different prioritizations and that's where the gender issue comes in strongly also. Let's say that women are more caretakers and would be concerned about the health of their children, for example, in terms of nutrition or in terms of health linked to waterborne diseases, for example, and men might be a bit more responsible for bringing in cash, or food. So men might be more concerned about water quantity because they'll be needing to irrigate their crops, whereas women might be concerned about water quality, because they don't want their children to die from waterborne diseases such as diarrhoea. So in that case, it's really important to make sure that all voices—whether it's we're talking about gender, whether we're talking about different water user types—it’s  really important that all views are at least stated, and then negotiated. And that's a concern for for social justice, but in the end, it's also a concern about efficiency. Because if you have conflict or if you have sabotaging then everyone loses..

Olivia: Despite all these complexities, there are some paths forward to start to address them and create a more equitable system, and one that also responds to changing conditions due to climate change.

Nathalie: One thing that's been really good is to bring these experiences from research and from being with WWF, which is a conservation international NGO, for example, and then bringing this to my current job working in bilateral aid, which is government to government aid between Germany and Tanzania, is that these experience have been able to feed the development of ideas of how do we make things work out more sustainably, even within these frameworks that are imperfect.
It's nice to try to develop solutions in cooperation. So not coming in with a solution but co- developing solutions through collective action between the different sectors. So now for example, working a lot about private sector engagement and civil society engagement, even though civil society is not very developed in Tanzania

Olivia: So do you think there's a way that we can both protect conservation and also protect livelihoods at the same time surrounding water management? 

Nathalie: So I don't have a response to that fully because I think no one has but I think one way to go forward from there is to recognise that there are trade-offs but also recognise that those two things go hand in hand. So we can't have livelihoods in 50 years if we've depleted our natural resources. And we can't conserve areas while people are starving next door. So there's a need to find solutions of—and  this I like discussions going on in terms of nature-based solutions—and so moving away from this modernistic aspect, that there is this heavy data collection, let's say for example—this idea that modernity comes with infrastructure, for example, which is a thing called high modernism. If we move away from that idea and are able to come back or to go towards this idea that these issues are integrated and together, we'd also be able to see the benefits of conserving natural resources, while also creating livelihoods that are more sustainable so that these two things can go hand in hand. 

Olivia: For Nathalie, solutions will come, so long as the processes that are designed to address water issues include the voices of everyone at the local level.

Nathalie: Water issues are not just about water issues, they're about who, gets something and who doesn't get something and that's embedded in a wider system. And that wider system is of a country that's in an inferior position in the global market, it is of a position of you know, postcolonial status, it is in a patriarchal society and, and, and in many other things, so if we can't take away the context from the reality and that's what's been also so difficult about research findings is how do you make generalities out of something that was so specific. And that's where I like working with principles, especially from a social environmental justice perspective, it's about well, how can the process be improved?
I think, even if solutions are not developed now, what's important to focus on from my point of view is processes. So if the process is equitable, if the process if the governance of the process is fair, if people have a voice to speak in it, etc., if power imbalances are compensated if we're not looking or prioritising only at economic gain, and if we're looking at long term rather than short term, so if we're really accounting for these things in the process of shaping the future, then I think we can make it right because it will be the decision of people who are concerned with the issue. The debate about conservation is held with international NGOs that are based in the Global North is somewhat messed up. Because, I mean, there are social justice concerns and environmental justice concerns that are represented in these places, but I think the way capitalism works is that it is about financial gain and that success and if we continue with that aim, I think then then we're really losing on on the benefits of improving the process of decision making, towards outcomes that hopefully would be conserving natural resources and improving the lives and well being of people living across different areas.

Olivia: This was an eye-opening conversation with Nathalie. At the heart of this conversation is the important take-away that there is a gap between policy and practice surrounding water management. 
Thanks to community-based research we are able to identify the need to include all stakeholders to allow for the improvement of all livelihoods impacted by water management.
I also really enjoyed learning about how the impacts of water management are gendered, with gendered roles navigating the men and women’s priorities and worries of water management upon their livelihoods.
And lastly, it is important to reflect upon the re-occuring topics of colonialism and modernism.
Once again thank you so much to Dr Nathalie Richards for her insight and time. And thank you so much for listening to this second episode of our series. If you missed the first episode, you can find it on the podcast page, along with transcripts in English and Swahili of each episode. You will find our email address on our website, or tweet us @UCLanthropology.

In our third and final episode Hein Aung will be talking to Eva Maria Anyango Okoth, a lawyer and Senior Programme Officer based with the NGO Natural Justice, about her work defending the environmental and human rights of communities in East Africa in the face of major infrastructure projects.

Thank you for listening, and we’ll see you next time!