Partnerships, platforms and power - Water Scarcity, Livelihoods and Food Security - page 163

Power

Power and poverty
The original objective of the CPWF was to increase water productivity as a
means of increasing food production and decreasing malnourishment and rural
poverty. The focus was to be “in river basins with low average incomes and
high physical, economic or environmental water scarcity or water stress, with
a specific focus on low-income groups within these areas” (see Chapter 1;
CPWF Consortium, 2002, p. 1). As the Program moved towards an explicit
R4D approach, it maintained a focus on development and rural poverty.
Chapter 1 discussed the concept of poverty in terms of social exclusion and
power: “[M]easures of poverty [range] from head counts of people living on a
certain minimum amount of income to people-centered approaches of how
well people meet their livelihood goals . . . [The CPWF] also included the
concept of social exclusion acknowledging that multiple forms of discrimi-
nation impact severely on the poor and their capacity to influence decisions
that directly affect their lives . . . Human agency is what poor people can do for
themselves, and empowerment is creating conditions that allow them to do
so.” The notion of poverty as a lack of freedom emphasizes the impact of
the institutions (organizations but also norms and frameworks of behavior) on
decision-making as individuals and households pursue their livelihoods
(Kemp-Benedict et al., 2011).
CPWF research in the Basin Focal Projects identified five “aspects of water-
related poverty:

• Scarcity: where people are challenged to meet their livelihood goals as a
result of water scarcity.

• Lack of access: where people [from some ethnic or social groups] lack

equitable access to water.

• Low productivity: where people acquire insufficient benefit from water use.

• Chronic vulnerability: where people are vulnerable to relatively predictable

and repeated water-related hazards such as seasonal floods and droughts, or
endemic disease.

• Acute vulnerability: where people suffer an impaired ability to achieve

livelihood goals as a consequence of large, irregular and episodic water-
related hazards” (Kemp-Benedict et al., 2011).

These aspects of water-related poverty are interconnected among themselves
and with agency 3 and empowerment. Power relationships are fundamental to
access to water and other resources while access itself is one of several
dimensions of water scarcity (see Chapter 2). The productivity of water and
other resources is influenced by access to inputs, credit and product markets but
the poor often have limited access to these markets, goods and services.
Vulnerability to water-related hazards increases risk to the point where the
poor often cannot invest in practices that raise productivity (Scoones, 1996).