Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
5.1 INTRODUCTION
Ethiopia, Yemen and Palestine are two countries and a nascent state that face different
challenges concerning access to groundwater. Common problems range from ground-
water depletion caused by excessive pumping, a lack of information on groundwater
resources, and obstruction of access and the denial of water rights by other parties.
These challenges may appear unrelated at first glance, but they are in fact linked by the
importance of the political arena in removing barriers and furthering development.
The Groundwater in the Political Domain project (GP-Project or GPP) that is
funded by the Netherlands CoCooN programme (see chapter 1, this volume) aims at
learning lessons from the interaction between politics and groundwater governance and
management. The project employs inductive methods of research; letting the specific
field situations in the three countries provide their own context for data gathering
analysis and action based research strategies. It is assumed that the combination of an
inductive, fieldwork-based methodology and a reflective scan of existing theories will
lead to new theoretical insights.
The challenge is to better understand the complexity surrounding groundwater
use and management, and to identify opportunities to intervene in and engage with
the political domain as has successfully been done in the technical, institutional and
socio-economic domains over the last decades (van der Gun 2012; Wijnen et al. 2012;
Smidt and Satijn 2013). Attention for local experience and knowledge has grown
as well, and good governance and institution building have become a main focus of
international policy (United Nations 2012). The political domain, however, remains
largely ignored in contemporary groundwater management. Despite the fact that poli-
tics clearly plays a crucial role, it is still largely a black box. By highlighting the political
domain, we hope to gain an understanding of this last piece of the groundwater puz-
zle. Despite it being a vital part of the context of groundwater management, barriers
exist between the political domain and groundwater management (figure 5.1). The-
oretically one might argue that politics belongs to the institutional domain (defined
as the organizational field). However, for the sake of practical policy development, it
makes more sense to separate the two. This holds true in large part because the polit-
ical domain deals with decision making on policies and budgets of institutions. The
technicalities of groundwater management are considered tools that can be used or not
depending on the interaction between the political, socio-economic and institutional
domains.
Of course, we do not intend to state that politics is everything. As one of the
actors in the Palestinian water sector cautioned: 'Don't forget politics, but put it in the
right perspective'. This chapter is motivated by the quest for these perspectives on the
relation between groundwater management and the political domain.
The framework that is developed and will be discussed in this chapter consists of
general theories of conflict and water management that are flexible enough to allow
for “surprises'' (unforeseen outcomes) and are specific enough to be applicable in the
three quite different cases. This chapter will present our view on the concepts that are
central to the discussions: groundwater as a resource (section 2), the relation between
conflict, cooperation and the political black box (section 3), the field situation in the
three countries (section 4), the role of politics and different type of states (sections 5 and
6), factors of change (section 7) and lessons learned thus far concerning possibilities
for intervention and engagement, and its theoretical framing (section 8).
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