Dig Your Own Well: A Political Ecology of Rural Institutions in Western Sub-Saharan Africa

Abstract

This article examines the influence of changing demographic and human mobility patterns on present-day local institutions and access to basic services in Mali, West Africa. It offers a new political ecological perspective on how local institutions function in rural West Africa and how the spatial character of these institutions shapes service access. The article brings together evidence from archival sources, census data spanning the twentieth century, field surveys, and cartographic data in a novel geospatial analysis of decentralized governance in the western Malian region of Kayes. The article's principal argument is that historically higher population densities in Kayes's semiarid Sahelian zone compared with its subhumid Sudanian zone resulted in higher numbers of officially recognized villages and smaller administrative territories in the former. As population growth took off in the subhumid zone in recent decades, this important institutional difference—codified by law under a succession of governments—has created stark disparities in access to the most fundamental public service: safe drinking water. This article measures these disparities at several geographic scales and explains their causes, which include the permanent settlement of frontier areas where disease vectors had historically kept populations sparse and mobile. These findings reveal the fundamental yet overlooked spatial form and function of rural institutions that have a critical development mandate in one of the poorest regions in the world.