Abstract

• Working with the grain can make community management more effective but represents a methodological, empirical, and implementation challenge. • These challenges are centred through a study of community-managed water in rural Ethiopia, Malawi, and Uganda. • Working with the grain re-renders water management as a non-technical process of navigating and negotiating social relations. • There is a need to shift the focus away from development projects to the ongoing work of local governments. • This includes prioritising applied social science education among government staff and flexible working between local departments. Despite cogent critiques and limited successes, community-based management (CBM) remains central to policies for natural resource management and service delivery. Various approaches have been suggested to strengthen CBM by ‘working with the grain’ of existing social arrangements and relationships. For advocates, such approaches ensure that management arrangements are rooted in local realities and are therefore more likely to be effective. Implementing this approach is, however, methodologically, empirically, and operationally challenging. In this paper, we centre these challenges through a study of community-managed water in rural Ethiopia, Malawi, and Uganda. We examine water management arrangements by undertaking an in-depth social survey of 150 communities in the three countries. We also undertake yearlong studies in 12 communities in Malawi and Uganda involving 30 diary keepers. This focus on the local is complemented by country-level political economy analyses and district-level sustainability assessments. Our multi-country extensive-intensive research design uncovers the flesh and bones of CBM, and provides explanations for our findings. In Ethiopia, water management arrangements are more likely to be fleshed out – fully formed committees often working in conjunction with other institutions. In Malawi and Uganda, water management arrangements tend to be skeleton crews of key individuals. The position we adopt is located between advocacy and critique. We recognise the potential of working with the grain. We also recognise the considerable challenges of operationalising this approach without reducing it to another standardised checklist or toolbox. In an attempt to reconcile this tension, we identify practical entry points and sketch out requirements for a more socially informed, reflexive, and effective approach to working with the grain. Whether this can be operationalised within the logics of mainstream development, and whether it can ‘save’ the CBM model, remain open questions.

Highlights

  • Many countries have long pursued the policy of communitybased management (CBM) for natural resources

  • Our findings suggest that CBM in Ethiopia more closely reflects the policy mandate to form a waterpoint committee (WPC)

  • The greater tendency in Ethiopia for communities to form WPCs is coupled with a tendency for WMAs to develop into more elaborate arrangements – e.g. umbrella management organisations - sometimes performing a range of functions unrelated to water

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Summary

Introduction

Many countries have long pursued the policy of communitybased management (CBM) for natural resources. There is a strong policy mandate for committees and user associations to manage communal water supplies This model has not produced the desired results. The rural water supply sector has been concerned with alarmingly high rates of nonfunctional waterpoints, which at any one time stands between 15% and 60% (Banks & Furey, 2016; Foster, Furey, Banks, & Willetts, 2020; Harvey & Reed, 2007; Lockwood & Smits, 2011; RWSN, 2010). We finish with four provocations for taking forward a working with the grain approach

Literature review
Form and formality
From form to function
How to work with the grain
Research design
Investigating water management arrangements
Understanding wider context
The flesh and bones of community management
Authoritarian participation
Leakage and borrowing
Presence and proximity
Patronage and clientelism
Personalisation and co-optation
Working with the grain
Working with complexity
Context and the enabling environment
Local leaders: brokers and bricoleurs
Embeddedness and inequality
Learning by doing
Brokering trust to overcome reactive problem solving
Pragmatism and possibilities
Findings
Conclusion

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