The economic value of water: The contradictions and consequences of a prominent development model in Namibia

Abstract

Since the 1990s, access to water has profoundly changed in rural Namibia. The institutional transformation was informed by the then dominant discourse in the global policy debate on water, most importantly the idea of community‐based management (CBM). While the supporters of the development regime promised that it would bring sustainability, economic development, and water for all, ethnographic research in pastoral communities reveals that quite the opposite is the case. The aim of this article is to explore why this is so. We use the concept of traveling models as a theoretical guide. We trace the emergence of CBM since the 1970s and reveal how competing meanings became attached to it. Tracing the model's path, we further show how specific aims and strategies became salient when the CBM model was applied in Namibia, most notably by treating water as an economic good. The final implementation of CBM water policies in Namibia reveals contradictions with which the model became infused over the years of its development and application. Our theoretical intervention is to show how, in addition to translations between actors and sites, the growth of the model led to tensions and contradictions in the model itself. A focus on these contradictions helps to explain why pricing water did not become an accelerator of economic development in northwestern Namibia but became instead a field of social conflict.