Competing for water

Understanding conflict and cooperation in local water governance

Water is vital to local livelihoods and a key prerequisite for development. Thus, part of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) is to halve by 2015 the proportion of people without sustainable access to safe drinking water and improved sanitation. However, the relationship between poverty and water reaches far beyond the lack of access to safe drinking water, particularly in rural areas. If the rural poor are to move out of poverty, secure access to water for productive purposes is crucial. This includes e.g. irrigation and water retention for crop production; watering of animals; ecosystem protection to ensure fish and grazing availability as well as for environmental services (e.g. flood as well as drought control).

Alongside these developments, there is an increasing focus on water as a source of conflict, not least since the publication of UNDP’s Human Development Report 2006 Beyond scarcity: Power, poverty and the global water crisis. This has included growing attention to transboundary water conflicts and collaboration, and more recently also a spreading perception that the number and intensity of local water conflicts are growing (Carius et al., undated; Thomasson, 2005). However, while transboundary water conflicts are quite well documented (Wolf et al., 2003), the perception of growing local conflicts is based mostly on sporadic accounts of local water conflicts rather than on systematic empirical evidence. Even less is known with respect to how the poor, women and otherwise disadvantaged groups fare in such local conflict and cooperation, and, in general, how they are affected by increasing competition for water (United Nations, 2006). The lack of better insight into these issues jeopardizes current initiatives taken in many developing countries to ensure a more efficient and equitable water governance.

It is on this background that DIIS together with its partners in North and South are embarking upon the task of generating a more systematic knowledge base on conflicts and cooperation in local water governance and their consequences for the poor.

The research programme works to provide the following main results:

quantitative inventories and qualitative case studies of the origin, nature, extent and intensity of local water conflicts and cooperation in the five research locations, and of their social, economic and political impacts;
cross-cutting analysis and synthesis of findings from national studies, including typologies of water conflicts and cooperation and contributions to the theoretical understanding of the impact of economic and political inequality on the nature and outcomes of water-related conflict and cooperation;
recommendations for ongoing water policy, legal and administrative reform developed and disseminated to national decision-makers, practitioners, researchers and relevant Danida sector support and Danida support provided through multilateral organizations; and
enhanced capacity and experience in the partner institutions within poverty-oriented analysis of water conflicts and cooperation.

For more information about the programme and its partners, please refer to www.diis.dk/water.

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