![Sample our Global Development journals, sign in here to start your access, latest two full volumes FREE to you for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5929/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Global-Development.jpg"})
Abstract
The interconnected discourses of ownership, autonomy, and state roles and responsibilities in the water sector are a strategic feature of the mobilization of water committees in Nicaragua. In particular, this paper argues that the effectiveness of these discourses in supporting water committees’ goals of political inclusion and legal recognition owes to how they reflect the day-to-day, historical and contemporary experience of water management at the grassroots, including how this work implicates the state. Ultimately, this case demonstrates how discourses ‘from below’ can have a democratizing effect on water governance by helping to carve out space for marginalized actors’ policy interventions.
Acknowledgements
The author thanks Kent Eaton, Jonathan Fox and Hector Perla for guidance in developing and honing an earlier version of this paper. Thanks are also due to the guest editors for useful comments and suggestions, as well as to two anonymous reviewers. The author also extends considerable gratitude to members of the CAPS networks and non-governmental organizations in Nicaragua who made this research possible.
Notes
1. These estimates are based upon an estimated CAPS membership of five to 10 residents and reflect documented water systems (through part of 2004 only) in the National Information System of Rural Water and Sanitation (SINAS), a database created by the Nicaraguan government and international donors in the mid-1990s.
2. A 1973 USAID grant entitled ‘Rural Community Health Services Grant 542-15-530-110’, which two years later created the Programa Rural de Acción Comunitaria en Salud (Rural Community Health Program), provides evidence of the early state role in fomenting community-based water provision in rural areas (Donahue, Citation1983).
3. Several reports have detailed the legal framework for the water and sanitation sector in Nicaragua (e.g., FANCA, Citation2006; Government of Nicaragua and PAHO, Citation2004; Gómez, Ravnborg, & Rivas, Citation2007; Romano, Citation2012b).
4. Domestic NGOs have also played a crucial facilitative role with regard to CAPS networks. In Matagalpa, these include the Organization for Economic and Social Development in Urban and Rural Areas (ODESAR) and the Association for the Development of Northern Municipalities (ADEMNORTE), although the latter has since dissolved due to insufficient funding.
5. This preliminary finding is based upon field research conducted in June 2014.
6. McKean (Citation2000) defines CPRs ‘as institutional arrangements for the cooperative (shared, joint, collective) use, management, and sometimes ownership of natural resources’ (p. 1).
7. Certainly, the social ‘webs’ that embed community-based resource management are oftentimes characterized by gendered, socio-economic and ethnicity-based inequities that call upon scholars not to romanticize community-based resource management, nor to presume homogeneity along these dimensions in examining ‘communities’ (Boelens, Citation2009; see also Meinzen-Dick & Zwarteveen, Citation1998).
8. This argument parallels Boelens’s (Citation2014) characterization of Andean water users’ ‘metaphysical arguments’ as ‘weapons to counteract hegemonic water policies’ (p. 245).
9. ‘In communities where the service provider [ENACAL] does not have coverage, systems will be administered by the community, specifically the Potable Water Committees, who will guarantee service to the community, all below the supervision and control of ENACAL’ (Article 75).
10. The author favours reference to discourses and discursive framings over ‘frames’ as the CAPS’ language can be seen as constituting discursive representations of their values as well as morally guided work and roles at the community level. ‘Discourse’ better captures the extent to which ideology and language are mutually constitutive, and thus allows ‘do[ing] justice to the ideational complexity of a social movement’ (Oliver & Johnston, Citation2000, p. 38; see also; Munson, Citation1999; Jasper, Citation1999; Westby, Citation2002).
11. CAPS from over 80 municipalities have participated as representatives in the National CAPS Network, which, as of 2014, had garnered the participation of an estimated 1900 CAPS. At the time of research, departmental-level networks were also under discussion in Jinotega, Leon and Nueva Segovia.
12. ‘Here we are the owners.’
13. ‘Tenemos amor [… lo] tenemos como propio de nosotros.’
14. In 2007, President Daniel Ortega decreed the creation of the Consejos del Poder Ciudadano (Citizen Power Councils – CPCs) as decision-making bodies at multiple levels of governance. The CPCs received harsh criticism as an alleged party tool of the National Sandinista Liberation Front (FSLN) and have accompanied a broader narrowing of space for autonomous civil society since Ortega’s election (Anderson & Dodd, Citation2009; Chamorro et al., Citation2009; Prado, Citation2010).
15. ‘Work that corresponds to the state.’
16. As Boelens (Citation2008) has argued, ‘it would be mistaken to suggest that local user organisations try to avoid interaction with the state or development institutions to defend their autonomy […] both the state and the users try to achieve the most favourable ratio of investment versus control for their purposes, where local user groups try to gain more access to state resources and international funding without handing over local normative power’ (p. 62).
17. As of June 2014 there were 1200 registered CAPS nationally (interview with INAA [Instituto Nicaragüense de Acueductos y Alcantarillados, Nicaraguan Institute of Aqueducts and Sewerage], 13 June 2014).