Far from basic rules: social dynamics, legal regulations and access to household water in Northern Ghana, 1965–2012

Abstract

Northern Ghana has been a pilot region for implementing drinking water programs. The Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) has acted as a key player in constructing hand pumps and small-town water systems, as well as in designing institutional frameworks for their delivery and management, which have been subsequently up-scaled to national level. Water rights are neither uniform nor immune to institutional drawbacks. The ethnographic study analyzes the history of water supply in a rural settlement from the mid-1960s through to 2012, and outlines the evolution of local law. It shows that water development is a non-progressive, multi-directional and hegemonic process that is driven by institutional bricolage and rule making in external and local political arenas.

Le nord du Ghana a été une région pilote pour la mise en œuvre de programmes d'approvisionnement en eau potable. L'Agence canadienne de développement international (ACDI) a été un acteur clé dans la construction de pompes manuelles et de systèmes d'approvisionnement en eau dans les petites villes, ainsi que dans la conception de cadres institutionnels pour leur mise en œuvre et leur gestion, qui ont ensuite été élargis à l'échelle nationale. Les droits relatifs à l'eau ne sont ni uniformes ni à l'abri des inconvénients institutionnels. L'étude ethnographique analyse l'évolution de l'approvisionnement en eau dans un établissement humain rural entre le milieu des années 1960 et 2012, et décrit dans ses grands traits l'évolution des lois à l'échelle locale. Elle montre que le développement de l'eau est un processus non progressif, multidirectionnel et hégémonique qui est impulsé par le bricolage institutionnel et l'application des règles dans les arènes politiques externes et locales.

Keywords::

• drinking water
• Ghana
• institutional bricolage
• legal anthropology

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank the reviewers and the journal editor for their insightful comments.

Notes

^1. Other CIDA initiatives by that time were the Northern Region Water Sanitation Project (NORWASP, 1999–2009) and the Northern Region Small Towns project (NORST, 2004–2016), focusing on water supply and sanitation.

^2. Ghana Water Sewage Company Assistance Project.

^3. Bohman (2012) shows that similar concerns were pronounced during water projects in colonial Accra, thus the right-based debate around the regulation of access to urban water is not a new one but certainly has an important historical dimension.

^4. This became visible only during the Water, Engineering and Development Centre (WEDC) conference in Accra in 2008, where the author presented her findings and met such activists in the audience.

^5. Water user communities are water user groups with registered membership and formalized leadership (committee). The terms can be specified, e.g., well user group, pump community, reservoir community.

^6. “[…] the Constitutions still recognizes customary practices. The result is that customary water law and rights co-exist with and alongside statutory law as two separate systems and bodies of law. In reality, these two systems do cross each other and interact” (Agyenim and Gupta 2010, 349).

^7. Catholic Organization for Joint Financing of Development Programmes.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Irit Eguavoen

Irit Eguavoen has studied Social Anthropology and African Studies in Berlin and holds a Dr Phil. in Social Anthropology from the University of Cologne. She works as Senior Researcher at the Center for Development Research, University of Bonn for the West African Science Service Center for Climate Change and Adapted Land Use (WASCAL). Her publications use a legal anthropology, environmental history and political ecology perspective and focus on water development in Ethiopia and West Africa, as well as on local perceptions and politics in the context of climate change adaptation.