Building Capacities for Sustainable Water Governance at the Grassroots: “Organic Empowerment” and Its Policy Implications in Nicaragua

ABSTRACT

Many of the most acute water crises globally are “everyday” crises experienced in impoverished rural areas and urban slums across the global South. Confronting these crises are thousands of community-based water management regimes—many operating “below the radar” of formal state policies. Arguably, a foremost challenge to constructing sustainable water governance concerns reconciling long-standing—yet politically and legally unrecognized—locally based governance structures with state policies designed and promoted from above. Bridging the scholarships on common property regimes and decentralized natural resource management, this article examines how policymakers and rural water committees confront the challenge of securing water access for domestic use. Specifically, this article documents the development of what is termed an “organic empowerment” of water committees in Nicaragua, arguing that this grassroots form of empowerment has contributed to the democratization of top-down policymaking. Ultimately, it reveals the complex, multiscalar tensions inherent in efforts to create new and recognize preexisting institutions for water governance.

KEYWORDS:

• Common property regimes
• community-based water management
• decentralized natural resource management
• empowerment
• Nicaragua
• water governance

Acknowledgments

Thank you to Kent Eaton and Jonathan Fox for comments on an earlier version of this article that promoted its development. Additional gratitude is owed to the editors of this special issue and three anonymous reviewers for detailed substantive and conceptual feedback that helped to strengthen the article.

Notes

CBWM regimes in the Global South began to flourish in the context of growing international financial support for water system construction starting in in the 1970s (e.g., Fresh Water Action Network Central America [FANCA] 2006; Schouten and Moriarty 2008).

Arguably, even cases of urban “water theft” reflect this kind of self-organization and empowerment for water access (in particular see Meehan 2013, 326).

Although CAPS observed for this study demonstrate the potential for residents to develop competencies for operation and maintenance (O&M), the contribution of Naiga et al. (this issue) highlights, importantly, the persistence of major O&M challenges for rural communities in the Global South.

Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for raising the point that legitimacy vis-à-vis residents can exist “along with disempowerment/exclusion of marginal groups in the community,” something that may help to explain nonattendance and nonparticipation at assemblies.

As of 2010, more than 30 municipal CAPS networks had formed across the country and more than 80 municipalities had sent CAPS members to participate as representatives in the national network. While they constituted a critical mass for the purpose of political and policy interventions, only a fraction of the thousands of active CAPS members participated in national-level collective action.

Another CAPS member gave her interpretation of the negotiations: “I think the bottom line for ENACAL was the budget. They said that if the CAPS took [responsibility for] sanitation, it would take [from them] half of [their] national level budget. They wanted sanitation for themselves, because sanitation brings money, even from the international organizations” (interview, June 4, 2010).

Additional information

Funding

Research for this article was funded by Fulbright, the University of California Pacific Rim Research Program, the UC Santa Cruz Chicano/Latino Research Center, and the UC Santa Cruz Department of Politics.