Water institutions in the Awash basin of Ethiopia: the discrepancies between rhetoric and realities

ABSTRACT

This paper strived to describe the features of water institutions in the Awash basin from a historical perspective based on reviews of water laws, policies, and administrative documents, as well as interviews with water actors using snowball techniques. The result revealed that institutions had rapidly been changing but not coherently built. The most centralized duties and powers of institutions, coupled with financial and technical limitations created difficulty in enforcing the laws. The policy was comprehensive and inculcated the principles of Integrated Water Resource Management. Yet, it did not properly cascade down to the lower level as it was fundamentally top-down. Several stakeholders were not involved in the policy-making process. Water institutions were overwhelmingly more rhetoric than action oriented. Customary water institutions were undermined. Therefore, critical steps need to be taken towards enforcing formal water institution, recognizing the role of customary practices, and involving the key stakeholders, and building the capacity of actors to minimize water insecurity in the basin.

KEYWORDS:

• Awash basin
• administration
• Ethiopia
• institution
• laws
• policy
• water insecurity

Acknowledgements

We extend our warm thanks to all experts and local communities who were willing to give interviews. We would like to acknowledge two anonymous reviewers and editors of this journal. We immensely benefited from their comments on the original manuscript. Finally, the authors wish to thank Mr Teshome Dhaba from Arsi University for his generous support in improving the English of this text.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Reta Hailu http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2915-6407

Notes

1 According to Proclamation No. 534/2007 (FDRE 2007), the basin is defined as a geographical area, described by the watershed limits of water system including surface and underground water flowing into a common terminus and includes main basins and their sub-basin of Ethiopia.

2 The core of the reform was to serve as public trustee. It abolished all existing customary and formal rights to land and water. Ownership of these resources is vested in the state. The state has the power to redefine property rights and access to land (Rahmato 2007).

3 The number outside and inside the bracket represents Article and Sub-article of the particular law, for example, 40(3) here represents Article 40 of Sub-article 3 of the FDRE Constitution.

Additional information

Funding

The authors would like to thank Ethio-American Foundation (EAF) and Addis Ababa University [2014/15] for financial support of part of this research.