Water, Politics, Conflict in North West Africa

I find the topic of questioning effectiveness of community based water management fascinating due to its relevance to the political and practical debate of who holds responsibility for water management. Pragmatic acceptance of modern government’s incapability of sustainable water management points towards a more bottom-up approach whereby local communities would take control over the resources they utilise ( Carter et al, 1999 ). Within the wider political sphere, narrative placing the dichotomy between people and state into a Manichean framework seems ever-present as worldwide, protests and technological advancements are promoted in response to government inefficiency. Yet literature querying community based water management is inconclusive as to whether community management or community participation are the prerequisites for sustainable water management; the first relinquishes responsibility of the government to oversee management and requires sustained community involvement whic...

In the preceding introductory post I presented the ensuing theme of the link between politics, conflict and water scarcity, yet before discussing the possible correlation and causations among the triad, it is important to first define what we mean by water scarcity. In their discussion of the relevance of Falkenmark’s WSI (Water Stress Index) as an adequate stress measurement, Damkjaer and Taylor ( 2017 ) define water scarcity as “shortage in the availability of renewable freshwater relative to demand.” The WSI is one of the most universally utilised indicators of water stress yet was developed on the model of Israel, a small developing country with a high population density and large agricultural and industrial output - hardly a universally applicable model one could argue. Furthermore, both the WSI and its successor, the MARR, make assumptions that agricultural and industrial uses of water will amount to 20 times that of domestic use, does not take into account temporal variability...

Welcome to my blog! I am a 4th year Bachelor of Arts & Sciences student and have previously focussed my studies on Anthropology, Politics, Computer Science and Arabic. My interest in water and development began when spending a total of 6 months in Morocco during my first 2 years of UCL, where in the first summer I volunteered at an eco-project by the south west coast and then in the second summer interned at a human rights organisation in the Saharan region near the Atlas mountains. Here I experienced first-hand how water scarcity cause unrest in daily life and is thus eternally contributing to the cycle of poverty, violence and lack of resources. Following this, in my third year of university I spent a year in Israel/ Palestine, here I was first introduced to the centrality of water in politics through the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (where Palestinian water resources are controlled by Israeli authorities leading to the heightened economic and political power of Israel yet bre...