The Implementation Gap, Part I

Welcome to this last double-post in Water, Politics and Africa, where I will be reflecting on all I have covered so far and relating this to an issue I have not explicitly covered yet, but which I feel might be the most important problem in African domestic water supply management: the implementation gap.

Introduction

Ownership of domestic water supply in Africa is a strange issue, since it can in many ways be both a massive advantage and a huge burden to the affected party. Thus, any actor involved in controlling water supply has an interest in extracting the largest profit from this control while bearing the smallest cost. Be it government agencies and parties, private corporations, communities and cooperatives, volunteers and NGOs, even academic theorists, all these parties have an interest in influencing how exactly water supply is executed. However, and this has been alluded to in many posts especially regarding the market-government spectrum, a large number of researchers are in agreement that on-the-ground implementation is a problem all these actors are having major trouble resolving. In a 2012 paper by Frederick Golooba-Mutebi, the author includes refreshingly concrete and specific examples of successful and unsuccessful implementation efforts in Rwanda and Uganda, and insists that coordination and enforcement are the key to change, rather than advising, informing and involving (or any other contrasting philosophy). While he realizes the importance of democratization in realistically distributing responsibilities and involvement of affected shareholders, he includes confusion, false assumptions, contradictions, conflicts of interest and lack of incentive as the real problems that should be discussed to achieve solutions.

Ideology versus Implementation

According to Margaret Catley-Carlson(2002), then Chair of the Global Water Partnership, IWRM is a ‘toolbox’ which “does not say this action will achieve this result – and should therefore be implemented widely. What it does say is – here are various things which can be done, and this is where they have worked, and these are some of the things to be aware of in using these tools.” As covered in my last post, IWRM is a concept that focuses on advising, making knowledge available, creating platforms for discussion and ensuring stakeholder involvement. It is described as the modern right way of doing things, replacing out-dated paradigms that were ineffective and discriminating. But to what extent is this true? Here are two citations from previously covered papers:

“Water and sanitation services are subject to rival political projects rooted in different principles and value systems.” – Allen et al., 2016

“We assert that the emergence of each ‘paradigm’ can, in large part, be traced to the difficulties that arise when individuals apply pure, objective, and rational ideas within the uncertain, subjective, and biased contexts of human understanding, social factors, and governance. With each shift, having become frustrated with the inadequacies of a ‘flawed’ concept, debate and development appear to start anew. We suggest that this cycling is a way to avoid the paralysis that accompanies the implementation gap.” – Cook & Spray, 2012 (underline added)

Is it not only IWRM but all of these ideologies that are failing to directly address the implementation gap? Is the more theoretical ‘how to do it’ debate is wrongly overshadowing the ‘what to do, here and now’ debate, even abusing the failure of implementation as a false symptom of the ineffectiveness of the market-, government-, or community-governance? Through observations, conversations, interviews and reviewing of official documents, Golooba-Mutebi describes water provision in the Masaka district in Uganda and Nyamagabe district in Rwanda, both of which involve to some extent government, private and community in water supply provision.

Source

The Implementation Gap in Masake, Uganda and Nyamagabe, Rwanda

The first thing that requires mention is the fact that ‘decentralisation’ has within the last 20 years occurred in both countries, meaning that water supply is no longer managed by one single authority by itself, yet by many levels of authority, reflecting the multi-level structure of government in both countries (Uganda: national à district à county à sub-county à parish à village; Rwanda: national à district à sector à cell à village). This decentralisation is according to the author critical to successful water supply management, yet it does not automatically solve all problems while also creating some new problems by itself. 

...continued in part II....