| Abstract |
Water governance in rural Namibia has profoundly
changed since the early 1990s. After independence
and in accordance with global environmental policies,
it became a central theme of Namibia’s environmental
legislation to transfer the responsibility for managing
natural resources to local user associations. In this
article, I explore the emergence of new social forms at
the intersection of existing cultural models and new rationalities
for governance. Doing so combines an analysis
of state legislation with the micro-politics of water
governance in 60 pastoral communities. The ethnographic
analysis reveals that different actors, including
state bureaucrats as well as rich and poorer herd
owners, have different understandings of how to share
water. While the poorer often agree with the state policy
that water is an economic good and should be paid for
accordingly, only in about half of the communities do
corresponding institutional regimes emerge. Using critical
institutionalism as a theoretical guide, I offer a contribution
to understanding how more than 20 years after
Rio local institutions of resource governance emerge at
the intersection of different, and often heterogeneous
and intertwined, social fields. |
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