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

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...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Society & natural resources 2017-04, Vol.30 (4), p.471-487
Main Author: Romano, Sarah T.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Committees
Common property regimes
community-based water management
Crises
Decentralization
decentralized natural resource management
Democratization
Empowerment
Governance
Grass roots movement
Natural resource management
Natural resources
Nicaragua
Policies
Policy making
Property
Radar
Resource management
Rural areas
Slums
Southern Hemisphere
State policies
Sustainability
Water crises
Water governance
Water management
Water resources management
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Summary: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.
ISSN:0894-1920
1521-0723
DOI:10.1080/08941920.2016.1273413