Water, Women, and Local Social Organization in the Western Kenya Highlands

Safe water is widely recognized as both a fundamental human need and a key input into economic activity. Across the developing world, the typical approach to addressing these needs is to segregate supplies of water for domestic use from water for large-scale agricultural production. In that arrangement, the goal of domestic water supply is to provide small amounts of clean safe water for direct consumption, cleaning, bathing and sanitation, while the goal of agricultural water supply is to provide large amounts of lower quality water for irrigated agriculture. A new third use of water is now being given more attention by researchers: small amounts of water employed in selected household enterprises. This third use may be particularly important for women. There is a potential, therefore, that provision of modest amounts of water to smallholder farmers can enhance household economic production, save labor time for women and girls, and improve family health. This paper adds to the emerging literature on the multiple values of improved water supplies -- improved health, time savings, and small-scale production for individual farmers and collectives -- for the case of a rural community in the western highlands of Kenya. With minimum external support, two groups in this community have managed to install and operate systems of spring protection and piped water to their members' homesteads. Members of those households, particularly women, have benefited substantially in terms of time savings, health and small-scale production. The experience of this community also illustrates some of the challenges that must be faced for a community to effectively self-organize the investment and maintenance of a communitybased water scheme. There are challenges of finance, gender relations, and conflict over scarce water supplies, group leadership, enforcement of community bi-laws, and policy. Data from a census of springs in the same area show that successful collective action for water management is unusual, but certainly not unique, in this region of Kenya. Although women emerge as the main beneficiaries of improved water management in the community, their substantial contributions are largely hidden behind social norms regarding gender roles and relations. Research methods need to carefully triangulate information sources in order to clarify the very substantial and active roles performed by women. Kenya's water policy should be modified to better recognize and facilitate small-scale community-based water projects

Water, women, and local social organization in the Western Kenya highlands:

"Safe water is widely recognized as both a fundamental human need and a key input into economic activity. Across the developing world, the typical approach to addressing these needs is to segregate supplies of water for domestic use from water for large-scale agricultural production. In that arrangement, the goal of domestic water supply is to provide small amounts of clean safe water for direct consumption, cleaning, bathing and sanitation, while the goal of agricultural water supply is to provide large amounts of lower quality water for irrigated agriculture. A new third use of water is now being given more attention by researchers: small amounts of water employed in selected household enterprises. This third use may be particularly important for women. There is a potential, therefore, that provision of modest amounts of water to smallholder farmers can enhance household economic production, save labor time for women and girls, and improve family health. This paper adds to the merger literature on the multiple values of improved water supplies – improved health, time savings, and small-scale production for individual farmers and collectives – for the case of a rural community in the western highlands of Kenya. With minimum external support, two groups in this community have managed to install and operate systems of spring protection and piped water to their members' homesteads. Members of those households, particularly women, have benefited substantially in terms of time savings, health and small-scale production. The experience of this community also illustrates some of the challenges that must be faced for a community to effectively self-organize the investment and maintenance of a communitybased water scheme. There are challenges of finance, gender relations, and conflict over scarce water supplies, group leadership, enforcement of community bi-laws, and policy. Data from a census of springs in the same area show that successful collective action for water management is unusual, but certainly not unique, in this region of Kenya. Although women emerge as the main beneficiaries of improved water management in the community, their substantial contributions are largely hidden behind social norms regarding gender roles and relations. Research methods need to carefully triangulate information sources in order to clarify the very substantial and active roles performed by women. Kenya's water policy should be modified to better recognize and facilitate small-scale community-based water projects." Authors' AbstractGender, Water, Collective action, Community organizations, Community-based organizations, Women,

The conditions for functional mechanisms of compensation and reward for environmental services

Mechanisms of compensation and reward for environmental services (CRES) are becoming increasingly contemplated as means for managing human–environment interactions. Most of the functional mechanisms in the tropics have been developed within the last 15 years; many developing countries still have had little experience with functional mechanisms. We consider the conditions that foster the origin and implementation of functional mechanisms. Deductive and inductive approaches are combined. Eight hypotheses are derived from theories of institution and policy change. Five case studies, from Latin America, Africa, and Asia, are then reviewed according to a common framework. The results suggest the following to be important conditions for functional CRES mechanisms: (1) localized scarcity for particular environmental services, (2) influence from international environmental agreements and international organizations, (3) government policies and public attitudes favoring a mixture of regulatory and marketbased instruments, and (4) security of individual and group property rights

The effects of scales, flows and filters on property rights and collective action in watershed management:

Research and policy on property rights, collective action and watershed management requires good understanding of ecological and socio-political processes at different social-spatial scales. On-farm soil erosion is a plot or farm-level problem that can be mitigated through more secure property rights for individual farmers, while the sedimentation of streams and deterioration of water quality are larger-scale problems that may require more effective collective action and / or more secure property rights at the village or catchment scale. Differences in social-political contexts across nations and regions also shape property rights and collective action institutions. For example, circumstances in the Lake Victoria basin in East Africa require particular attention to collective action and property rights problems in specific “hot spot” areas where insecure tenure leads to overuse or under-investment. Circumstances in the uplands of Southeast Asia require analysis of the opportunities for negotiating more secure rights for farmers in exchange for stronger collective action by farmer groups for maintaining essential watershed functions.

Property rights and collective action in watersheds

According to the authors, "watersheds define a terrain united by the flow of water, nutrients, pollutants, and sediment. Watersheds also link foresters, farmers, fishers, and urban dwellers in intricate social relationships. Both factors—the biophysical attributes and the policy and institutional environments—shape peoples' livelihoods and interactions within the watershed." In this brief the authors show that "watersheds have such broad impacts at so many levels, they raise special issues for the management of resources through collective action." They explore the relationships between property rights, collective action, watershed management, and stakehold participation and conclude that empowering local communities to take a leading role in watershed management is essential. from Text.Collective behavior ,Poverty alleviation ,Property rights ,Collective action ,Empowerment ,stakeholders ,

Collective action in space: assessing how collective action varies across an African landscape

This paper develops and applies a new approach for analyzing the spatial aspects of individual adoption of a technology that produces a mixed public-private good. The technology is an animal insecticide treatment called a “pouron” that individual households buy and apply to their animals. Private benefits accrue to households whose animals are treated, while the public benefits accrue to all those who own animals within an area of effective suppression. A model of household demand for pourons is presented. As a private good, household demand for the variable input depends upon output price, input cost, and household characteristics. Input costs for pouron treatments include both the market price of the pourons and the transaction costs that the household must incur to obtain the treatments. Demand also depends upon the way that each household expects its neighbors to respond to one's own behavior. Free-riding is expected in communities with no tradition or formal organization to support collective action. Greater cooperation is expected in communities that have organizations that reward cooperative behavior and punish deviant behavior. Data for estimation of the model were collected for all of the 5,000 households that reside within the study area of 350 square kilometers in southwest Ethiopia. Geographic reference data were collected for every household using portable Geographic Positioning System units. GIS software was used to generate spatial variables. Variables for distance from the household to the nearest treatment center and number of cattle-owning neighbors within a 1-kilometer radius of the household were created. The density of cattle-owning neighbors was used as a measure of the potential benefits from cooperation; this variable was expected to have a positive effect on household pouron demand in communities able to support effective collective action and a negative effect in communities not able to support effective collective action. A set of community binary variables was interacted with the density variable to capture differences between communities. The results confirm the importance of the household-level variables. The results also indicate large differences in ability to cooperate between local administrative units. Everything else equal, the areas least able to cooperate were located farthest from the treatment center, were ethnically heterogenous, and had a different ethnic composition than areas around the treatment centers.

Innovation in natural resource management

International agricultural research is expanding beyond the development of annual crop technologies for individual farms to the development of longer-tern natural resource management techniques for entire landscapes. But technologies of practices with a long lag time between investment and returns are unlikely to be adopted by farmers unless they have secure rights to the underlying resources (property rights). Similarly, technologies that span multiple farms are unlikely to be adopted unless neighbors and groups work together (collective action). But little is know about the way property rights and collective action in developing countries mediate the adoption of technologies by farmers and groups. This statement offers suggestions for promoting sustainable natural resource management.