Safeguarding research staff “in the field”: a blind spot in ethics guidelines

Across disciplines there is a large and increasing number of research projects that rely on data collection activities in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). However, these are accompanied by an extensive range of ethical challenges. While the safeguarding of study participants is the primary aim of existing ethics guidelines, this paper argues that this “do no harm” principle should be extended to include research staff. This study is a comprehensive review of more than 80 existing ethics guidelines and protocols that reveals a lack of safeguarding research staff regarding the ethical challenges faced during data collection activities in LMICs. This is particularly the case when it comes to issues such as power imbalances, political risk, staff’s emotional wellbeing or dealing with feelings of guilt. Lead organizations are called upon to develop guiding principles that encompass the safeguarding of research staff, which are then to be adapted and translated into specific protocols and tools by institutions

Engaging with the politics of climate resilience towards clean water and sanitation for all

Climate resilient development has become the new paradigm for sustainable development influencing theory and practice acrossall sectors globally—gaining particular momentum in the water sector, since water security is intimately connected to climatechange. Climate resilience is increasingly recognised as being inherently political, yet efforts often do not sufficiently engage withcontext-specific socio-ecological, cultural and political processes, including structural inequalities underlying historically produced vulnerabilities. Depoliticised approaches have been shown to pose barriers to concerted and meaningful change. In this article,world-leading water specialists from academic and practitioner communities reflect on, and share examples of, the importance ofkeeping people and politics at the centre of work on climate resilient water security. We propose a roadmap to meaningfully engage with the complex politics of climate resilient water security. It is critical to re-politicise climate resilience to enable effortstowards sustainable development goal 6—clean water and sanitation for all

Vector-Agriwater: A pro-urban water allocation to increase agricultural output in semi-arid areas

This thesis is the first empirical study of an emerging concept, vector-agriwater. Vector-agriwater is common pool water resources that are allocated to urban centres, instead of irrigation, in order to increase the overall agricultural output of a system. In semi-arid areas of sub-Saharan Africa, urban centres are connected to a large hinterland of rainfed farming communities and farmers depend on urban services for their agricultural production. Vector-agriwater enables urban services to flourish with a safe, reliable water supply and supports a diverse urban economy, potentially facilitating farmers’ access to services and urban markets. This study reports findings from comparative case study research in Ethiopia. Ethiopia is experiencing rapid urban growth and irrigation expansion resulting in fierce competition for common pool water resources. There is a favourable policy environment for increasing irrigation for food security and poverty alleviation since Ethiopia’s macroeconomic policies are based on agricultural development-led industrialisation. This thesis challenges a dominant focus on irrigation by revealing that, under certain conditions, meeting urban water demands may support small increases in the productivity of rainfed agriculture which can produce more agricultural output overall than if those water resources are allocated to irrigation. It draws on evidence collected during a period of fieldwork from 2014-15 with mixed methods: surveys, focus group discussions and semi-structured interviews. Conceptually, this thesis bridges existing theories of rural development and water resources management to make an original contribution to improve our understanding of the most prudent use of water resources in semi-arid environments for increasing agricultural output. Empirically, it finds that: 1) rainfed farming households are highly underutilising urban services for different reasons, 2) an urban water supply is a limiting factor for the urban economy, 3) urban water supplies play a role in sustaining rural-urban linkages and 4) allocating water resources to urban centres instead of irrigation is politically viable but requires strong, enforceable institutions and integration of water governance actors

Competing Narratives of Water Resources Management in Ethiopia

In Ethiopia, urban water supply and irrigation are competing for water resources. The Millennium Development Goals have spurred large donor investment in water supply resulting in a rapid increase in coverage for health and human development. At the same time, most of Ethiopia’s population is engaged in low-productivity rainfed agriculture and the government has made smallholder irrigation an investment priority for food security and poverty alleviation. In areas where water is physically scarce, there is fierce competition between water supply and irrigation resulting in unsustainable abstraction from common pool water resources. In the Haramaya watershed in Eastern Ethiopia, this has resulted in the severe depletion of Haramaya Lake, once an important water source for urban water supply for the historical town of Harar. Unregulated smallholder irrigation has expanded significantly and has displaced the urban water supply to over 72 km away. Water developments have been influenced by land-use change, international, national and local institutions and biophysical changes in the watershed. This chapter employs the nascent concept of the waterscape in order to explore how competition for water resources plays a role in the mediation of land-use change and vice versa

Code of Conduct for Ethical Fieldwork

The dataset comprises the Code itself and a supplementary toolkit, and was commissioned by the School of Geography and the Environment, University of Oxford, as suggested by the Graduate Collective’s template for change on dismantling systemic racism

Equitable urban water security: beyond connections on premises

Despite worldwide advances in urban water security, equitable access to safely managed drinking water remains a challenge in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). Piped water on premises is widely considered the gold standard for drinking water provision and is expanding rapidly in small and medium urban centres in LMICs. However, intermittency in urban water supply can lead to unreliability and water quality issues, posing a key barrier to equitable water security. Leveraging mixed methods and multiple data sets, this study investigates to what extent urban water security is equitable in a small town in Northern Ethiopia with almost uniform access to piped water services. We have developed a household water security index that considers issues of quality, quantity, and reliability. We demonstrate that there is high spatial variability in water security between households connected to the piped water system. Moreover, reliability of piped water supply did not equate to high water security in every case, as accessibility of appropriate alternative supplies and storage mediated water security. Urban water planning in LMICs must go beyond the physical expansion of household water connections to consider the implications of spatiality, intermittency of supply, and gendered socio-economic vulnerability to deliver equitable urban water security

(Re-)orienting the concept of water risk to better understand inequities in water security

As populations grow and climate patterns change, difficult trade-offs in water security must be made. Re-allocation of water resources and re-distribution of water security outcomes will inevitably raise questions of equity. Equity is a central component of water security but often underemphasised, hence we still lack nuanced insights to how equity is understood and operationalised by water managers and users. The concept of risk is increasingly used in water security policy and practise but has been weakly integrated with equity considerations. We offer a contextual study that explicitly unpacks risk and inequity in water security across multiple scales; we have analysed lived water experiences and their hydrosocial drivers in a major river basin in Ethiopia. This is based on 61 interviews from seven rural kebeles, government organisations at woreda, zonal, regional and federal level and local and international NGOs as well as 17 industrial water user surveys. With our findings, and drawing on existing studies, we offer a theoretical framework for embedding water risk in equitable water security considerations. We find that when water risk is (re-)oriented from a biophysical framing, towards one centred on water-related values, it can be suitably embedded within hydrosocial framings of water security. This approach offers unique insights into how inequities are understood, within uneven power and political dynamics, which is critical for interventions that seek to deliver more equitable water security and meet social development targets

A Water Perspective on Land Competition

This chapter reflects on land competition from a water perspective. Conceptual thoughts are enriched with evidence drawn from case studies as well as other published studies about both land and water. At the same time, it lays down an analytical framework for these case studies. Starting with a discussion of the inherent relationship between land and water, we explore recent disconnects in land and water studies that make it difficult to collate empirical evidence and comprehensive understanding of how competition between water and land are inherently linked. For us the term competition refers to gaining access to or control over—either land or water—and thus simultaneously captures social and material dimensions. To address these linkages, we employ the concept of waterscapes. One way of seeing waterscapes is through the lens of the competition that occurs at specific places, in various positions and on/across various scales, thereby capturing a combined view of land and water. The notion of waterscapes is mainly used by scholars from the fields of political ecology and critical geography thinking to explore how power is wielded, and in determining when and where who or what gets how much water/land. We briefly review the different notions of competition in disconnected literature concerning land and water in order to instil a further analytical dimension: whilst the term “competition” is increasingly used in land change science to refer to the global rush for land, water scholars refer rather to the various means of water governance

Negotiating spaces of marginality and independence: on women entrepreneurs within Ethiopian urbanization and water precarity

In the context of the growth of Ethiopia's market economy the importance of women-owned enterprises is acknowledged, with barriers to economic success outlined in a limited number of studies. However, the daily struggles and embodied experiences of low-skilled women entrepreneurs in informal economies, as well as precarious and unequal intermittent water environments, have been insufficiently understood. We analyse how women strive for and negotiate their independence through spatiality and how services, specifically water, affect their ability to develop their business spaces. The evidence derives from five studies, using mixed methods, conducted in the small town of Wukro, Ethiopia. The methods used were household surveys, a water diary, and interviews with women entrepreneurs - owners of coffee, alcohol, and hair salons businesses. Our study finds that they develop their businesses through the simultaneous presence of various, multilevel spaces of marginality/paradoxical spaces and articulation of independence as control over one's business and body. Unlike the positive term ‘empowerment’, the lens of negotiating ‘independence’ integrates spaces of conflicting subjectivities, where marginality and resistance, suffering and claimed control, interpellation, and re-construction of own identities are simultaneously present. We suggest that water struggles are analysed not only through the evaluation of water shortages and unequal geographical sectorization but also through the perspective of ‘water precarity’ (Sultana, 2020) as in our study it was a water-induced lack of control over businesses and daily lives that caused the most suffering. We highlight that this multidimensional approach is pivotal in supporting women's entrepreneurship and gender equality

Equitable urban water security: beyond household connections

This record includes an extended abstract and MP4 presentation. Presented at the 42nd WEDC International Conference