A city in a water crisis: the responses of the people of Gaborone

Worldwide, countries are challenged by the increasing pressure on potable water resources. In Botswana these pressures are particularly severe. Gaborone, the capital city of Botswana, is faced with a water crisis. There are no nearby permanent water sources to supply the city and successive years of drought led to extreme water shortages in Gaborone in 2015. This study investigates how the government has responded to the developing water shortage over the last decades and how the water use and management practices of the people changed in response to this water crisis. Social practice theory is applied as an analytical theoretical framework with a focus on the elements of practices and the norms of consumption (three Cs of cleanliness, comfort and convenience) reveal how and why consumption takes place. It is shown that the co-evolution of water supply infrastructure and customer demand creates imperatives and expectations that water is always available and ready to be used. It is also concluded that practices of water use are shaped around the concepts of cleanliness, comfort and convenience and that when water was very scarce, practices evolved so that acceptable social standards could still be maintained. The study shows that although people’s practices changed, there were limits to their adaptability in the context of the supply and demand paradigm that dominates water infrastructure across the world. This study illustrates that social practice theory’s conventions of comfort, cleanliness and convenience (the 3Cs) needs to be extended to survival to adequately capture how people respond in a resource constrained situation, which is a contribution this thesis makes to the social practice theory literature. While the importance of technical supply solutions to water situations cannot be overlooked, this study shows that addressing water demand and supply cannot be entirely dependent on them. Understanding people’s social practices and the ways in which they adjust to changes in water provision can be valuable to inform policy aimed at building resilience and adaptive strategies to crisis situations such as water paucity

Living in a city without water: A social practice theory analysis of resource disruption in Gaborone, Botswana

Using social practice theory, this study examines what happens to everyday household water-use practices when water in a city stops flowing, as it did in Botswana’s capital city of Gaborone in 2015. Our study investigates changes in the conventions of cleanliness, comfort and convenience and how water-use practices evolved, and spread and how old practices were revived in times of need. Our research illustrates how water supply infrastructure shapes and separates daily water-use practices such as washing, bathing and cooking within the household and locks-in a co-evolution of unsustainable supply and demand. Our analysis brings into view the container technologies that became essential for survival and identifies the possibilities and challenges of containers for reconnecting water and water-use practices within the household. It is concluded that residents of Gaborone were highly adaptable and resourceful in reconfiguring new water-use practices, but would have coped better if water managers had been more supportive of co-provision and provided advice and support for safe household water sourcing and storage. With the limitations of large-scale supply-driven water infrastructure increasingly evident, and resilience often focused simply on household water tanks, this research highlights the potential for (re)designing container technologies within the household to (re)connect water-use practices and hold, slow down, redirect and re-use different types of water, rather than the single-use paradigm of using drinking quality water for every task in a way that allows that high quality water to simply drain away

Flourishing within limits: Does ‘development’ have to mean excessive consumption?

In 2015, Gaborone, the capital city of Botswana, experienced extreme water shortage, with all residential areas of the city having no running water for most hours of the day over a period of more than 3 months. Gaborone has developed and urbanised rapidly since Botswana’s independence in 1996, and part of that development has involved progressive improvements in access to clean drinking water and good sanitation, providing enormous public and environmental benefits. However rather than seeking to address public health needs for clean water and sanitation with a system tailored for a country with limited water, water managers in Botswana opted to roll out conventional indoor plumbing and water-borne sewage systems, assuming this would be the system that their citizens would/should aspire to and which they should deliver. This particular vision of modernity has played out in city after city across the world, and everywhere it has been accompanied by massive increases in water consumption. In a water-stressed country such as Botswana, attempting to satisfy the unending increase in demand these systems stimulate has perhaps inevitably led to episodes of massive disruption. As more and more cities are facing constraints on their water supply, how do we shift from equating ‘development’ and higher standards of living with infrastructure systems that give us an illusion of abundance, and disconnect us from the natural systems that supply us with water, and instead adopt new concepts of development and new approaches to infrastructure that focus on human flourishing within the limits of the planet? This paper explores how householders in Gaborone coped with the water shortage, resurrecting old thrifty practices from their rural background, dropping more wasteful practices and developing new practices, particularly around sourcing and storing water on site, providing insights for the development of more resilient, sustainable systems