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