Linking Participatory Water Governance to Access to Water

Abstract

Ghana runs the risk of becoming water insecure. As population growth increases, so does water demand, and climate change increases uncertainties in supply. There are furthermore many inequalities at play that significantly affect how Ghanaians access water. It has been established that good water governance can alleviate both water security and water equity issues. However, many solutions of good water governance revolve around centralized governance, while the Ghana government has reformed to a decentralized system in the 1990s. Local government is now responsible for water governance, but local government often lacks the capacity to manage access to water effectively. A good governance approach that could circumvent these issues is participatory governance, an approach that focusses on the inclusion of community members in decision-making processes.

Little research has been performed on the links between participatory governance and access to water. To fill this gap, this thesis has selected two case-studies. As peri-urban areas are often overlooked in research into access to water, two peri-urban areas that have undergone the implementation of a participatory governance approach were selected. The first is the peri-urban town of Dodowa, where a Transition Management approach was implemented focused on transitions in sustainable groundwater management and the inclusion of community members. The second is the peri-urban municipality of Ejisu-Juaben where the Community Ownership and Management approach was implemented.

The objective of this research is thus to uncover how participatory water governance influences access to water in the cases of Dodowa and Ejisu-Juaben, in Ghana. To achieve this, levels of access are measured along five measures: quality, accessibility, availability, affordability, and equity of access. Next to that, governance approaches are analysed and levels of participation of community members are determined. Two communities were selected in each peri-urban area where community representatives were interviewed, and interview surveys were performed with community members. The results from these interviews and surveys were supplemented with literature research.

Most significantly, the results show the complexity of the relation between governance and access to water. Access to water in and of itself is a complicated topic and so is governance. Different complex governance modes, successful and less successful participatory approaches, and complex configurations of access to water came to the forefront. The results furthermore showed that not only governance but also the presence of natural resources can be a determinant for good access to water. Next to that, for these cases intervention of government or non-government agencies played a large role in determining the success of the participatory approaches. One of the underlying reasons for this was the lack of financial resources available to communities and community representatives to provide access to water for their community.

Considering the complexity of the relation between access to water and water governance, this research recommends for future research to include more cases for comparison as the results from cases in this research on their own cannot be extended to other cases. It is also recommended to research specific context factors that may influence the link between governance and access, and to further research why governance approaches fail. Lastly it is recommended to do more extensive research into the development of a ladder of access that takes the use of multiple sources into account.