Panel discussion

The panel discussion under the moderation of Patrick Moriarty of IRC focused on local water governance issues. The different panel members all had to answer questions from the moderator and from the audience.

Moderator: Dr. Patrick Moriarty

Panel members:

• H.E. Dr Kamal Ali. Minister of Irrigation and Water Resources of Sudan and Vice President of the Arab Water Council
• H.E. Dr Munther Haddadin, Former Minister of Water and Irrigation / Jordan
• H.E. Dr. Azmi Shueibi. AMAN: Transparency Palestine.
• Dr Hakan Tropp - Water Governance Facility (SIWI/UNDP)
• Prof. Tony Allan, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London
• Ms Iklas Abu Zuneima. Ruweiha, Community-based organization/Jordan Valley.
• Dr Roger Hearn, CARE International, Director Middle East and Eastern Europe Regional Office.

H.E. Dr Haddadin answered the question whether local participation could contribute to solving water problems.

He made clear that the water sector should not be seen in isolation but that we should look at the linkages with other sectors in particular energy and environment. He proposed to have three slogans to express these linkages. The most appealing slogan he mentioned was: “Water for development and development of water”, meaning that water is needed for development and that development of water is needed for growth.
H.E. Dr. Haddadin also reflected on the participatory planning that EMPOWERS promotes. He said that we should not create parallel activities. We should not look at local participation in separation from the democratic processes in the country. The political processes are very important in water management and should not be ignored.

The former Minister was asked if water engineers would need training to learn how to work with communities. He said: “I learned more on the ground from the farmers than I learned from books. Engineers and communities must both learn to understand each other.”

The moderator of the panel discussion asked the Ms. Ikhlas Abu Zneimeh

from the local community of Rweiha if EMPOWERS had brought changes for her and her community. Ms. Ikhlas replied by saying that EMPOWERS helped them to accept responsibility for solving water problems. EMPOWERS gave them the information about their water rights. They needed that information to understand what their rights are and to cooperate with government officials. She also said that for the government officials things changed as well. In the past, they never came to the villages. With EMPOWERS they started to come to the villages. The community showed them (the director-general and the engineers) their water problems and then they started to understand these problems and started to address them.

The moderator asked the Dr Roger Hearn, CARE International what lessons CARE had learned form EMPOWERS.

He answered by saying that the most important lesson for CARE from EMPOWERS is that not always CARE should go for the quick solutions by building infrastructure, pumps and pipes. CARE must also invest in capacities of people, in improving the cooperation between government and users etc. Donors must be encouraged to invest in these processes. They should not only go for quick solutions.

Dr. Hearn also addressed a question about scaling up EMPOWERS and if there would be a second EMPOWERS phase. He said that we can scale up from the local level learning through this event and some of the national events held in Palestine and Egypt. Take the experiences from the local level and take them to the national level and debate and discuss them with colleagues and in the international arena. At the moment there is no donor interest in a phase two of EMPOWERS. CARE does not have the money. We have to start thinking beyond just working in water and working on governance. Our future work will be in governance and may not even have water in the title.

Dr Hakan Tropp of the Water Governance Facility / SIWI said that in the water sector we still have a lot to learn about how to work with governance. EMPOWERS is a programme that starts to concretize governance in the water sector. That is important because more and more we are defining the water crisis as a governance crisis. One of the key challenges in water governance is how we include powerless groups with low capacity and who are in general quite poor in decision making. How do we disseminate information and knowledge to them? Much more work is needed in this area. In capacity building, water managers tend to be technocrats rather than process managers. This is also important because water governance is a process. Dr. Tropp felt encouraged when he heard the Palestine transparency representative, H.E. Dr. Shueibi, talk about accountability, integrity and corruption. These are the issues in governance we have to deal with, because we can have stakeholder processes but then the interests of the dominant stakeholders tend to prevail. So we need to look at how transparency is applied in practice.

Panel member

Prof. Tony Allen of SOAS elaborated on the political dimension of local water governance. He highlighted that most of the six items that have been put up by EMPOWERS concern politics. Intense political processes must put these six items in place. So EMPOWERS is extremely political.

Prof. Tony Allen also addressed the issue of scaling up the EMPOWERS approach. He said that a good or bad idea takes a long time to get currency. He referred to his own idea of virtual water which took more than 10 years to be adopted in the countries in the region. To accelerate the process one can try and get the media on ones side. One can use the educational processes in society. The institutions in the region looking after water are monolithic. In Egypt there are 100,000 people working in the government irrigation sector. These large types of institutions have mindsets that are not necessarily appropriate. One thus needs new ideas going into institutions of higher education. These new sets of ideas and skills would then go out into the world and start to steer the ship in a different direction, in terms of ideas and policies.

Some questions were asked by the audience about the financial aspects of water management. How do we get water users to pay the proper value of their water?

Ms Ikhlas Abu Zuneimeh said that our communities are very poor. There is extreme poverty and water prices are very high. Water is subsidized by the government, but even when it is subsidized, the cost is still very high. It is poverty that created this problem and that is why people are complaining about the high prices of water. Palestinians are the people who face the most difficult situation, but they are used to paying. Everyone should be billed equal. There should be a tariff system with everyone receiving an equal portion of water and paying an equal amount. There should be a fund where everyone contributes. This fund should help to pay in those areas where people have to pay a relatively high amount. We should not use public funds to subsidise poor people because it will undermine the rights of the citizens because the state would be treated as an underprivileged person.

H.E. Dr Munther Haddadin, Former Minister of Water and Irrigation in Jordan proposed to link the tariff to the GDP. A percentage of 2 – 3 % is fair. Take 2% to 3% of GDP and collect it for water services. Use it to subsidise the poor together with cross subsidies from the more wealthy. This is for water services. For agricultural water the same can be done. It is not fair to delink the water tariff from the GDP of the country, otherwise you will pressurize the poor and it will result in unrest.

A participant commented that some countries can recover all their costs, some countries can cover part of their costs. A distinction needs to be made between water for irrigation and water for domestic use.