Author(s):
Patricia A. Benjamin - Worcester State College
Abstract:
Highland “water towers” capture, store, and release freshwater for downstream users. This instrumentalist view of mountain water is common in a policy environment dominated by institutions such as the World Water Forum. World Water Vision espoused neoliberal water policies and addressed the needs of poor people by naming the state as guarantor of their water rights. Africa’s fifth highest mountain, an isolated volcanic cone, provides water for a million people in the semiarid Arusha region of northern Tanzania. Although favorable environments typically render East African highlanders wealthier and more powerful than lowlanders, around Mt. Meru the situation is more complex. Here, lowland users have generally held the preponderance of power, the twentieth century state was rarely a protector of mountain villagers’s water interests, and the single montane forest contributes water to multiple basins. A case study (1994-1995; 2004) of the mountain’s rural southwestern slopes reveals growing irrigation demand and decades-old land and water conflicts in mountain villages, sandwiched between large commercial lowland farms and highland reserves. State interest in regulating upland water user behavior in order to meet growing lowland irrigation, municipal, and hydropower demands leaves mountain villagers – some of whom are not even in the same basin – to devise their own management solutions, including water theft. To be effective, water policy prescriptions must be viewed as legitimate by those who wield the power of altitude. Only policies which address the survival needs of upland villagers can achieve such legitimacy.
