Water and dignity? Impacts of Social Change on the Water Situation in Solwezi, Northwestern Zambia. (MA thesis)

Presentation by Julia Hohn, University of Basel

Abstract

Due to the fundamental role water plays for people and the environment, we can try to use it as a lens to understand the complex reciprocity between these two entities. Two political moments have shaped the legal frame of water in the last decades: a post-Cold War moment of widespread neoliberal reforms on the one hand and the rise of prominence of economic and social rights as an extension of global human rights frameworks, on the other (Von Schnitzler 2014). In the year 2010, the human right for water has been recognized through the United Nations General Assembly, which led many countries, including Zambia, to anchor it in their constitutions. As anthropological scholarship critically has analysed, humanitarian discourses and interventions – in this case around water – can have ambivalent effects. For, they are always linked to a normative understanding of progress. The humanitarian discourse about water in Southern Africa is amongst others shaped by the term dignity. What does this imply for everyday water use? 

In my thesis I looked at how governance processes structure the possibility for sociality in Solwezi, Northwestern Zambia. I asked how water shaped people’s relationships. Water access in Solwezi is very unequal: The majority of Solwezi residents is not connected to water pipes. Massive population growth due to a re-opening of three large-scale copper mines in the region in 2003 has put pressure on water resources and infrastructure. Water’s availability for residents is yet exposed to other factors: weather conditions, effects of climate change, scarcity and contamination due to operations of the nearly situated mine. 

Drawing on theoretical approaches which suggest that an assisting of practices can lead to an understanding of relationships and its political consequences, as for example the investment of temporal resources for women when fetching water, findings suggest that discourses and practices around water often differ widely, and that water can have connecting and separative effects within the household and across the urban space. 

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