The Challenges of a Water System Management Handover in Eastern Ethiopia- From the United Nations Refugee Agency to a Local Community MASSACHUSETS INSTITUTE OF TECHNO-JLOGY By JUN 3 0 Christophe Chung 2011 BA Political Studies and Middle Eastern Studies Bard College Annandale-on-Hudson, NY (2006) ARCVES SUBMITTED TO THE DEPARTMENT OF URBAN STUDIES AND PLANNING IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER IN CITY PLANNING AT THE MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY JUNE 2011 @ 2011 Christophe Chung. All rights reserved. The author here by grants to MIT the permission to reproduce and to distribute publicly paper and electronic copies of the thesis document in whole or in part. Signature of Author: Department of Urban Studies and Planning /4 . N .May 19, 2011 Certified by Urf/ ss r Balakrishnan Rajagopal Department of Urban Studies and Planning Thesis Supervisor ,1 Accepted by _______ C-' - Professor Joseph Ferreira Department of Urban Studies and Planning Chair, MCP Committee The Challenges of a Water System Management Handover in Eastern Ethiopia- From the United Nations Refugee Agency to a Local Community by Christophe Chung Submitted to the Department of Urban Studies and Planning on May 19, 2011 in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master in City Planning Abstract During the height of a political crisis in the late 1980s, hundreds of thousands of Somali refugees crossed into eastern Ethiopia. A humanitarian crisis soon unfolded as water was in short supply in the arid region. In response, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) constructed the largest water system ever built by the agency, with the clear understanding that the Jerer Valley Water System (JVWS) would be passed on to a local institution. More than a decade later, with most of the refugees repatriated, the JVWS tenuously exists within the management jurisdictions of both everyone and no one-between the local, regional, and national governments and UNHCR. The thesis aims to go beyond simply identifying the shortfalls in management, but seeks to understand key underlying factors which help drive such failure. Factors include issues of geopolitics, sovereignty, dependency and space. The Ethiopian state's right to territorial sovereignty has very significant spatial and planning implications for where refugee camps are located, how they are built and to what extent public services are shared with the local community. In the refugee camp studied in this thesis, a heavy dependence on the part of the local community has formed on the continued existence of Kebribeyah camp, as the space has become a key node of development for the surrounding community. Thus, while UNHCR attempts to pull out, its efforts are complicated by the fact that the local, regional and national governments have a deep seated interest in continued operations of the water system as it is now. A case is made for greater inclusion of local institutional capacity development in the emergency response phase (accompanied by the needed funds from international foreign aid) as a means to ensure a more timely infrastructural management handover. Thesis Supervisor: Balakrishnan Rajagopal, Ford International Associate Professor of Law and Development Acknowledgments Research for and writing of this thesis spanned a year and a half and there are countless people who have helped me along the way by offering suggestions, providing advice and inspiring a passion for water and sanitation work in developing country contexts. This is an attempt to fit all thank yous on a single page. Thank you to my thesis advisor, Balakrishnan Rajagopal, for our conversations, your guidance in making sense out of a complex topic and helping me draw the connections between what would be perceived as disparate fields. Thank you especially for your adept application of pressure to identify the deeper questions and issues at hand. As your student, your research assistant and advisee I have come to learn of the very significant role international law and human rights play in spatial planning. Thank you to my thesis reader, Susan Murcott, for the incredible amount of comments you've given on the working drafts of my thesis as well as giving a good kick in the pants when I really needed to hustle. My passion for water and sanitation provision for the most vulnerable was inspired by your example. And without your EC Kits I would not have been able to secure the opportunity to do fieldwork with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), and so I thank you for it. Thank you also for your patience while walking a liberal arts graduate through the complexities of water and sanitation engineering. Thank you to all the UNHCR staff in Kebribeyah, Jijiga, Addis Ababa and Geneva who have been instrumental to this thesis by sharing information, providing direction, answering questions as well as committing endless amounts of time and energy towards getting me into the field. I still look back on our shared meals, our long drives and the short deadlines with a smile and I am deeply appreciative of your role in my academic and professional development. In addition, thank you to a number of professors and students who have helped shape my thinking and education while at MIT. Thank you JoAnn Carmin and Deepak Lamba-Nieves for your lead in helping me form my initial research questions through Thesis Preparation; Diane Davis for teaching me of the importance of spatiality and sovereignty; Bishwapriya Sanyal for your writings and our discussions on inter-institutional coordination; Judith Tendler for Good Government in the Tropics and our discussions on public service provision in the developing world; and finally, James Wescoat for being another figure who inspired a passion for water as well as raising my awareness to the importance of scales and jurisdictions. Thank you also Karen Jacobsen at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy for your writings and our discussion which have helped considerably in framing my thesis. Thank you also to the students in the School of Architecture and Planning, who served as a sounding board, provided a safe space to tease out new thoughts and assisted a student (who can barely draw a straight line) with design. Thank you Alyssa Bryson, Rob Crauderueff, Ryan Maliszewski, Sagarika Suri, Aspasia Xypolia and the legends of 3 Hancock Park! Fieldwork would not have been possible without the generous support of the Department of Urban Studies and Planning (DUSP)-Public Service Center (PSC) Summer Internship Program, the Program on Human Rights and Justice (PHRJ) and the William Emerson Travel Grant. Thank you. And lastly, thank you to the MIT Department of Urban Studies and Planning for supporting my education- without which, none of this would have been possible. Preface First, the thesis aims to identify and understand the reasons behind failures in management and handover of the Jerer Valley Water System (JVWS). This goes without saying that as a student, I have the luxury of evaluating this project in retrospect-a feat significantly easier than actual implementation in emergency response situations. As an outsider, therefore, I approach this topic with a great deal of humility. This thesis does not aim to simply identify the shortfalls, but more importantly seeks to understand the factors behind why the JVWS finds itself in the current state that it is in now. Second, the incredibly short timeframes in which United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) staff are required to decide, plan and act to address humanitarian crises-as these relate to provision of water and other basic necessities of life-make it difficult to ensure that all measures are covered prior to implementation. While as a student of international development, I have been taught to value the process of long-term planning, this is an amenity not afforded to many when water needs to be procured for hundreds of thousands immediately. Third, while failures in management and handover are fully detailed, I approach the situation as a glass half full rather than half empty. As this thesis will note, the JVWS nevertheless stands as a major asset to the refugee, local and pastoralist communities and the water coverage rates provided by the system are far superior to surrounding areas in eastern Ethiopia. Fourth, I must express that from the year and a half process of researching, interviewing and writing on the JVWS I have come to firmly believe that the many UNHCR implementers involved in the process carried out decisions with the best of intentions and acted on those that seemed most logical- based upon the realities of limited time, personnel, resources and information. This thesis is a modest attempt at understanding the many elements involved in the challenges of managing and handing over management of the JVWS, and does so by drawing from literatures and disciplines of planning, international law, engineering, history, international development and politics. And I use this thesis as an opportunity to gage how a water system-and infrastructure more generally-can be passed on from an international actor to a local community-a struggle faced widely in the international development field. These are my thoughts. All arguments made in this thesis are based on my own observations unless otherwise specified. To my mother, who always encouraged me to reach higher; and to my father, who always reminded me to keep two feet on the ground. Table of Contents Abstract....................................................................3