Encounters at the Water Point – An Ethnography of the Travelling Model of Community-based Water Management and its Application to Rural Water Supply in Namibia Inaugural‐Dissertation zur Erlangung des Doktorgrades der Philosophischen Fakultät der Universität zu Köln im Fach Ethnologie vorgelegt von Thekla Kelbert geb. am 30. März 1975 in Essen Köln, im April 2016 Acknowledgements This PhD is the result of research within the LINGS project (Local Institutions in Globalized Societies) of the Universities of Cologne and Hamburg, funded by the German Research Council, the DFG (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft). I express my particular thanks to the DFG for funding this research, as well as to the two project leaders, Prof. Dr. Michael Bollig and Prof. Dr. Michael Schnegg who made this PhD project possible. An overview of all LINGS case studies, publications, and researchers can be found on the project webpage: www.lings-net.de. I thank my supervisors, Prof Michael Bollig and Prof Robert Gordon, at the Universities of Cologne and Vermont respectively, for their expert guidance, patience and support; and my colleagues at the Departments of Anthropology in Cologne and Hamburg for our numerous motivating exchanges and their constant encouragement. If it had not been for the manifold support from the side of different other people, it would not have been possible for me to commence – and to finally finish this PhD. First and foremost I would like to thank all those who have welcomed me in their offices, during their extension work, and at their water points during my research in Namibia. I am grateful that they have shared their time, knowledge and views with me – a necessary precondition to finding answers to my numerous questions. In particular I thank the officers of the Ministry of Agriculture, Water and Forestry in Windhoek and its regional branches in Kunene Region, as well as the staff of the Namibian Red Cross Society in Windhoek and Opuwo, who provided me with a lot of valuable information, with contacts to some of the communities in Kunene Region, and with their personal and professional viewpoints on community-based water management. I thank Uetupa Upora and Charles Kaee who assisted me and kept me company on the long drives and around the evening campfires during my trips to 21 water points in Kunene North. Magic Muburura did a great job in carefully translating and transcribing lengthy protocols of community meetings. Sally Harper at The Namibian’s Archive went to great lengths to help me find my way through the information available, kept me good company and presented me with a thumbing device for the days of newspaper browsing. I also owe thanks to Karine Nuulimba and her family and to the Willberg/ Seeling family who shared their friendship and my interest in the research topic, and offered me a place to stay in Windhoek during different phases of my research. I am particularly grateful to John Bosco Katjiua who’s long-proven friendship has cheered me up while in Namibia whenever I needed it. Three people who contributed professionally to making this thesis a more insightful and hopefully pleasant read are Monika Feinen in Cologne who I thank for producing six of the maps included, Pax in Edinburgh who was the best proofreader for this project I could have wished for, and Farrukh Nazarmavloev from the Pamirs who boosted my energy at the stage of publishing the thesis and helped me give the final touches to its visual representation. Without all the close interaction which I have had especially with my three PhD-candidate colleagues of the LINGS project in Hamburg and Cologne, and with the ‘Marienburg peers’, I would have felt far less comfortable emotionally and far less inspired intellectually while at the Cologne office and in the field, and this thesis would surely not have become what it is. But also my ‘old University friends’ whom I got to know during previous phases of engagement with academia, Namibia, and the Cologne Institute have my heartfelt gratitude for their ceaseless encouragement and belief in me. Special thanks for their collegial company and friendship go to Anne-Christina Achterberg-Boness, Bea Wittger, Christiane Naumann, Corinna di Stefano, Diego Menestrey, Dirke Köpp, Gertrud Boden, Johanna Below da Cunha, Kathrin Gradt, Martina Gockel-Frank, Sara de Wit, Sarah Albiez- Wieck, Sebastian Schiffer, Stefanie Michels, Susanne Berzborn, Theresa Linke, and Ute Dieckmann. A big word of thanks to all my other friends and relatives who over the past six years continued to find the right words of motivation to keep me going in this endeavour, and who now share the joy of it being finished. Those who carried me through this project more than anyone else are: Erich, who helped me out with commenting on parts of the ideas and the text, taking care of the kids and the kitchen, calming me down and cheering me up when needed. And Laurin and Linus, for their unlimited understanding and love while this dissertation was evolving. Abstract This study takes an anthropological perspective on a globalized political environment – more particularly on the fields of global environmental governance and development cooperation and their interplay with national and local arenas and actors. I offer an anthropological account of the rise of the global environmental governance agenda, of the international arenas where it has been generating debates and joint decisions, and of their consequences for national politics and local resource management regimes in the Global South. Furthermore, this study contributes observations and findings on how ideas, discourses, and processes at different scales affect the emergence and change of local institutions. The analysis focuses on institutions that regulate the management and supply of water in Namibia’s rural areas, and more particularly in Kunene Region – and in similar ways in many other countries in the Global South. For Namibia, a new set of standardized management institutions was introduced in a blueprint-like manner to groups of water users through a national reform programme and through various development interventions starting in the 1990s. The connecting thread underlying my account is based on the way in which natural resource management concepts and models emerge on the international scene of water experts, policy-makers, and practitioners, and how the models travel between international, national, regional, and local scales, reaching Namibia’s communal areas, and being translated and transformed during their travelling. In the process, this study also generates findings that can inform further research and debate around the interaction of ‘the state’ and its agents with civil society organizations and citizens, particularly in more remote parts of a relatively recently independent country in the Global South; as well as the recently developing field of the ethnography of infrastructure, based on the example of water infrastructure in a water-scarce environment. The study at hand can certainly be read against the background of the anthropology of development which, as others have recently postulated, must be transformed and complemented in order to become an ‘anthropology of global social engineering’ (Bierschenk 2014:75). My work presented here can contribute to such a broadening of the view of this field by presenting an account which integrates the different steps of a translation chain of a policy model emerging in the context of international debates, negotiated in the national setting among others in the context of development projects, and implemented in local settings in Namibia. Having applied the framework of travelling models previously elaborated by a group of anthropologists and other social scientists to my particular case, to the field work I did, and to the documents I collected, I draw some conclusions from my own experiment, following ethnographically a travelling model of community-based water management across scales and between locations. The main contribution of the study at hand is to devise and refine ways of grasping the dynamics behind discourses and blueprint-like models at different scales, conceptually and methodologically. My account serves to demonstrate the potential of the travelling models approach in ethnography and anthropological analysis, especially by focusing on the travelling of a particular model for local behaviour in situations of connectivity between actors from different spheres and scales, such as in the realm of development anthropology, and in interactions of representatives of the state with civil society organizations and of both of these with local individuals and groups. This study meets the challenge of not only concentrating on the local consequences of global tendencies as others have done before, but also of applying the toolbox of anthropological methods to scenarios where ‘the global’ becomes tangible, and to the spaces of connectivity, movement, and friction in between the different scales. In so doing, the aim has been to also test the theoretical paradigm of ‘travelling models’ based on researchers from STS and ANT, and applied to other ethnographic contexts more recently by a group of mainly Germany-based anthropologists, regarding its applicability to my particular research questions and context and to some of the advantages and limitations it has to offer. My case is situated in the broader research context of a project dealing with the emergence and change of institutions. It complements a set of case studies which deal with the local implementation at the water points in Namibia of an institutional blueprint designed by a group of national and international water-sector experts. Based on the ethnographic experiment of following a travelling model of community-based water management across scales and between locations, I offer an exemplary case of how such a standardized model for the management of rural water supply, prescribed by the state and introduced at the water points by a group of external actors, emerges from and is influenced by discourses and actors at the national and global level.