New Pipes, Old Ways: Water Infrastructure Failure, Power, and the State in Nigeria
Creators: name: Adeniran, Adegboyega
Publisher: name: The Australian National University
Year: 2022

description: Repeated malfunction and failure of water supply infrastructure pose a critical challenge to equitable and sustainable water access, and the attainment of Sustainable Development Goals in most African countries. As part of the broader water governance problems, this challenge concerns the design and organisation of the distributive systems of water infrastructure. A governing approach that ignores power and historical relations in water infrastructure management presents interesting conceptual, theoretical, and practical problems. With Nigeria as a case study, this thesis seeks to understand some of these problems by asking the question: What are the changing effects of power on the development and governance of water infrastructure in Nigeria, and to what extent is it responsible for infrastructure failure? The thesis explores ideational, symbolic, and disciplinary power to examine this question through the Nigerian state using the Transaqua interbasin water transfer project and the Iganna water supply scheme in Oyo State, Nigeria. Through a focus on the logic of resistance, the thesis argues that water infrastructure failure and inequity in Nigeria are historically produced by political knowledge (e.g., policies and theories) and discursive practices (e.g., ideas and ideologies) at different water infrastructure and governance levels. The thesis revisits theoretical concepts like the hydraulic mission, and practical concepts like infrastructure renovation because of their ability to misrepresent contextual relations of power, or to mask and perpetuate inequitable water access and distribution. The Nigerian case shows the different motivations for state-making beyond the traditional arguments on spatial or autocratic control by the federal government, helps explain some contributing determinations of other water-related issues beyond the traditional analytical tropes of corruption, fragmentation, ethnicization, and allows us to question other analytical concepts in the political economy field that fundamentally assume the coherence of the nation-state. The Iganna study shows that the Oyo state government's intended household water access ratio (50 litres/day/person) cannot be guaranteed by constructing standpipes at 70 m - 100 m intervals. Similarly, individuals within communities with a high level of recognition and symbolic capital could be identified to fill community water management committees, because spatial proximity determines who garners authority for the day-to-day management of water. Conceptually, the thesis develops a conceptual framework to study the politics of water governance, which situates power and politics at the centre of water governance and infrastructure systems. The framework recentres the state as a critical organisation of social, economic and ecological change. In addition, the thesis proposes an infrastructure renovation model as a new lens to think about water infrastructure failure. The model demonstrates the cyclical pattern of infrastructure failure as central to Nigerian society's past, present, and future plans for water infrastructure development and offers new research and policy pathways in water infrastructure financing. Proposed political, policy, and research pathways for water infrastructure governance include: constitutional changes to concentrate water infrastructure development for potable water supply in one arm of government; reconsidering the standpipe as a model supply infrastructure; and transformative historical research to expose problematic concepts and strategies of power that have endured over time.