Transforming water scarcity conflict: community responses in Yemen and Australia

Abstract

When water is scarce, disputes over how to share it fairly and effectively are frequent. Understanding how people view and respond to water scarcity conflict is essential if it is to be addressed constructively. Through an interdisciplinary lens of hydropolitics and peace and conflict studies, this research used semi-structured interviews and interpretive phenomenological analysis (IPA) to investigate lived experience of sharing scarce water resources in Australia’s Murray-Darling/Barka Basin and Yemen’s Jibal as-Sarawat. Across divergent hydrological, cultural and political contexts, the study gained rich insight into how top decision-makers, mid-level community leaders and grassroots water sharers make sense of their relationships to water and emergent conflict in the face of water scarcity, as well as barriers to and opportunities for fair and peaceful water sharing. The study demonstrated that water scarcity conflict can wear down community resilience long before physiological needs arise, with devastating effects on mental health and social cohesion. Unpredictability, lack of information, social division and perceived injustice among basin stakeholders represent barriers to constructive water sharing outcomes. Opportunities to transform this conflict lie in expanding understandings of hydro-hegemony to incorporate the satisfaction of basic human water needs best understood as social in nature. However, this represents an ongoing process which is costly and replete with paradox. Despite water scarcity theory, policy and practice being dominated by positivist approaches, community resilience to the immense stresses of water scarcity can be found in acknowledging and holding emergent tensions between predictability and adaptability; simplicity and complexity; and personal and social responsibility.