Reconstruction 6.3 (Summer 2006)
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Donors, Modellers and Development Brokers: The Pork Barrel of Water Management Research / Julie Trottier
Abstract: Donors are shaping the mainstream research agenda concerning water management around the world. As large sums are made available within applied research programmes, many actors are competing to access them. This has led to the development of a new class of actors: the water research development brokers. Development brokers have mostly been studied in the developing world. They are usually defined as local actors who master the knowledge framework of donor organizations while their social positions and local networks allow them to act as intermediaries between the local population targeted by the donor and the donor itself. Such a position allows them to control the flow and distribution of funds. This is a form of resource capture, as well as a crucial and necessary interface. This paper analyses how the interplay between bureaucratic donors, water researchers and development brokers has shaped and constrained the understanding and the development of water management research. Development brokers arise as a response to a supply of projects from donor agencies. They must first and foremost create and maintain their indispensability. As projects are finite in time, brokers must continuously reinvent themselves in order to maintain their indispensability. This study identifies a kaleidoscopic configuration of brokerage that typifies much water research. The very mechanisms maintaining this kaleidoscopic configuration contribute to constraining the scientific discourse. The scale of the analysis, the hegemonic use of commensurability, and the lame interdisciplinarity generally demonstrated by water research are all largely products of these dynamics.
<1> Science is a social construct. Power relations structure any scientific discourse in an implicit manner. As the loci of power relations evolve over time, so does the scientific discourse they pervade for they redefine and reshape its object.(Foucault, 1969: 55-58) Water is the object of so many competitions among so many actors that the scientific discourse on water and on sound water management could hardly escape this phenomenon. This article examines some of the mechanisms that participate in the production of the modern ‘scientific’ discourse on water management. It draws on the literature on development brokers to identify and explore some of the power relations that shape this discourse. It applies this theoretical framework to the analysis of several international water management research projects as case studies, some of which I actually participated in.
<2> The appropriation of water occurs through a variety of modes. The representation of the resource, its access modalities, the transmission of these access modalities, the uses of the resource deemed to be acceptable and its allocation constitute some of the modes of appropriation of that resource. (Weber & Reveret, 1993) Any actor involved in the struggle for controlling water will deploy simultaneously a variety of strategies within each of these modes. This study examines the manner in which the relations between donors and water researchers, especially modellers, have given rise to a class of development brokers within the field of water research. It explores the manner in which the interactions between these three categories of actors are now constraining the discourse on water management. These interactions largely determine which modes of appropriation are recognized and which are rendered invisible. They define water management in a manner that empowers some actors and disempowers others.
Development Brokers
<3> Most of the recent literature on development brokerage concentrated on Africa, where the decentralization of international aid fuelled this phenomenon throughout the nineties. Yet, one of the earliest studies of similar brokerage focuses on Mr. J. [1], a merchant from a small harbour town of Newfoundland, Canada, in the 1970s, described as an expert in the management of meanings. (Cohen & Comaroff, 1976: 87-107) Mr. J.’s brokerage targeted the residents of small settlements in Focaltown’s hinterland with no tradition of communal organization. He gave access to the resources of patronage, by securing for these communities infrastructure and welfare services from the government, but he did not dispense them himself. Cohen and Comaroff concluded that his strategy to create and maintain the need for his services in patron-client relations distinguishes the broker from other kinds of middleman. (Cohen & Comaroff, 1976: 89) Mr. J. explained his own success by the personalization of his interactions both with the government where he knew the "right people" and with the local inhabitants he claimed to resemble by his origins, his accent and his poor education opportunities, even though he was significantly wealthier than them. (Cohen & Comaroff, 1976:92)
<4> Turning to the phenomenon of local development brokers in Africa who specialize in capturing the funds of international and bilateral donors for the benefit of their communities, Le Meur pointed out that this rent is neither a godsend nor a free flowing resource; the broker needs to go actively towards it. (Le Meur, 1996: 105) He used Boissevain’s definition of a broker as a professional manipulator of people and of information who creates communication in order to achieve profit. (Le Meur, 1996: 103) The relevant questions, then, concerned the process whereby the brokerage function becomes dominant within a social trajectory, transforming the actor into a broker. In Ivory Coast, Le Meur pointed out, a specific combination of an economic and political crisis and of a diversification of the development channels had compelled those holding elected offices to become development brokers. He distinguished ‘professional’ from ‘occasional’ development brokers on the basis of two essential criteria. First, this distinction derived from their having accumulated enough competences and resources, including social capital, to reinvest in brokerage. Second, this distinction depended on their degree of monopolisation of the channels of information flow and of the resources at stake. Much work still needed to be carried out, he argued, to explore the link between the forms, both material and symbolic, of remuneration of the activity of broker and the forms of redistribution carried out by the broker. The latter defines his social legitimacy as well as the legitimacy of his remuneration.
<5> Building on Cohen and Comaroff’s and on Gonzalez’ work on political brokers as well as on the ‘Manchester school’of political anthropology, Bierschenk and Olivier de Sardan undertook to study local development brokers in Africa in order to explore the relations between African states, local governance modes and intermediary organisations. (Bierschenk, Chauveau & Olivier de Sardan, 2000: 13) They refused normative presuppositions concerning the development broker. Neither necessarily good or bad, he was merely an actor who was studied empirically. They used the term ‘development broker’ as a conceptual category determined by the researcher, aware that no one labels himself as such, and emphasized that these actors are not necessarily cynical manipulators. In fact, their believing at least somewhat in their own discourse contributed to their success. (Bierschenk, Chauveau & Olivier de Sardan, 2000: 25)
<6> Bierschenk et al. distinguished several types of development broker careers and strategies. Yet, most often, the ability of the broker lay more in his capacity to respond to the dynamics of ‘project supply’ stemming from the donors rather than in his success in expressing a ‘project demand’ that would have arisen from the grassroots. The authors concluded that a brokerage market existed, with a concomitant supply and offer, both of which were simultaneously social constructs and constructions of meanings. (Bierschenk, Chauveau & Olivier de Sardan, 2000: 37) This supply and demand were submitted to multiple influences and variables that evolved over time. Bierschenk and Olivier de Sardan therefore considered that the key variables determining brokerage lied in the context within which brokerage supply and demand met. A transitory situation, or a change in this situation, contributes more to explain an expansion of development brokerage in a given country at a given time than the local socio-cultural characteristics or the extent of the aid flow.
Development brokers in water research
<7> Cohen and Comaroff already demonstrated that political brokerage occurs within the industrialised world. Their Newfoundland case study, however, portrayed a situation where one actor, the broker, had placed himself at the interface between a remote community and a national government. Similarly, the recent literature on development brokers described actors liaising between local, remote and often rural communities and international donors. The development brokers active in the field of water research, by contrast, place themselves at the interface of two urban, cosmopolitan communities: the donors on one hand and the research community on the other. Each of these collective actors has a loose geographical base that is often difficult to identify clearly, that may lie within close geographical proximity and may even partially overlap. Development brokers create their indispensability out of their capacity to manage meanings. The water research development broker is capable of "speaking the right language" to convince the donors that the research proposal satisfies the donors’ requirements. Being aware of the constraints faced by the donor, such as the delivery constraint, allows him to succeed. [2] Similarly, the water research development broker is capable of speaking an academic language that will be accepted by the research community. His capacity to capture outside funding makes him desired by the research community he belongs to.
<8> Contributors to this literature have examined how the emergence of the development brokers is testimony to changing relations between African states, sources of authority exercising social control within these states, citizens and foreign actors. Studying development brokers active in the field of water research leads us to examine how this interaction is ultimately contributing to constraining the scientific discourse on water management.
Methodological considerations
<9> Pierre Bourdieu argued that a main source of error in social sciences stemmed from a relation to the object of the study that was ‘uncontrolled’. As a result, the researcher projects this unanalysed relation into the object of the analysis. (Bourdieu, 1992: 48) He advocated participant objectivation rather than participant observation. The latter, he deplored, was only a necessarily fictitious immersion in a foreign milieu. It needed to be combined with the ‘gaze from afar’ of an observer who remained as remote from himself as from his object. (Reed-Danahay: 2005, 24) His methodological cautiousness extends over the full first chapter of Homo Academicus, where he analysed the French academic system. (Bourdieu, 1984: 11-52) He was himself part of the field he was analysing and consequently scrutinized carefully his relation to it in order to objectify it thoroughly. This, he explained, was the difference between ‘settling accounts’ and a careful, scientific enquiry of the field that is possible only through participant objectivation.
<10> Similar difficulties arose here in my own approach to and direct involvement with development brokers as the objects of this study. While the anthropologists studying local development brokers in Africa who were quoted earlier tended to be foreign both to the local communities of the brokers and to the donor community, I was professionally immersed in the field of water research throughout this study. The importance of development brokerage became clear to me when I started participating in an international research project funded by a multilateral donor. The proposal had announced it as an interdisciplinary research on water management in the Dead Sea basin. The reality of what unfolded proved to be very different as the various development brokers involved each pursued their strategies. Many of these interactions contribute to explaining the great weakness of the literature on water management in the Middle East. They contribute to explaining the overwhelming presence of modelling and commensuration in the field of water research in general as well as the rise of Integrated Water Resources Management to the status of hegemonic concept. Most importantly, it contributed to explaining why so many crucial questions concerning water management in the Middle East are silenced within the academic literature.
<11> I took extensive notes throughout the project meetings, each held over several days, twice a year over the three years of the project, and undertook the painstaking process of participant objectivation in order to objectify both the dynamics that had led these development brokers to deploy these strategies and the dynamics their actions were generating as well as the very interests I had in this project, in this research and in this field. I interviewed three scientific officers who had been involved as donors, two of whom had been involved in successive framework programmes that fund water research, and two research directors of other international water research projects. All together, I examined six projects as case studies. Four were supposed to be applied research while two were classified as development projects dedicated to improving water management. All together these projects covered over 20 countries all around the Mediterranean Sea, the Middle East and North Africa. I complemented this by field observation of other project meetings and interactions in water conferences.
<12> This work does not pretend to be an exhaustive survey of the mechanisms whereby development brokerage is produced within water research and the impact this phenomenon has on the scientific discourse itself. It simply interrogates these case studies in the manner of Le Meur, Bierschenk, Chauveau and Olivier de Sardan. This allows us to demonstrate important contextual variables that determine the construction of the discourse on water management. While a case study can never be generalized in social science, this is allowing us to improve our theoretical framework when studying water politics. (Bryman, 1999: 35-69) Some of these results are applicable only to the Middle East. Others have a wider range of application. This study only scratches the surface of the complex manner in which development brokerage is now contributing to shaping scientific discourse and the power relations embedded in it. The observations it provides raise more questions than they answer.
A meeting of brokerages
<13> The Dead Sea project consisted of a meeting of brokerages. It gathered development brokers who each specialised in a different field within an interface that allowed them to exert collective brokerage that would have been impossible individually. Interface experts have been said to have an interest in maintaining the social boundaries of the world-views between which they mediate. (De Herdt & Bastiaensen, 2004: 881) These boundaries generate the need for their services. Brokers need to protect the information they have in order to maintain their indispensability. Their entering such interfaces therefore becomes very compatible with alleged interdisciplinary studies and with research covering a wide variety of case studies where each team member provides ‘local’ (national) expertise supposedly otherwise unobtainable. Although the donor creates the demand for interdisciplinary projects gathering partners from several states in the idealistic hope of generating research carried out within a common, interdisciplinary theoretical framework and research partnerships that stretch across boundaries, the brokerage mechanisms that respond to this demand ultimately create exactly the opposite result. The brokers preserve jealously the data they often acquired thanks to the same donor in a previous project. They also try to achieve a monopoly over the understanding that derives from their discipline so that they preserve their indispensability within future projects. They try to preserve their collective indispensability by cultivating their group’s value as a collection of institutions spread over the correct set of countries.
<14> Bierschenk et al observed two types of collective brokerage. The first type consisted of a ‘brokers’ club’. This frequent occurrence often took the form of a national non-governmental organization (NGO), an expatriate association or a village development association. The second type consisted of a chain where the vertical integration of the brokers involved clientelist configurations among them. (Bierschenk, Chauveau & Olivier de Sardan, 2000: 29-30) The configuration of brokerage observed within this project does not correspond to either type. This meeting of brokerages integrated the various specialties of the brokers involved in a complex and specific interface that generated the group’s indispensability. This collective brokerage was in some respect a transitory structure because it existed specifically as such only for the duration of the project. But the long-lasting relations between some of these brokers who entered other, similar forms of brokerage before and after this particular project demonstrates that this interface is not a fleeting social structure. It is a social construct whose reoccurrence over time is determined both by the supply of projects generated by the donors and by the brokers’ own success at creating the conditions of the brokerage. I will call this specific configuration a ‘kaleidoscopic development brokerage’ because the various members rearrange themselves from one project to another, altering the membership and the arrangement slightly in order to adopt a new shape, yet preserving each member’s specific content (the data it sits on) and shape (the skills and expertise it brings to the project). Calls for interdisciplinary research on water management have provided a fertile breeding ground for kaleidoscopic development brokerage.
<15> The various brokers that entered the kaleidoscope of the Dead Sea project will be examined within their individual broker’s trajectory before their interaction within this collective brokerage is explored.
Mr. H.: The nationalist environmentalist activist
<16> By far the most colourful of this team’s members, Mr. H. was a well known Palestinian who has carefully nurtured an image both as an activist and as an environmentalist. Bierschenk et al considered that development brokers need four categories of competences. First they need to master the right rhetorical skills in order to speak the right language to the donors, often dubbed "donor speak", and a different language to their local constituencies. Second, they need organisational skills that allow them either to set up the development institutions sought out by the donors or to federate enough groups to reach the critical mass required by the donor. Third, they need a sense of stage to showcase their achievements for the benefit of the donor, the project evaluator or the ‘expert’ on a short mission, as well as to impress on their local constituency the importance of their links with the external world. This sense of stage essentially consists of a capacity to fabricate a reality that corresponds to the expectations of the partner. Fourth, they need relational skills that allow them to seduce experts as well as local peasants. These skills include their building up a network of ‘connections’ which they guard jealously in order to maintain their indispensability. (Bierschenk, Chauveau & Olivier de Sardan, 2000: 26) Mr. H. was on all four counts the most accomplished development broker to take part in the Dead Sea project.
<17> Mr. H. had demonstrated his organizational skills by setting up in 1990 an NGO dedicated to studying the environment in Palestine. This outwardly non-political topic allowed donors to direct funds to him, and his relational and rhetorical skills led him to secure great amounts from international donors. The international community directed so much funding to the Palestinian Territories in the 1990s that donors started feeling the strain of the delivery constraint: they were at pains to succeed in spending all of the funds pledged to the Palestinians. This blurred the patron-client relationships between the donors and the NGOs receiving their funds. Nancy Gonzalez warned against an overly rigid structural definition of patron-client relationships. She insisted on the fact that the patron was just as dependent upon the continuance of the interrelationship as is the client. The patron, she cautioned, may appear disproportionately dominant while in fact it is held in check by its very dependence upon the apparently weaker party. (Gonzalez, 1972: 180-182) This was clearly the case in the Palestinian territories in the 1990s as donors competed to fund peace building projects in a saturated environment. (Trottier, 2000: 187; Brynen, 2000) The delivery constraint became even more acute after 2000 when aid to the Palestinians inflated at an accelerating rate; most of the $6 billion provided to the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip between 1993 and 2005 was actually given to them after 2000. (Keating, 2000 : 4) Mr. H. benefited from this situation and excelled in capturing funds from the international community for the benefit of his NGO. It produced a great amount of literature systematically printed on glossy paper purporting to be of scientific value. Neither the donors nor Mr. H. himself perceive the scientific content as its primary value, though, as his activist claims took precedence over his scientific contribution. [3]
<18> Mr. H. carefully cultivated his nationalist credentials in meetings with foreigners. He liked to talk about the tiny window of the cell the Israelis kept him in when they imprisoned him. This discourse never appeared in front of fellow Palestinians. It was constructed for the consumption of Europeans whose perception of the Intifada and its accompanying violence Mr. H. understood perfectly. He never missed an opportunity to assert his nationalistic credo and his own importance in front of foreigners:
The most important in all this is to not forget your principles. I find that the people who opt for quick fixes end up betraying themselves. I won’t do this; I will not compromise on my principles. I will never let Israel enjoy this by imposing compromises in the agreements. I am not willing to talk to any Israeli as long as they don’t accept my rights. Israelis are not the masters and I am not their slave. It is not human. … We have been abandoned by the international community and by the world as a whole. But I will not accept it. (de Chatel, 2005: 186; translated from Dutch by de Chatel)
He also claimed a monopoly over good research on water in Palestine. A foreign journalist recounts her meeting with him thus:
As he lights a cigarette, he looks at me critically. "So, you are writing a book about all this in the context of water? And who have you spoken to so far? What sources have you consulted?" After I name some names and books, he shakes his head disapprovingly. "You have done very bad research on water issues in Palestine," he says, and immediately calls in his assistant who is sent to dig up a list of (his NGO’s) books and articles. (de Chatel, 2005: 184; translated from Dutch by de Chatel).
<19> Mr. H.’s staging gifts were continuously used during the Dead Sea project. When a meeting was held in the West Bank in January 2004, the two Israeli partners who joined the group felt some apprehension towards the location of the meeting. One of them had pretended to his wife and daughters that the meeting was held in Jerusalem—otherwise they would not have accepted his participation. M. H. erupted suddenly in the office announcing dramatically that the town was surrounded by the Israeli military and under complete closure. He disappeared as suddenly as he had arrived, claiming he had to cancel his trip to India in order to care for two of his staff members who had just been arrested by the Israelis at the checkpoint at the entrance of the town. This act was clearly directed at the two Israeli partners to frighten them, as military regulations forbade them from entering "A" areas and the impending storming of the offices hosting the meeting would reveal their ‘illegal’ participation. [4] The closure on the town that day was no different than any other day. Palestinian movement was restricted, as usual, but others could circulate. The military neither encircled nor stormed the town. This was pure invention destined to frighten the Israeli partners and construct a reality where Mr. H. was heroically pursuing idealistic partnerships with Israelis that threatened him physically on his own doorstep.
<20> Mr. H. also cultivated the image of his own importance in Palestine. His mobile phone rang during a project meeting in June 2005 so that he could demonstrate Abu Ala was phoning him. This impressed Mr. Q., the project coordinator, deeply but would not necessarily have impressed Palestinians within his constituency given the ambivalent attitudes most of them had towards the Palestinian authority by June 2005.
<21> Mr. H. strove hard to achieve his indispensability as the only possible Palestinian partner in any form of collective development brokerage via a variety of means that included a careful use of the notion of ‘collaborator’. At a meeting held in Beit Jalla in 2005 to gather Palestinian and Israeli NGOs carrying out research on the environment, Mr. H. delivered a long speech disqualifying all other Palestinian NGOs from participating. They were, he said, ‘false Palestinian NGOs’, Israeli contraptions masquerading as Palestinian NGOs. His systematic disqualification of any competitor cultivated his indispensability for donors who were already struggling with a tight delivery constraint. Palestinians cannot afford to be accused of collaborating with Israelis in the present political context.
<22> Likewise, Mr. H. was an expert in the management of meaning. Like Mr. J., studied by Cohen and Comaroff in Newfoundland, he claimed to resemble the local people he alleged to represent although he was significantly wealthier than them and had studied abroad, the privilege of a minority of Palestinians. His organisation was perceived locally as the only possible local employer for young graduates with environmental studies degrees. His image projected such power that young graduates did not dare create their own NGOs and compete in capturing donor funds for fear of his preventing them from succeeding. They often worked for him as young professionals long enough to acquire an immigration permit to Canada, the USA, a European country or Australia. His preserving his own indispensability, as does any development broker, therefore fuelled the brain drain from Palestine, a fact that contradicts his nationalistic discourse. This monopoly he created for his organization also stifled the development of quality research on the environment in Palestine because his publications were subordinated both to the activist message he wanted to convey and to the need not to allow in the public domain the data that made him necessary for the donors, even though this data had been acquired with donor money. This led to numerous publications of maps of Palestine showing rainfall, land use, etc., in a shape that could not be used by a practitioner. Anyone needing the information had to go to Mr. H. and purchase his services.
<23> When dealing with foreigners, Mr. H. often used fear to succeed in his construction of reality. When Mr. Q suggested in January 2004 to visit a spring lying within a short walk of the meeting place, Mr. H. alleged this was much too dangerous and impossible. Walking there was thoroughly unproblematic, but the fear instilled by Mr. H.’s discourse ensured Mr. Q. stayed tucked in Mr. H.’s office for the entire day. This allowed Mr. Q. to ‘visit the field’ while only hearing Mr. H.’s narrative without having the opportunity to verify it. This strategy is widespread among development brokers in ‘dangerous’ areas. It allows them to transmit an unquestioned narrative. This contributes to explaining why so many studies of water in the Middle East have only transmitted the narratives promoted by the development brokers involved in water research. The western researchers who visit the West Bank and Gaza Strip arrive with a precise perception of the occupation. The development brokers manipulate this perception to prevent them from ever reaching the actual field. Most Palestinian NGOs are equipped with much documentation they give out to such foreigners, often young, easily impressionable research students. The transmission of narratives replaces actual field work even within the work of mature researchers. (eg, Rouyer, 2000)
Mr. Q.: The modeller
<24> Initially a doctor in chemistry, Mr. Q. worked for an Austrian research institute that had previously been largely funded by the state but had to reinvent itself as a self-sustaining company that secured its own research funding. The qualities of a development broker were therefore essential for Mr. Q. to persist in his success within his institute. The conversion of the Austrian Institute had also been thematic. Initially devoted to nuclear research, it had later turned to any environmental issue and claimed to incorporate social science within its approaches even though it was overwhelmingly peopled with natural scientists, engineers and modellers. This change corresponded to the demand for projects created by research donors to which the institute had to respond in order to survive financially.
<25> Mr. Q. had already been successful in capturing funds from the same donor within a previous project that had gathered Mr. H., Mr. C., and an Israeli partner in order to model the water flow in the same river basin. This modelling exercise had led them to formulate policy recommendations that were largely divorced from practical political realities as they were essentially based on hydro-geological data. Mr. Q. had acted as the project coordinator within this exercise, putting together a team that corresponded to the donor’s geographical and political requirements as well as addressing one of its research priorities. The geographical requirements were bureaucratic and restricted the possible composition of the consortium. The political requirement dictated that the proposed research had to support the foreign policy of the donor. By gathering an Israeli-Palestinian-Jordanian team, Mr. Q. had joined the long list of development brokers who have derived a living out of the ‘peace business’ in the Middle East. [5]
<26> While he was outwardly engaging in a patron-client relation with the donor through his institution as the client, Mr. Q. was also engaging within his institution as the patron in another patron-client relation with a more junior member of staff, Mr. F., the progress of whose career was his responsibility. Mr. F. was the modeller involved in this project, the coordinator of one of its six work packages. Part of Mr. Q.’s duties towards Mr. F was to insure his institute kept receiving more modelling projects in order to keep generating Mr. F.’s salary and allow him to progress in the institution.
<27> A development broker needs first and foremost to keep reinventing his indispensability. Once the second Intifada broke out, Mr. Q.’s partnerships with Middle Eastern organisations spanning the Arab Israeli divide increased in value. Indeed many such partnerships were disrupted by the conflict. Mr. Q. introduced a new project to the donor, proposing to model water flow in the same basin with a similar team, but catering this time to a new demand from the donor: the research had to be interdisciplinary and had to include social, political and economic considerations. This should, in principle, have allowed for more practical policy recommendations to emerge. As the donor funded applied research, this usability of the research results was a main concern. Participant objectivation carried out over three years demonstrated that the interdisciplinarity claimed by this new project was entirely a response to the new demand expressed by the donor.
<28> Mr. Q. demonstrated his rhetorical skills by drafting the new project in terms that included the donors’ concerns. He proved his organizational skills once again by gathering the right partnership for the consortium, providing the critical mass required by the donor. His sense of stage was rather accomplished as he could introduce his consortium members and his project within international conferences, but it never matched that demonstrated by Mr. H..whom he admired openly. In the drafting phase of the project, he even claimed he wanted to write this project to allow Mr. H..to "keep 25 brilliant young environmentalists in employment". Bierschenk et al. noted that the development broker’s success is furthered by his believing somewhat in his own discourse. Mr. Q. clearly believed the nationalist-activist discourse of Mr. H. This allowed him to be more convincing and to showcase his project as furthering peace in the Middle East as well as improving water management. Mr. Q.’s relational skills could not possibly match those of the ‘local’ partners in his consortium. This forced him to rely on another source of indispensability: the technical skills his institute could provide. This eventually led the project to develop a model only the project modeller could use because of its complexity. This meant that any use—if ever—made of the model his project produced would reinforce him as the indispensable broker.
<29> Although clearly not as accomplished a development broker as Mr. H., Mr. Q. definitely satisfied the essential criteria of a professional development broker, a successful one who mastered the four key skills sufficiently.
Mr. B.: The peace activitist
<30> Head of an Israeli institute created with the explicit purpose of furthering environmental research and peace among Israelis, Palestinians and Jordanians, Mr. B.’s experience of development brokerage had essentially consisted of capturing and delivering funds from American, often Jewish, sources up to the project coordinated by Mr. B. This was the first research project his institute secured from this multilateral donor. A key aspect of successful development brokerage is the diversification of the sources and Mr. B. realized how important this goal was.
<31> Of all the brokers involved in this project, Mr. B. was probably the most idealistically committed to furthering research on water management and peace in the Middle East. He had not taken part in the first project and was new to the vocabulary and the methodologies deployed by the other project partners. The second Intifada had complicated the life and work of his institute because it had disrupted the participation of Palestinian students and teachers to its programmes. Taking part in a research project with Jordanian and Palestinian partners was extremely important to Mr. B. in order to ensure the survival of his institution.
<32> Mr. B. was supported in this project by a colleague, Mr. J., with a much greater sense of stage. Mr. J. ensured, for example, that the project brochure included a picture of him hugging his Palestinian partner, Mr. I., while doing field work together in the West Bank. The deliberate choice to work with Palestinian partners constituted a driving force within Mr. J.’s career as a development broker and he showcased it regularly. The team formed by Mr. B. and J. therefore gathered all the necessary characteristics of development brokerage.
Mr. C.: The environmental consultant
<33> Mr. C. was the director of a private Jordanian environmental consultancy business that had a variety of contracts with the Jordanian government. He, Mr. H. and Mr. Q. had already collaborated in the previous research project. Whether Mr. C. fits the description of a development broker is debatable because he was a straightforward businessman who instructed his staff to work only according to the number of person months and deliverables specified in the contract. When payments were delayed, he instructed his staff to work on something else. A development broker captures funds from development organizations for the benefit of his community. While his NGO and Palestine at large constituted the community of Mr. H.., and the Austrian and Israeli research institutes constituted the respective communities of Mr. Q. and Mr. B., it is difficult to conceive of this private consultancy business as a community catered for by a development broker who derives some sort of remuneration, both monetary and symbolic, from this role. Mr. C. could rather be described as a businessman. Yet, his extensive network of connections and his participation in the kaleidoscope confers some aspects of the development broker onto him. The organizational skills he demonstrated in setting up a consultancy business that could capture donor funds also correspond to the skills of a development broker.
<34> Interestingly, while Mr. Q and Mr. B. were keen on advertising the partnership on the project website, Mr. C. wasn’t. Publicising an association with an Israeli partner at a time when the Americans were occupying Iraq and the Israelis were building the Separation Wall could have had negative impacts on his securing other contracts with the Jordanian government and other sources of revenues.
Me: The token political scientist
<35> Finally, I completed the kaleidoscope configuration. This was my first experience with a team of development brokers. I had been invited on board by Mr. Q., as I was later to discover, because of the donor’s request for an interdisciplinary approach that would include a social scientist. I was to be the token woman among the research directors and the token social scientist. This, of course, was not clear to me from the beginning. Like all development brokers, I came into the activity by accident. My British university was keen on developing externally funded projects, on the mistaken basis that this represented revenue for the institution; externally funded research projects generate more costs than benefits for universities, but this fact has yet to percolate in decision-making considerations. I quickly realized the contradiction between my role as a development broker and that as a researcher within this configuration. As opposed to the three local partners, I was not heading my institution. And as opposed to all four partners, my main function in my institution was not development brokerage. It is fair to add that of all five brokers in this configuration, I was the one with the least rhetorical skills, the least demonstrable organizational skills, the least sense of stage and the least relational skills. A researcher is not as successful at constructing his indispensability as a development broker. Mine proved to be created far more by the demand expressed by the donor than by my own doing.
<36> I entered this project with the aim of producing interdisciplinary research. Although the results were not those I had initially expected, they allowed me to understand the mechanisms whereby development brokerage is constraining interdisciplinary research in water management.
The kaleidoscope
<37> Within the kaleidoscope of brokerage occasioned by the Dead Sea project, several mechanisms contributed to constraining the scientific discourse on water management. Some of these will be detailed here as they were generated by the brokerage configuration’s interactions with donors and modellers. These mechanisms restricted the scalar level of the analysis, erected commensurability as the hegemonic approach, and limited severely the form interdisciplinarity could take. Examining them therefore allows us to better question interdisciplinary research on water in general.
Scale
<38> The very first meeting of the project led the team to adopt a ‘study area’ that extended over much less territory than the basin itself. It didn’t even include the capitals of the states involved. This restricted study area was determined by the ‘data gathering’ needs of the project. The three veterans of the first project on this basin, funded by the same donor, conceived of this new ‘interdisciplinary’ approach only in terms of a new model that would include more variables. They were deploying the same, unamended theoretical framework they had used in the first project. This meant they would gather a huge set of numerical data in order to model mathematically the flow of water in the basin. Success in such an enterprise largely depends on owning the data set at stake so that only a negligible portion of the project effort is devoted to localising a small amount of new data. [6] The geographical scale of the study area was determined by the data available to the partners.
<39> Curiously, all of the natural scientists and modellers involved in this project subscribed to the discourse on Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM) that stipulates the only correct scale of analysis and management concerning water is the catchment basin. This scale of analysis is especially favoured by modellers because it is so large that it justifies mathematical modelling in order to handle sizeable data sets. Yet, modellers themselves do not hesitate to restrict their work to suit the data bases they dispose of while announcing results valid over the entire catchment.
<40> This necessity of matching existing data to the schedule of deliverables prevented the project from deploying a multiscalar analysis within its theoretical framework. The latter is cruelly necessary because the interface between actors involved at various scalar levels largely determines the fate of water management within a basin. The dynamics linking the brokerage kaleidoscope and the donor prevented the articulation of a multiscalar analysis.
<41> The data the consortium members already possessed determined more than the overall scale of the study and the exclusion of a multiscalar analysis. It also determined the grid size of the maps their models produced. A 1 km by 1 km grid size was adopted because the data at their disposal did not allow a finer resolution. This entails important consequences in the representation of reality offered by these maps. Within an area of one square kilometre, several springs and several wells will coexist, each with a distinct property regime. Most of these, in the West Bank, and many in Jordan are governed by informal institutions that deploy communal, private or a mixed communal/private property regime. The choice of the grid size prevented any representation of this reality. Instead a homogeneous reality was portrayed within every grid unit, manufactured by the requirements of producing a map on the basis of the existing data set.
<42> The lies embedded in maps are accepted when they suit the knowledge framework of the map user. This homogeneous reality matched the idea of three entities each governed by national legislation that determines, alone, water management. It did not contravene the donor’s representation of reality. Multilateral donors are composed of member states. They unavoidably create a state empowering environment. The maps produced by this kaleidoscopic brokerage reinforced the perception of water management fiction. Such maps have been produced in the area for decades. They have largely contributed to shaping the dominant discourse on water management in the area. They have made invisible the most crucial stake of water management in the region: the competition among state actors and local actors all vying for the power to determine the rules governing water management.
Commensuration
<43> In her landmark study on the conditions that propelled commensuration to become the hegemonic approach in water management decision making, Wendy Espeland documented how the modelling approach initially emerged as a means deployed by a ‘New Guard’ within the Bureau of Reclamation in the USA to challenge the ‘Old Guard’s’ view of dam building. The latter perceived itself as endowed with a mission and pursued the construction of dams because this represented to them a substantive value rather than an instrumental one. The Central Arizona Water Control Study (CAWCS) was commissioned to provide an environmental impact statement concerning the proposed construction of Orme Dam after the major political crisis triggered by President Carter when he attempted to delete the Central Arizona Project from the federal budget in 1977. The ‘New Guard’ in the CAWCS perceived itself as enlisting rationality in the service of democracy. It intended to integrate archeological data, anthropological data, sociological, recreational, biological data, etc. in one quantitative model. (Espeland, 1998: 13) The key assumption underlying the conception of rationality within such models, notes Espeland, is that different values and entities should be made commensurable. In order to make rational decisions, precise comparisons need to be made between alternatives, and this requires all actors to express their values in accordance with some common scale. Such a process necessarily distorts the values of some groups.
<44> Espeland explored in detail the profound violence that is inherent to such commensuration. Her study demonstrates how cultural processes and power can influence what counts as a ‘feasibility set’ within rational choice methods. Cultural processes shape the cognitive maps that define what can be construed as possible outcomes or alternatives, thereby determining what needs to be compared. (Espeland, 1998: 234) Rational choice theory has focused on the choice process rather than on exploring the determination of the feasibility set. Yet, cultural processes also define who is a ‘stakeholder’ and who is invisible because they attribute various degrees of legitimacy to the representation of the resource, the access modalities employed, the transmission of these access modalities and the uses made of the resource by the various contenders to the title of ‘stakeholder’.
<45> The kaleidoscope of brokerage suits commensurability very well. The ‘local’ partners are deemed to know their area best and are therefore asked to detail what ‘data’ needs to be ‘collected’ and what causal relations need to be taken into account. The foreign partners contribute the ‘technical’ expertise of aggregating this data within a model according to these causal relations without challenging them. The epistemology deployed within the research project is therefore structured by the data that is already in the possession of the local partners as well as by the compromise they will achieve among them concerning the causal relations to be included. As only one local partner was predominantly a nationalist activist, and as this was the only partner responsible for centralizing the data bases, the model only included data and causal relations that could support his political discourse. Communal property regimes were excluded from any consideration, for example, although they determine the management of over half the water used by Palestinians and are largely used in Jordan as well. This reality did not match the world view of any of the local partners involved so it was deemed irrelevant.
Interdisciplinarity
<46> Beyond the fundamental limitations of rational choice theory explored by Espeland, catchment basin modelling that claims to ‘include social and political aspects’ can present fundamental methodological flaws. Such models are based on causal loop diagrams and stock flow diagrams that cannot represent most causal relations involved in water management. Four types of causal relations exist. Necessary and sufficient causal relations mean that B will occur if and only if A occurs. This type of causal relation rarely exists. ‘I am born therefore I will die’ corresponds to such a relation. Necessary and non-sufficient causal relations mean that B will occur only if A occurs. ‘My article will be published if I submit it on time’ corresponds to such a relation. Sufficient and non-necessary causal relations mean that B will occur if A occurs. ‘I will die if I stop drinking water’ corresponds to such a relation. Non- Sufficient and non-necessary causal relations do not guarantee any such link between A, the cause, and B, the effect. ‘I fell in love with Marjorie so I married her’ corresponds to such a causal relation. It was, sadly, neither sufficient nor necessary for the groom to have fallen in love with Marjorie in order marry her. Yet, the narrative of this actor hinges on this causal relation. It is therefore relevant. Most human decisions, most political decisions involve such non-necessary and non-sufficient causal relations. Causal loop diagrams cannot, by definition, capture non-necessary and non-sufficient causal relations. [7] They can be applied very efficiently to describe physical relations such as evaporation, recharge, abstraction, etc. that do correspond to the first three types of causal relations. But they cannot be used to describe human relations that constitute the fabric of social, political and economic relations with water appropriation. [8]
<47> The Dead Sea project aimed to include the complex political, economic and social relations involved in the governance of water in the basin. But it refused to do this in any other manner than in a model and within causal loop diagrams. This was impossible because these were non-necessary and non-sufficient causal relations. A multiscalar understanding of the brokerage configuration is necessary to understand this strange resolve. Within his institution, Mr. Q, the project coordinator, was responsible for the development of the career of the modeller involved in the project. This placed him in a situation of confuse patron-client relation with this modeller within his own institution. He was ostensibly the patron, for he specialised in capturing research projects that allowed, among other things, this junior member of staff to develop his career. But his success at capturing these projects largely hinged on his ability to portray such modelling as indispensable to the donor. When the latter started insisting, as did other donors, that the social and economic factors had to be taken in consideration within any study of water management that aimed to provide policy recommendations, Mr. Q. had to adapt his discourse suitably in order to keep securing donor funds. He had to reinvent himself as brokers need to do continuously in order to maintain their indispensability. He had to propose a project that would achieve this integration of social and economic components while catering within his institute for a constituency of modellers.
<48>Wendy Espeland’s fascinating study of the CAWCS shows how the "New Guard" within the Bureau of Reclamation believed its version of rationality was universal: "Their commitments to this form of rationality became a substantive value. … Their confidence in its capacity to process diversity fairly and uniformly did not permit them to see, at first, the unequal effects of its procedural equality." (Espeland, 1998: 230) A generation after the use of rational choice theory emerged to challenge the dogmatic beliefs in the civilizing power of dam construction, the belief in water modelling to generate sound water management recommendations has replaced them as a hegemonic concept. Mr. Q.’s commitment to modelling revealed a substantive value, one that could not accommodate comparison with another method on the basis of instrumental value. This prevented him from accepting to develop an interdisciplinary theoretical framework that would have restricted modelling to the examination of phenomena it could effectively capture. His believing in his own modelling discourse contributed to his success as a development broker. His relying on the local partners to provide his expert modeller with material allowed him to believe he was including all the relevant stakeholders and data. This allowed him to be as convincing to himself as he was to the donor.
<49> The interdisciplinarity of the project was doomed at the second project meeting. The work package delivering the model emerged as the crucial part of the project, to which all other research tasks were subordinated. Yet, like most other projects devoted to modelling, the Dead Sea project does not advertise itself as such within its abstract published by the donor. Rather, it announces that it will establish the scientific basis for ‘more sustainable than today’ water management and water related land management in the basin. Mr. Q. considered that only modelling could offer such a scientific basis. It allowed him to present the donor with a convincing discourse at a time when that donor was actually turning away from modelling.
The donor-modeller-development broker nexus: an idiosyncrasy?
<50> A case study can never be representative. The exploration of the Dead Sea project allows us to formulate clearer questions concerning the mechanisms whereby power relations structure the scientific discourse on water management, specifically regarding the relations between donors, modellers and development brokers. Several questions emerge from this research.
<51> Studies of development brokers in Africa demonstrated a clear link between the decentralization of aid and the emergence of the social category of development broker. Water research has been facing a similar decentralization for a number of years. As states around the western world have been squeezing their funding to university research for decades, researchers have been increasingly required to turn to external research funding. This was the explicit case of two partners within the kaleidoscope of the Dead Sea project. This is also the case of numerous university researchers around the planet. Several national research councils, foundations, the European Union, UNESCO and other donors have been interested simultaneously in funding water research. Such funding was systematically awarded on the basis of research projects that were finite in time in the same manner as donors expect to fund development projects. We can safely consider that the environment propitious to the rise of development brokers extends far beyond this single Dead Sea project. This emerged strongly from the interviews of the research directors within the other international projects as well as from observations carried out within international conferences over a number of years. The short term horizon of research funding compels researchers to constantly reinvent themselves in order to generate further grants. It transforms them into development brokers.
<52> Have modellers fared better than other researchers within this environment conducive to development brokerage? A quick scan of the EU water initiative reveals the importance of modelling within projects funded by the European Union, even after this donor stated explicitly within some programmes that it would not fund the development of a model per se, that it would consider including the use of a model within a research project only if this furthered the interests of the research. Modellers then morphed themselves into interdisciplinary researchers, and advertised themselves as such. Their success with donors can be explained partially by their capacity to schedule clear deliverables. "Real research means asking questions. A real research project states the questions you wish to investigate. It cannot state that it will produce deliverables on this or that date." This was declared by a research director who considered the EU 6th framework project he participated in was the explicit example of the kind of project he never wanted to be involved in again. [9] Modellers can schedule the production of deliverables because they are not asking open ended questions in the manner fundamental research does. Finally, modellers have no qualms concerning the universal pretension of their claims. This lies at the root of rational choice theory, as was demonstrated by Wendy Espeland. It suits donors who do not wish to fund an idiosyncratic study, and requires results that can be applied elsewhere.
<53> Have donors been aware of the emergence of development brokers? Interviews of donors within this research revealed a certain level of awareness of the role played by development brokers. But this awareness seemed to deal with the form of the projects rather than their fundamental content. The scientific officers interviewed knew that consultancy services offered researchers to set up the consortia required by the research programmes and to write the proposals in a manner that suited the bureaucratic requirements of the organization. These were flawless proposals. According to these scientific officers, such a phenomenon had first originated in Holland and had later spread to all European countries. They didn’t mention, however, an awareness of this phenomenon extending to the content of the research produced and a concomitant constraining effect on the scientific discourse on water.
<54> Have modellers highjacked interdisciplinarity? The scientific officers interviewed deplored the fact that anthropologists seemed always bent on exploring obscure issues of "marriage within a remote tribe on a far away island, for example" rather than important questions with universal implications. At a time when modellers trusted the universal applicability of their methods, ethnographers were showing great concerns towards the inappropriate projection of their knowledge on a scale greater than that of their case study. (e.g., Comaroff & Comaroff, 2003: 168-169) More generally, post-modernism was leading social scientists to question the ethno-centric assumptions of dominant theories. Modellers proved far less hesitant than social scientists at claiming interdisciplinary goals and methods because their knowledge framework prevented them from identifying their pitfalls.
<55> Can international research collaboration avoid the trap of the kaleidoscopic brokerage configuration? Perhaps, if the consortium exchanges collaborators within long term stays at each other’s institutions. A research director interviewed for this article considered that one year probably constituted a minimum time span for such an exchange to be really meaningful and to lead to cross-fertilization. This form of brokerage emerged within a very specific, donor induced environment. It will last only as long as it succeeds in capturing donor funds. A change in the demand from the donor may bring an end to the kaleidoscope as a successful form of brokerage. But another form will emerge so long as research is funded on the basis of projects with a definite life span. Brokerage is an interface that cannot be avoided in such a context.
<56> The phenomenon of development brokerage is so widespread within water research that more questions need to be asked concerning its role in the rise of important hegemonic concepts within water management. The idea of Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM) has risen to a very high status, yet several studies demonstrate that other forms of water management can be extremely successful. (Ruf, 2005) IWRM is compatible with a management approach where an entire set of large infrastructure is planned at once. Clear economic interests have vested stakes in a form of water management that will encourage this. How have the interactions between researchers, donors and development brokers contributed to the ascent of IWRM and to the surprising silence of its detractors? This issue deserves to be explored in the future.
<57> The kaleidoscope of brokerage is especially successful at disseminating the discourse it produces. Its members invite each other at conferences and courses they organise. This allows them to showcase their project for the benefit of the donor while cultivating the links among them in order to reconstruct a new kaleidoscopic configuration within the next call for projects. Their various contributions are perceived as non-threatening because they cannot challenge each other’s knowledge framework. The discourse on water management is therefore restricted by this brokerage configuration and then perpetuated by the dissemination practices necessary for its success.
<58> Technologies and scientific theories never impose themselves because they are intrinsically more efficient or truer than others, but rather because groups that prove to be dominant succeed in imposing them. (Latour, 1987) Understanding the present hegemonic discourse on water management requires us to explore the struggles among the groups who compete to determine its construction. The mechanisms involved in development brokerage within water research constitute an element of this struggle. Investigating them allows us to decipher better the social construction of science. It also allows us, more crucially, to question many concepts that are now presented as ‘black boxes’ within the scientific discourse on water, as unquestionable, objective facts. It allows us to recognize them for what they are: social constructs, and to consider alternative options.
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Notes
[1] Most anthropologists use pseudonyms to refer to the persons they study. This practice is followed throughout this article. Identifying the exact protagonists would not serve any useful purpose because our research aims to uncover the social mechanisms in which they are embedded; it does not aim to judge or attribute blame to individuals. [^]
[2] The delivery constraint is the compulsion of disbursing the amounts a donor is committed to spend within the agreed schedules. This constraint can sometimes constitute one of the major driving forces of water development. (Trottier, 2000: 197) [^]
[3] This emerged clearly from an interview of a retired official who spent several years heading a donor office where he channelled aid to the Palestinians. He laughed when I asked whether he thought Mr. H.’s NGO had any scientific value. This was not, he said, his main concern at the time. Finding Palestinian organizations that worked on the environment and accepted to work with Israelis was challenging. Mr. H. came in-person, knocking on his door and offered material that matched the donor’s needs.
This also emerged from declarations made by Mr. H. himself. He liked to repeat that about 5% of what he would say was not scientifically accurate because he was an activist before he was a scientist. He made this declaration publicly, for example, at the water conference held in Bir Zeit University in 1999. Of course, he would never point out which of the information, in his discourse, belonged to the 5% of activist-driven inaccuracy. [^]
[4] The Oslo agreements divided the West Bank and Gaza Strip into "A," "B" and "C" areas. Only centres of high (Palestinian) population density were designated as "A" areas. These were under Palestinian administration and Palestinian security. "B" areas were under Palestinian administration but Israeli security. "C" areas gathered most of the territory and were under Israeli administration and Israeli security. [^]
[5] We designate here with the term ‘peace business’ any economic activity that has been made possible and profitable by the persistence of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. These economic opportunities would vanish if the conflict were solved. Most of those involved in the peace business claim to strive towards a resolution of the conflict in a variety of ways. Yet, they would lose their job or their business if that professed goal were achieved. [^]
[6] This seems widespread as several researchers interviewed beyond the five case studies mentioned earlier explained that a project submitted to the EU had to include research that was already 80% complete in order to honour the deadlines scheduled for the deliverables. [^]
[7] Modellers will volunteer here that their models can show correlations for statistically relevant data sets, though. This is correct and is the basis for social scientists to explore their data in order to discover variables of confusion. This process is not possible within a model based on causal loop diagrams. Such a model is usually calibrated by comparing its results to actually measured flows. Calibrating a model that has incorporated causal relations that correspond to non-necessary and non-sufficient relations is impossible. [^]
[8] The term appropriation is much wider than allocation. Appropriation occurs via several modes that include representation of the resource, access modalities, transmission of access modalities, uses and allocation. Significantly, modellers systematically use allocation, appropriation, demand, needs and uses as synonyms. [^]
[9] Interview of Mr. X., research director within several EU funded research project, 8 Sept 2005. [^]