Paper short abstract:

How can leadership in mitigating water scarcity be encouraged in India? Contextual diversities and inequalities are important to understanding leadership There is lack and lag in policy emphasis on it. Evidence-based water policies requires leadership of policymakers, scientists and practitioners.

Paper long abstract:

How can leadership in mitigating water scarcity be encouraged in India? The research aims to explore this through assessing - whose leadership? On what aspects of water scarcity? and how is it shaped in India? To address these questions, the research draws on three studies on water resources governance and management carried out in 2011-2019. First explores the knowledge-governance gap on water scarcity mitigation. Second engages with the extent of women's participation in river and water management. Third studies developmental organizations' role of representing vulnerable to disaster risk. The three studies indicate that there is a slow pace at which leadership of decentralized state agencies (study 1), women groups, specifically indigenous women (study 2), and communities (study 3) is shaped in these specific contexts rather than a lack of leadership. This slow pace reflects a lack of policy emphasis on it, socio-cultural diversity and inequalities which is unique to Indian context, and power relations among different stakeholders (state, community, and civil society organizations). Lack of policy emphasis is inferred from policies not explicitly recognizing leadership as a priority in mitigating water scarcity. The research argues that leadership is weakly adequate to address the contextual diversities and inequalities in access use, and management of scarce water resources. Second, leadership of communities in environmental change is essential in the context of India, however, heterogeneity, and power relation in communities is often not understood adequately. Third, for formulating and implementing evidence-based water policies leadership of policymakers, scientists and practitioners is needed.

Paper short abstract:

Land as a vital factor of production has limited supply and opportunity cost in terms of its acquisition and usage. How peacefully has land been used, and what does this portend for Leadership and Nigeria?

Paper long abstract:

Land as a vital factor of production has limited supply and opportunity cost in terms of its acquisition and usage. In Nigeria, the choices for land use are between productive and social purposes, with each choice having attendant different economic results. How peacefully has land been used, and what does this portend for Leadership and Nigeria? Land users have competing needs and choices, leading to clashes. Most rural lands in Southern Nigeria are for farming because of the fertile soil and the agrarian culture of the people. The herders from Northern Nigeria crave grazing land and have found the Southern lands attractive and thus migrate en mass with their animals from the North to the South, destroying crops and farmlands as they go, leading to incessant deadly clashes with trails of blood. The Southern Farmers have defended their lands, but the herdsmen also lay claim to the right to land as co-citizens. The Nigerian Leadership who has had no specific answers to these clashes finally came up with a grand idea to provide grazing areas for the herders all over Nigeria, but this has been rejected as a ploy to steal Southern peoples land for the Northern herders. Is this a failure of Leadership in land control? How can the impasse be resolved? These are what this study set out to determine.

With the limited existence of literature in land leadership in Nigeria, this qualitative study deployed field interviews and Focus group Discussions on which the study's recommendations rest.

Paper short abstract:

This paper seeks to to do a close reading of land dispossession and breakdown of traditional leadership structure of the indigenous communities of Attappady Hills, Kerala which has not been replaced by alternate governance.

Paper long abstract:

Land dispossession is part of the embodied memory of the recently settled indigenous communities in the Attappady Hills among whom settler population is numerically preponderant. Encroachment among those in the fringe areas of the forest continue despite laws to protect them and the loss of commons has impoverished these communities. The loss of land is accompanied by the collapse of their local governance structures. This paper seeks to provide insights into the implementation of environmental governance in this Western Ghats region by strengthening local bodies and building local leadership. This paper uses ethnographic methods and content analysis to unpacking the complexities over weakening local institutions. It suggests a grounded approach in development practice to strengthen leadership and protecting the commons.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores how the leadership of small-town Dhulikhel, Nepal overcame water insecurity through the development of governance and management strategies without state support, to exert and develop systems of control over local resources and to maintain these systems for water security.

Paper long abstract:

Nepal hill towns face unprecedented water scarcity due to rapid population growth and escalating demands for domestic and other uses of water. Traditional local sources are proving inadequate to meet these growing needs. Nepal has a long history of community-led management over local resources. To overcome increasing water insecurity, local communities have had to evolve and develop governance and management strategies without state support, as the Nepali state lurched from crisis to crisis. Control over local resources, and demonstration of effective provision skills and strategies, were strong factors in the development of local political capital and success amongst local leaders. In post-earthquake Nepali politics these local adaptations strategies have been turned into 'formal' political capital through the advent/reintroduction of local elections, and the re-appearance of the 'formal' state. These developments extend our understandings of formal/informal regulation of natural resources and the ways in which scarcity and crises provide windows of opportunity that leaders may recognise and use. We examine these dynamics specifically through the Dhulikhel Drinking Water Supply Project, which is widely perceived as one of the most successful community-governed drinking water projects in the mid-hills towns of Nepal. The project sources its water through negotiated agreements between upstream rural communities and the downstream town. These negotiations and formal agreements are also rich sources from which to investigate how negotiations over natural resources are guided by social and political contexts and leadership forms, wherein socio-political landscapes and pressures challenge the stability of water provision arrangements.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explains failed attempts by the Ghanaian state to clamp down on ASM. It argues that Ghana's competitive political configuration and the patron-client networks of ASM operatives shape the state's penchant to clampdown on ASM and its repeated failure in doing so.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explains the conflictual relations between the Ghanaian state and artisanal and small-scale miners (ASM).

Despite Ghana's democratic consolidation, the state clamps down on its ASM sector with little or no success contrary to our theoretical priors.

The paper argues that Ghana's competitive political configuration and the patron-client networks of ASM operatives respectively explain the state's penchant to clampdown on ASM and its repeated failure in doing so.

The country's competitive political configuration affords Large Scale Mining (LSM) companies significant 'holding powers' with which they play one political authority against the other and, thus, shape the state's clampdown measures. These measures then, seemingly, guarantee the protection of LSM investments against invasion by ASM operatives.

Moreover, the existing political configuration implies that governments choose clampdown policies for instrumental reasons. First, the mass media campaign against ASM-induced environmental degradation increases incumbents' risk of future electoral defeat, making clampdown measures preferable.

Second, clampdown measures become subtle means by which incumbents weaken the financial base of opposition via targeting ASM operatives deemed to be opposition financiers.

This half-hearted manner in which governments clamp down on ASM, to a lesser extent, explains why such clampdown strategies fail. More importantly, however, artisanal miners undermine clampdown measures through their complex web of patronage networks with a host of powerful sub-national actors, including traditional authorities and special security task-force charged with clampdown responsibilities.

This argument sheds light on the political settlement, state-business relations, and patron-client relations pieces of literature.