Paper short abstract:

The article describes, first, the rise of 'Integrated Water Resources Management' (IWRM) to hegemonic discourse in the sphere of international organizations, and second, the deployment of IWRM in Mali through international development aid. Actor-Network Theory (ANT) is used as descriptive tool.

Paper long abstract:

The unequal distribution of water quantity and quality in space and time burdens the livelihoods of over a billion people on this planet, most of them living in the poorest countries. 'Integrated Water Resources Management' (IWRM) is a normative policy discourse that holds the promise of a holistic management of this unfair distribution. In the early nineties the discourse appeared in the sphere of the United Nations organizations and in two decades time the discourse has gained an apparently hegemonic status in the network of water development actors worldwide.

A multi-sited ethnography traced the flow of the IWRM discourse through the network of development actors and observed its actual deployment in Mali. Both the governmental and non-governmental pathway of deployment were accounted for.

The author harnesses Actor-Network-Theory (ANT) to describe how actors enroll each other into an alliance to make the discourse work. Non-human actors -e.g. the typical aid financing mechanism, a couple of UN reports, or the Niger river- have proven to be important anchorage points for the alliance. The once very strong alliance, however, seems to be disintegrating and actors are compelled to renegotiate IWRM by drawing in climate change.