6 From masqa to ministry

Managerial networks and integrated water management

On November 4, 2011, protesters from a village in the southern governorate of Luxor occupied the main railroad line connecting upper Egypt to Cairo. They refused to depart until the government promised to provide drinking water to their village (Pollick, 2011). Later that month, the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) appointed Kamal al-Ganzouri, a Mubarak-era politician who had served as prime minister from 1996 to 1999, back to his former position. As Prime Minister, al-Ganzouri had championed several controversial large hydroengineering projects to divert Nile water for land reclamation projects in Egypt’s deserts.

Not enough water to drink in a village in southern Egypt, so much water that it can be diverted to large-scale irrigation projects. This contrast between too much and too little hints at the complex politics of water in Egypt.¹ Egypt’s irrigation and drainage systems are among the most extensive in the world and depend almost entirely upon the Nile River and its renewable aquifer. Egypt’s seemingly Malthusian combination of relatively fixed water supplies, a growing population, and increasing consumption have long attracted international attention and domestic intervention in the water sector.

Managerial networks have sought to restructure the governmental and social institutions that govern flows of water in line with global trends in water management. Neoliberal reforms adopted in the agricultural sector in the 1980s deepened expert and international engagement in pushing for restructuring of the water-agricultural sector. Since then, Egyptian water experts and international donors have increasingly employed discourses emphasizing demand-side management, efficiency and conservation, and increased participation of agricultural users in the management of water supplies. By the 2000s, these various policy approaches were increasingly subsumed into an expert discourse of integrated water resource management (IWRM).

To a greater extent than other policy domains analyzed in this book, managerial networks have envisioned remaking Egypt’s irrigation and drainage systems in their entirety. Managerial networks sought to implement new paradigms of water management through a series of donor-funded projects that combined investments in physical infrastructure and technology with new forms of social organization, such as users’ associations, and institutional restructuring of the governmental bureaucracies involved in water distribution and treatment. These projects, implemented over several decades, translated generic discourses about demand management, water conservation, and integrated resource use into geographically and administratively specific pilot areas that have been gradually expanded outwards. In implementing these long-term interventions, water experts gained concrete information about how complex systems of water use and reuse are used in practice. Often gathered in hindsight, these findings showed a consistent mismatch between many of the informational assumptions and administrative routines employed by central government ministries, on the one hand, and the coping mechanisms of diverse water users, on the other.

Drawing on this consistent mismatch between existing practices of users and the policy prescriptions of experts, I argue that one of the central conundrums encountered in attempts to remake Egypt’s irrigation and drainage is a lack of infrastructural authority, that is, a lack of cooperative and trust-inducing linkages between local state representatives and small-scale cultivators. National water institutions are preoccupied with generalized water scarcity and managing the water system as a whole in a centralized fashion, while most small-scale farmers are left to access flows of water that may or may not be adequately supplied by the Ministry of Irrigation (Hopkins, 2005: 4). The result, as Hopkins argued, is two parallel systems of water management—the official, governmental realm of national planning, to be implemented by irrigation and agriculture officials at a variety of scales, and the often unofficial, customary, and widely recognized practices used by many small-scale farmers to ensure adequate supply (Hopkins, 2005).

Managerial networks of water experts have further been unable to counter the influence of privileged water users in agribusiness, tourism, and industry. These actors create demands that central water institutions are forced to satisfy in a reactive manner. While managerial networks have embraced discourses of decentralization, conservation, and efficiency, many governmental initiatives and priorities work in the opposite direction. These include a focus on large-scale land reclamation and domestic subsidies on various crops.

These developments are analyzed as follows. The next section provides an overview of Egypt’s water situation, focusing on the supply and demand for freshwater, sources of pollution and contamination, and the regional and domestic constraints on further increasing Nile extractions. I then turn to the evolution of discursive framings about water management, exploring how the liberalization of Egypt’s agricultural sector in the 1980s prompted managerial networks to advocate for user participation, cost recovery, and new methods of distributing irrigation supplies. By the 2000s, many participants in managerial networks had subsumed these approaches into the idea of IWRM. Egyptian water experts were active participants in diffusing the idea of IWRM in domestic planning documents and regional fora, but faced significant difficulties implementing these ideas within the Ministry of Irrigation or across government ministries. The limits of applying IWRM to Egyptian governmental planning are aptly illustrated through a discussion of the Mubarak regime’s promotion of large-scale land reclamation projects.

The last sections of the chapter examine the disconnects between top-down interventions to decentralize resource management and the realities of how most cultivators experience and react to these central directives and interventions. I focus here on attempts by water experts to limit the amount of rice cultivated in the name of conserving water, on initiatives to create user associations, and on the creation of integrated water management districts. In all three cases, infrastructural authority proved lacking to various degrees, as did enabling legal frameworks and discursive framings that would mesh with the needs and experience of small users.

Overview of Egypt's water situation: distribution, pollution, and scarcity

While Egypt’s water situation is often reduced to a discussion of water scarcity and population growth, the water sector is more accurately approached in terms of evolving, complex systems of distribution, use, reuse, and contamination, operating within an overall constraint of limited physical supply, a changing economic structure, and increasing population. Egypt’s water sector is also more correctly a water-agricultural sector. As in most countries, agriculture is the largest sectoral consumer of water, accounting for 86 percent of total water distribution, with 6 percent consumed by municipalities and 8 percent by industry (Ministry of Water Resources and Irrigation, 2005b: 10).

Water experts at the Ministry of Irrigation face an intricate political problem of how to distribute and treat flows of water amidst multiple demands and myriad sources of pollution. The irrigation system delivers Nile water through 31,000 km of state-owned canals and 80,000 km of privately owned field channels, supplemented by groundwater pumping from renewable and non-renewable groundwater aquifers, to cities, fields, and industries (Abu Zeid, 1995: 39). An equally extensive system of 18,000 km of drainage canals and 450,000 km of subsurface drainpipes carries agricultural wastewater out to the northern lakes and the sea (ibid.).

The management of this irrigation-drainage system has long been the purview of Egypt’s Ministry of Irrigation.² Distribution of irrigation water was based primarily upon water quotas distributed hierarchically downward through a series of delineated geographic-administrative areas, from irrigation directorates, to inspectorates, to districts (Khouzam, 1994: 3.3–3.4). As the country was divided into irrigation districts, cultivated areas were also mapped onto distinct drainage districts. Drainage networks provide another source of water for farmers to access water when freshwater supplies are late or inadequate.

Renewable water resources constitute 96 percent of Egypt’s total water resources and are largely limited to the Nile River and aquifers recharged by the Nile. The 1959 Sudan–Egypt water sharing agreement for the Nile granted Egypt 66 percent of the annual Nile flow and Sudan 22 percent, with the rest consumed by evaporation in Lake Nasser and the need for sufficient flow for navigation, power, and ecosystem functions. Egypt fully uses its share of Nile water, and the Nile Valley and Delta are considered a closed river basin, with very little unused freshwater reaching the sea. During periods of high rainfall in the Ethiopian highlands, and amidst ongoing civil strife in Sudan and Ethiopia, Egypt has been reportedly able to use an additional amount of Nile water, estimated to range between 3 and 5 billion cubic meters.³

As shown in Table 6.1, Egypt’s annual consumption has exceeded its annual renewable freshwater supplies for some time. A significant proportion of current water consumption is met by imports of staple cereals, a source of virtual water (Allan, 2001). Egypt’s Ministry of Irrigation estimated the virtual water embedded in food imports in 2005 at 18.9 billion cubic meters, a source of water that far exceeds all other supplementary sources of supply (Ministry of Water Resources and Irrigation, 2005a). Climatic disruptions and drought led food-exporting countries to impose export bans on rice and wheat during the mid- and late 2000s, leading to escalating food prices on the global market and raising new fears about food security in Egypt and other Middle Eastern countries (Sadik et al., 2011: 2; Woertz, 2011).

Per capita freshwater resources will continue to decline as Egypt’s population is projected to increase from 75.4 million in 2006 to between 94 million and 106 million in 2025.⁴ Combined with increased water demand from all sectors, Egypt’s per capita water availability is estimated to decline from 773 cubic meters per person per year in 2006 to 600 cubic meters per person per year in 2025. Additional supplementary sources of supply include reusing water and limited exploitation of non-renewable groundwater. Significant reuse by farmers goes unrecorded. The government has formally embraced reuse of wastewater to augment water supply, building plants to mix agricultural drainage water with freshwater for irrigation purposes and expanding plans to reuse treated municipal wastewater.

Water pollution constitutes the most immediate problem for most Egyptians as well as for water planners, as it makes water less usable and thereby contributes directly to scarcity. Pollutants, pesticides, fertilizers, and salts accumulate as users reuse water downstream through multiple access points (Elarabawy and Tosswell, 1998: 172). The most significant contributing factor to contaminated water is raw sewage, followed by industrial wastewater, agricultural runoff, and trash thrown in waterways (World Bank, 2005a: 40–1). As a result of inadequate sanitation and increased reuse, water quality in surface canals and shallow underground aquifers diminishes significantly as water moves downstream toward the Mediterranean.

Water pollution has already limited government investment in increasing water reuse in agriculture. By 2004, at least five of twenty-five mixing stations constructed in the Delta to mix drainage and freshwater were unable to be used because of severely polluted drainage water (International Resources Group et al., 2002a: 19). Investment in sanitation systems thus prioritizes cities and towns that discharge directly into surface waters or the upper reaches of drainage canals, in order to maximize possibilities for reuse downstream.

As elsewhere in the Middle East and North Africa, high official coverage rates for potable water and sanitation to the population underreport grave problems with service quality, accessibility, and affordability (Zawahri et al., 2011). Despite significant investments in extending potable water systems, these networks are not adequately maintained, resulting in significant water losses in the distribution networks and contamination of supplies. Periodic water shortages and loss of pressure are experienced in Cairo’s wealthy suburbs as well as in informal areas (Reem, 2008). Drinking water in rural and peri-urban areas is often reported as unusable or contaminated; 20 percent of all childhood deaths in Egypt are attributed to diarrheal diseases caused by inadequate or contaminated water supplies (World Bank, 2005a). Households also report a variety of illnesses from coming into contact with irrigation canals, particularly when these are used as informal solid waste dumpsites (Pollick, 2011). The extensive informal use of drainage water for cultivation, to compensate for periodic water shortages, poses additional public health threats (Salem et al., 2009).

Egypt further faces increasing pressure from upstream riparian states regarding its historically dominant Nile allocation. Ethiopia, Uganda, Rwanda, and Kenya signed a new Nile sharing agreement on May 15, 2010, over the objections of Sudan and Egypt. Upstream states also filed a case with the International Court of Justice to annul the 1959 agreement (Othman et al., 2011: 1935). In the face of increasing pressure from upstream states and rising demand in Egypt, it is likely that discussions will eventually resume on infrastructure projects to harness Nile flow upstream in riparian states.

Demographic pressures, deteriorating water quality, and upstream withdrawals mean that eventually Egypt will have to allocate less water for agriculture. Agricultural production in Egypt largely depends upon reliable supplies of irrigation water and groundwater pumping to access renewable aquifers that are recharged by the river and by “loss” of water from the irrigation and drainage networks. Fully 98 percent of Egyptian agriculture is irrigated with Nile water or pumped from aquifers renewed by the Nile River flow (International Bank for Agricultural Development, 2005: 3). The remainder, as in the oases of the western desert, depend upon pumping groundwater, often from fossil (non-renewable) aquifers, such as the Nubian Sandstone Aquifer System that lies underneath parts of Chad, Sudan, western Egypt, and Libya. It is likely that, as water becomes scarcer, allocations of water will eventually be forced out of agriculture to meet municipal and industrial demands. Yet this shift is socially, politically, and economically costly for many. As we shall see, attempts to “conserve” water in agriculture for other uses often entail significant social costs, which have not been accompanied by compensatory policy interventions in rural areas, such as social insurance or employment schemes.

Water reform initiatives

Liberalizing the water-agricultural sector

The neoliberal restructuring of Egypt’s agricultural sector during the 1980s and 1990s was a major impetus for significant restructuring of the water distribution and drainage systems. Market reforms in the agriculture sector rendered existing systems of irrigation management problematic and, in the view of managerial networks, obsolete. Between 1986 and 1994, the Ministry of Agriculture removed crop area allotments and abolished fixed procurement prices (with the exception of cotton and sugar cane). The ministry stopped issuing centralized directives that dictated what farmers could grow, and at what price, with the exception of several important export crops, such as cotton, rice, and sugarcane. The government also reduced non-tariff barriers to imports and exports, and privatized many state-owned farms. Alongside macro-level policy reforms, the government supported intensification of cropping on existing arable land, disseminating high-yield varieties and subsidizing diesel used in pumping irrigation water to fields.

The liberalization of Egypt’s agricultural sector deepened in the late 1990s with the elimination of Nasser-era property right protections for small-scale and tenant farmers. Rent ceilings on land were lifted, allowing larger landlords to charge what they considered to be market value for their land. While price liberalization policies generally benefited farmers, removing property right protections for small and tenant farmers made sustaining livelihoods difficult for many small and medium-sized farmers (Bush, 2004, 2007).

Average yields on most crops rose significantly as a result of the policy reforms in the agricultural sector (Sadik et al., 2011: 32). For several crops, Egypt already had among the highest cropping intensities and highest yields in the world (International Bank for Agricultural Development, 2005: 3). Rising yields reinforced the government’s commitment to continued agricultural liberalization. Egypt’s experience with the Green Revolution led to similar problems with water pollution, soil exhaustion, and salinization that emerged elsewhere in the world. Government and donors alike, however, continued to hold up agricultural liberalization policies as a model of successful policy reforms.

A liberalized agricultural sector, in which farmers largely chose which crops to grow and prices were market-determined, required a simultaneous liberalization of water, in which farmers would have some say in how much water to consume and when (Hvidt, 1998). As one consultant concluded:

Managerial networks thus argued that overarching institutional reform of the water distribution and drainage systems was needed to sustain gains in agricultural productivity, enhance cost recovery for the irrigation and drainage network, and promote water savings. Cost recovery—that is, shifting some of the costs to farmers for operating and maintaining the lower levels of the irrigation system—was particularly important to Egypt’s water managers. Public financing for operation and maintenance for the irrigation sector amounted to 4 percent of total public expenditures, an amount entirely inadequate to service-deferred investments in rehabilitation, repair, and upgrading of the irrigation and drainage networks. Inadequate investment and funds for operation and maintenance meant extensive water loss in the conveyance and drainage system (World Bank, 2007: 14).

Beginning in 1981, USAID and the Ministry of Irrigation undertook the Irrigation Improvement Project (IIP) in selected areas of the Nile Delta, focused on upgrading the physical infrastructure and the social organization around the tertiary, privately owned canal (masqa) that delivers water to fields from a secondary (or branch) canal. This intervention was based upon field studies of irrigation problems in pilot sites in upper, middle, and lower Egypt (International Resources Group and Development Alternatives Inc., 2003: 5). With the goal of increasing equity in water deliveries and allowing farmers more control over water distribution, the IIP promoted a package of technical and social changes. These included changing the distribution of water from an on/off water rotation, controlled by the ministry’s district irrigation engineer, to a continuous but lower volume in branch canals, controlled by automatic floating gates at the entrance to selected canals; lining and raising the masqa above field level so that each farmer was not required to pump water up into each field (a previous technical intervention had been to “lower” the masqa to make it more costly for farmers to access water and therefore conserve it); and the provision of a single pump to “lift” water from the branch canal at the head of the masqa (Hvidt, 1998).

Along with these changes in physical infrastructure, the project created user associations to own, operate, and maintain the new pump and raised masqa, to schedule irrigation deliveries and manage potential conflicts among users. While not formalized, the “old” system of irrigation already had user associations, “circles” of farmers who rotated access to diesel pumps to lift water from the masqa to their field ditches (Mehanna et al., 1984). Nevertheless, donors and water experts widely viewed the new masqa associations, which included up to 200 farmers, as improving both the efficiency and equity of irrigation water delivery (Institutional Reform Unit et al., 2005: 20). This package of technology improvements paired with the establishment of local user associations was later expanded to other areas of Egypt using World Bank funds, and remains ongoing.

A number of other water-related projects were pursued as part of USAID and other donor supports. All of these projects used the model of tranche funding, where USAID released direct cash transfers to Egyptian governmental authorities when specific policy objectives had been met. The Water Policy Reform Project, one subsector of USAID’s Agricultural Policy Reform Program that ran from 1997 to 2002, for instance, had a budget of US$245 million for cash transfers. The process of developing and certifying specific policy benchmarks to trigger tranche releases was a negotiated process with Egyptian governmental agencies (Keith, 2003). For each programmatic focus, the projects convened working groups of experts and government officials (“policy champions” in the language of USAID’s assessments) to build political consensus around what constituted reasonable benchmarks and feasible implementation plans in the form of small pilot projects (Tczap, 2002). The process of carrying out pilot projects produced a number of suggested modifications for scaling up to larger areas (Ender, 2003).

In addition to project-specific working groups, managerial networks of experts and donors established semi-autonomous units to promote organizational restructuring. These enclaves of reform included an Institutional Reform Unit (funded by the Netherlands) and the creation of the Irrigation Advisory Service (funded by USAID), both within the Ministry of Irrigation. The Irrigation Advisory Service was later transformed into a regular directorate at the ministry charged with overseeing the creation of user associations. The Netherlands also funded a new Groundwater Sector and a Water Quality Unit, to incorporate groundwater resources planning and water pollution issues more fully within the purview of the ministry (International Resources Group et al., 2002b: 11–12).

Integrated water resource management

By the 2000s, managerial networks increasingly portrayed efforts to restructure water institutions in terms of IWRM. Under IWRM, water is to be valued by multiple criteria: as a social necessity, as an economic good, and as an ecological resource. In other words, management institutions need to consider how to balance the imperatives of consuming water for people, for food, for nature, and for other uses (Jønch-Clausen, 2004: 7). Balancing these needs is to be accomplished through cross-sectoral, coordinated planning at the level of state institutions; involvement of multiple stakeholders in water decisions; and the promotion of participatory, decentralized systems of water management.

Over the past two decades, IWRM has become the dominant approach to water management among professionals, development agencies, international donors, and government ministries (Conca, 2006). Adopted by participating countries at the Johannesburg World Summit on Sustainable Development in 2002, IWRM was seen as the new paradigm for water management, even though many of the central ideas had been in circulation for two decades. Nevertheless, as Conca noted, by the time of the summit “a large professional community of water knowledge experts had crystallized around the concept, promoted it vigorously, and enjoyed increasingly robust transnational linkages in doing so” (Conca, 2005: 450).

Top officials at the Ministry of Irrigation emerged as the principal exponents of IWRM in Egypt during the 1990s and 2000s. With the appointment of Mahmoud Abu Zeid as Minister of Irrigation in 1997, a post he held until 2009, the pace of administrative decrees pushing forward various aspects of IWRM accelerated (International Resources Group et al., 2002a: 26). Egyptian experts promoting IWRM argue that Egypt’s freshwater should be reserved for uses that extract the highest value per unit of water.⁵ Faced with constant requests to allocate Nile water for new activities, managerial networks would like government ministries to evaluate new industries, cities, and economic activities in terms of potential water demand.⁶ These experts envision requiring new development activities to employ water conservation measures and be required to provide their own supplemental water supplies (through water harvesting, desalination, and other means). From the perspective of other governmental ministries, however, IWRM further reifies the important distributional and planning role of the Ministry of Irrigation vis-à-vis other governmental authorities, and gives water experts a more decisive role in development decisions.

By 2005, the discourse of IWRM was formally adopted as the basis for Egyptian water planning. The Ministry of Irrigation issued an “Integrated Water Resources Management Plan,” formulated with the assistance of the World Bank (Arab Water Council et al., 2005; Ministry of Water Resources and Irrigation, 2005a). In the Arab world at the time, only Jordan, Tunisia, Yemen, and Palestine had similar plans, also devised with international assistance (Arab Water Council et al., 2005: 2–3). Attempts to integrate water resource planning were also undertaken at the subnational level; with support from the EU Commission, the Egyptian organization CEDARE undertook an integrated water plan for the city of Alexandria.⁷

Regional diffusion of IWRM

While seeking to promote IWRM through national planning documents, Egyptian water experts also diffused notions of IWRM through regional and transnational fora. Egypt’s Ministry of Irrigation was one of three organizations that founded the World Water Council in 1996, along with the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) and the multinational firm Suez-Lyonnaise des Eaux (Conca, 2005: 452). The World Water Council was to serve as a forum for networks of water experts to influence policymaking and international debates. As of 2011, the Council counted 300 organizational members from fifty countries.⁸ Egypt and the Arab states more generally are well represented in the governance structure of the Council. Of the thirty-one elected members of the Board of Governors in 2011, seven were water experts from the Middle East; in comparison, the United States had four representatives. Egypt’s former Minister of Irrigation, Mahmoud Abu-Zeid, served as the elected President of the Council up through the World Water Forum in 2000.

IWRM was further spread in the Arab world through multilateral institutions such as the World Bank and the UNDP. The UNDP, from its regional office in Beirut and country offices in nineteen Arab countries, sponsored a regional support program to promote the principles of IWRM in the Arab world (Arab Water Council et al., 2005). Abu Zeid and others further established the Arab Water Council in 2004, a regional forum structured along similar lines to the World Water Council and endorsing a similar technocratic approach, to promote IWRM in the Arab world. This regional council emphasized maintaining “a multi-disciplinary, non-political, professional, and scientific manner,” as noted on its website.⁹ It held meetings, generated publications, and undertook project work. In 2008, the council sponsored the Arab Water Academy, a regional executive training center on water issues headquartered in Abu Dhabi’s Environment Agency. Funded in part by the World Bank, USAID, and the Islamic Development Bank, the academy’s goals were to “accelerate the shift from a focus on water supply augmentation and direct service provision to integrated water management and service regulation.”¹⁰ As of 2011, the Arab Water Council’s executive committee remained dominated by a handful of Egyptian water experts. Mahmoud Abu Zeid served as its president, Muhammad ‘Abd alDa’im as secretary-general, and Khaled Abu Zeid, Mahmoud’s son and a water engineer, as treasurer, while one of the executive committee members was the current Minister of Irrigation in Egypt, Husayn al-‘Atfi.¹¹

Egyptian water experts, along with international donors, have thus been at the forefront of promoting IWRM in international fora and at home. Yet as Conca has argued, the technocratic precepts of integrated water resources management belie the fundamentally contentious nature of water management (Conca, 2006). As a set of generic policy prescriptions, the discourse of IWRM offers little guidance for actors tackling the profoundly political task of restructuring water management. The participants in Egypt’s managerial water networks are typically irrigation engineers. Their background and training prepares them to think about water management in terms of physical infrastructure, and they view implementing integrated resource management as a top-down exercise in reconfiguring constituent parts of a system.

The director of the Ministry of Irrigation’s institutional reform unit, whom I interviewed in 2008, typified the engineering background and technical Weltanschauung (worldview) of participants in managerial water networks. Hired in his retirement as a consultant to promote IWRM within the Ministry of Irrigation, his career spanned the principal areas of focus for managerial networks in the water sector. These included the building and rehabilitation of dams and barrages, the promotion of land reclamation, and centralized planning. This official graduated as an engineer in 1962, and spent the following five years working for the Aswan High Dam Authority, first at Aswan and then in Libya on a technical cooperation project. Transferred to the Ministry of Irrigation with the dissolution of the authority, he worked in the section responsible for renovations of Nile barrages and then in the land reclamation division. He then served in the technical office of the minister, as the director of the minister’s office, and as director of the ministry’s planning sector, before retiring and returning as a consultant on IWRM.¹²

Implementing IWRM

Applying the general principles of integrated water resource management to the actual conduct of work within the Ministry of Irrigation’s core tasks poses a serious challenge. In 2004, the ministry employed 97,000 permanent employees, mostly distributed in the provinces, and 26,000 temporary staff. The ministry is composed of four main departments, responsible for irrigation, drainage, groundwater, and mechanical operations (i.e. pumped water), respectively. Each of these departments are spatially decentralized to the provinces, and the boundaries are not coterminous across different ministerial departments; for instance, the boundaries of irrigation districts are not the same as those of drainage districts (Institutional Reform Unit et al., 2005: 29). Nor do they correspond to the boundaries of villages and municipalities used by the central government for purposes of central planning and financial transfers from the capital to provincial governments. With the restructuring of the ministry envisioned by managerial networks, leading irrigation officials said that they would need large-scale training programs for thousands of employees (International Resources Group et al., 2002b: 20).

By 2001, USAID and Egyptian irrigation experts began focusing on creating “integrated water management districts” as the most practical means of implementing IWRM within Egypt. The integrated district would, in theory, combine the functions performed by the three ministry departments (irrigation, drainage, and mechanical/electrical) operating at the lowest official level—the district—into one local administrative unit. This unit would aggregate information and take decisions on how best to combine water from different sources and of varying quality. The problem, as seen by consultants working for USAID, was that “the District Engineer focuses solely on irrigation issues, and has little or no management coordination authority to integrate the other aspects of delivery and use, i.e. drainage, groundwater, and rainfall” (International Resources Group et al., 2001: E-1).

The lack of horizontal coordination across district offices for irrigation, drainage, groundwater, and mechanical pumping was compounded by the fact that district employees were primarily supposed to channel information upwards in the irrigation bureaucracy, but did not have autonomy to take local-level decisions. Thus, managerial networks viewed creating integrated districts as an integral step in moving the central ministry towards more decentralized and integrated resource decision-making, by granting district irrigation officials the authority to incorporate non-conventional sources (such as groundwater pumping and drainage reuse) into water balances and deliveries (ibid.). More decentralized yet integrated control of water resources was supposed to increase equity in irrigation deliveries and help alleviate chronic water shortages experienced at the tail end of canals, particularly in summer.

These visions of integrated water reform were predicated on the ministry— whether at the district or the central level—having sufficient control over water resources to make proactive decisions about who receives water. At the national level, this was to take place through inter-ministerial coordination, planning, and consultation; at the district level by empowering and consolidating local-level functions of irrigation employees.

Attempts at inter-ministerial coordination

Implementing IWRM across government ministries at the national level was predictably difficult. To prepare the National Water Resources Plan, adopted in 2005 with project planning to last until 2017, water officials convened a number of inter-ministerial meetings to compile and compare sectoral development plans (International Resources Group and Development Alternatives Inc., 2003). The goal was specifically to involve other major government entities in water planning, including the Ministry of Housing, Utilities, and Urban Communities, which supplies and manages domestic municipal water and sanitation networks; the Ministry of Agriculture and Land Reclamation, which deals with agricultural demand and consumption; and the Ministry of Defense and Military Production, which exerts a de facto first claim over land use and planning. Several participants recalled the process as the first instance where central ministries responsible for various aspects of water supply and water quality engaged in joint agenda setting.¹³

The resulting national plans emphasized four key pillars of IWRM (Kandil, 2003). The plan emphasized managing and coordinating water supply and water demand across sectors, rather than simply within sectors. In practice, this dictum meant coordinating action across central government ministries and within established ministries responsible for resource management. The second principle invoked was decentralizing water management and devolving it to the lowest appropriate level (often termed the principle of subsidiarity), while the related third goal was to incorporate participation by stakeholders. Fourth, national planning documents highlighted the need for financial sustainability, through increased cost recovery, increased role of the private sector in the water sector, and marketization of water where possible.

An inter-ministerial committee and national planning, however, proved inadequate legal mechanisms to foster coordination among ministries accustomed to administering separate planning, budgets, and operations. The creation of high-level inter-ministerial committees had not worked to control industrial pollution (Chapter 3) or establish land use plans for coastal development (Chapter 5). The water sector proved little different. As one water official recalled:

The limits of IWRM: large land reclamation projects

During the late 1990s and early 2000s, as water experts introduced IWRM into Egypt’s national planning documents, leading officials also publicly promoted large-scale state land reclamation projects in the desert. The Mubarak government embraced several new large-scale Nile water diversion projects with much fanfare, including the al-Salam Canal (Peace Canal) in northern Sinai, and the Toshka (New Valley) project in the southwestern desert. The regime invoked a Malthusian crisis narrative in which overpopulation and pollution in the Nile Valley and Delta necessitated the creation of new arable land in the desert for settlement purposes. The government confidently predicted that these projects would increase Egypt’s habitable area from 4 percent to 25 percent of the country’s total.

Given that Egypt already fully used (and reused) its share of Nile water, water experts were tasked with explaining how Egypt could spare more water for crops without tapping more Nile water. Egypt’s then-Minister of Irrigation, Mahmoud Abu-Zeid, became the Mubarak regime’s designated spokesperson for the New Valley project, appearing repeatedly in state-owned media TV and newspaper accounts.

If IWRM is predicated on increasing efficiency of water use, and evaluating tradeoffs between different uses, why did some of Egypt’s leading water technocrats support expansion in irrigation when they had long argued that the agricultural sector needed to conserve water? Most outside hydrologists and social scientists considered these mega-projects a costly and inefficient use of Egypt’s water resources and its limited budgetary resources (Allan, 2001; Ayeb, 2002; Mitchell, 2002).¹⁵ Political scientists speculated that Egypt was maximizing its claim to Nile water by creating facts on the ground (Waterbury, 2002) or that the project was the last-ditch effort of an aging President Mubarak to create a monumental legacy (Mitchell, 2002). As I have detailed elsewhere, critiques within Egypt were also numerous, articulated by hydrologists, engineers, investors, independent journalists, opposition party members, officials, and agrobusiness managers (Sowers, 2011). Many water experts believed, usually off the record, that these mega-projects were unsustainable and would exacerbate distributional conflicts over water. Even the national IWRM reports produced by reform units within the Ministry of Irrigation cautioned against further land reclamation projects. The 2005 Integrated Water Resources Management Plan, for instance, argued that, “by implementing all these measures, in particular all of the planned horizontal expansion projects, the water resources systems has reached its limits of what it can support” (Ministry of Water Resources and Irrigation, 2005a: 20; italics added).

The Mubarak-era mega-projects were excessively grandiose in scope, but the underlying rationales for land reclamation had long been a feature of water discourses and water management institutions in Egypt (Sowers, 2011). In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, British irrigation engineers advocated for basin-wide systems of dams designed primarily to increase irrigated land and agricultural production (particularly cotton) in downstream Egypt (Collins, 1990). Proponents of the Aswan High Dam argued that the stored floodwaters at Lake Nasser would allow large-scale land reclamation in the desert. Over time, the emphasis on distributing water to grow crops was supplemented with the strategic goal of redistributing Egypt’s population away from the “crowded” and “polluted” Nile Valley and into sparsely populated frontier zones (see Chapter 5 for a discussion of the Sinai Peninsula).

Land reclamation and discourses of water conservation

Officials such as Abu Zeid argued for land reclamation schemes through yet another framing, that of water conservation. Egypt could conserve sufficient water in the “old” agricultural lands of the Nile Delta and Valley to free up water for land reclamation. This would be accomplished by upgrading the existing irrigation system through projects such as USAID’s IIP, limiting the cultivation of water-intensive crops such as rice, and shifting from traditional irrigation techniques to water-saving drip and sprinkler technologies. Less publicly, some water experts pointed out that the rapid and largely informal urbanization of the Nile Delta was freeing up irrigation water. The most rapid loss of arable land was around greater Cairo, where approximately 1,040 acres annually were converted from agricultural to urban uses between 1972 and 2003 (Hereher, 2006).

In the name of conserving water and allocating it to higher-value uses, many water experts inside and outside the government thus supported shifting to modern drip and sprinkler technologies. Yet few of Egypt’s numerous small and medium-sized farmers located in the old cultivated lands could afford such capital-intensive, imported irrigation systems. The government thus offered an array of incentives to attract large, capital-rich investors to undertake land reclamation. These incentives included government-financed construction of the irrigation infrastructure to the borders of newly allocated lands, a twenty-year tax holiday, long-term concessions on land ownership, tax exemptions on imported equipment, and guaranteed allocations of irrigation water.

This attempt to conserve water by supporting capital-intensive agrobusiness in land reclamation, however, did not play out as scripted in official speeches and media coverage touting the advantages of mega-projects. In the New Valley, few agrobusiness investors proved willing to invest in areas far from centers of population, transport, and distribution.¹⁶ The few who did so, most notably Prince al-Waleed Bin Talal’s Kingdom Agricultural Development Company (KADCO), encountered an array of practical and political difficulties in creating a profitable agricultural operation. These included insecure property rights, political scrutiny, and problems in growing crops cost-effectively given high temperatures, wind, sand, and other environmental factors (Sowers, 2011).

As noted by many critics of the land reclamation mega-projects, private investors preferred to reclaim land at the fringes of the Nile Delta or Valley. By offering a range of incentives for agrobusiness to engage in capital-intensive irrigation practices, state policy contributed directly towards shifting distributions of land and water to agrobusiness, even as private investors avoided the mega-project lands in favor of lands adjacent to the Nile Delta. Yet these ongoing land reclamation activities, primarily using modern irrigation technologies, created new problems in water consumption and water pollution.

For instance, private land reclamation along the western Delta, using wells to tap groundwater, was extensive enough to draw down aquifers unsustainably and contaminate groundwater. With the creation of a new agrobusiness constituency, the Ministry of Irrigation was requested to extend the Nile irrigation network to these newly reclaimed lands to avoid further groundwater contamination (Ministry of Water Resources and Irrigation, 2007). The ministry, in turn, sought World Bank assistance to finance the infrastructure costs. Thus, the spread of new irrigation technologies supposed to conserve water merely accelerated depletion and contamination of groundwater, requiring further diversions of Nile water to meet newly created agricultural demands for water. As seen in the western Delta, the role of governmental management institutions for water is often reactive— that is, finding water for activities already undertaken.

Infrastructural authority and agricultural producers

As we have seen, managerial networks in Egypt helped create and disseminate new norms of water management regionally and transnationally. They drew up extensive plans for moving towards integrated water management and reframed long-standing state goals for land reclamation in terms of novel discourses of water conservation. Yet they were unable to promote significant inter-governmental coordination around sectoral water planning. Attempts to implement integrated management remained a top-down process that overlooked existing systems of water use and reuse, and the needs and interests of many of Egypt’s small cultivators. In other words, managerial networks lacked the kinds of legal and infrastructural authority necessary to “reach” end-users and incorporate their perspectives effectively into water reform initiatives. In the following sections, we explore several instances where long-standing mistrust and lack of infrastructural authority troubled water reform initiatives.

Informational distortions, cropping patterns, and irrigation supplies

As the agricultural sector liberalized during the 1980s and 1990s, the Ministry of Irrigation could no longer rely on central directives and crop quotas from the Ministry of Agriculture to calculate water demand for different areas. The irrigation ministry calculated water discharges for the main canals based on planning targets supplied by the Ministry of Agriculture. In turn, the ministry’s district engineer (muhandis al-rayy) and local water gatekeeper (bahhar) allocated discharges at pre-set levels to lower-level canals on a fixed rotation schedule (Radwan, 1997: 80–1). With free cropping, however, calculations for irrigation releases depended upon agricultural extension agents acquiring information on cropping patterns from farmers, by direct observation, or by other means. To complicate matters, such information had to be compiled at least two weeks in advance of irrigation needs for releases at the Aswan High Dam to flow through the system.

Farmers typically mistrusted local officials, given the history of commandand-control policies in agriculture, which minimized their incentives to provide reliable information. In addition, each cultivator has an interest in maximizing claims to irrigation allocations under conditions of uncertainty. In field studies, researchers thus found that farmers selectively provided information on cropping patterns to government extension agents, or simply provided inaccurate information. Farmers overestimated the amount under cultivation, reported only a narrow range of principal crops still subject to mandatory quotas from the Ministry of Agriculture, omitted vegetable and fodder crops, and provided no data for the location of crops along canals (ibid.).

These problems in collecting information on actual patterns of cultivation were magnified at the national level through errors in aggregation and inaccurate simplifying assumptions employed at the central offices of the Ministry of Irrigation. For instance, the ministry assumed that canal efficiency in delivering water was 80 percent, whereas field studies conducted by Lutfi Radwan in the late 1990s found a figure closer to 65 percent (ibid.: 83).

Ministry employees recognized that their estimates of local demand and the efficiency of the supply system as a whole were unreliable. At both national and local levels, irrigation officials compensated for informational shortcomings by releasing more water than their estimates predicted. The result was significant flows of excess water through the system. Based on actual patterns of crop cultivation and water consumption in one Delta province, Radwan found that the ministry discharged water 64 percent in excess of crop requirements during the late 1990s (ibid.). Thus, the principal source of “over-irrigation” and excess water flows stemmed from the ministry’s supply practices.

To address this persistent mismatch between irrigation supply and crop demand for water, donors and water experts focused on developing systems to promote information sharing between farmers, the district irrigation engineer, and agricultural extension agents. One such project, for instance, put in place a physical reporting system in pilot areas where agricultural extension agents delivered cropping information to the district irrigation engineer on a bi-weekly basis (International Resources Group et al., 2002b: 12–13).

Alongside efforts to increase direct communication, projects in the water sector supported the deployment of increasingly sophisticated technologies to match irrigation deliveries with actual crop demand for irrigation authorities at various levels. These included funding and training to measure water flow (through installing and calibrating meters to measure flow at key inflow/outflow locations), the expanded use of telemetry, digital mapping, and real-time data gathering systems in project areas, and installing computer and database systems in all project areas to store and access data (International Resources Group, 2008: 67). This use of complex data systems in turn required upgrading the skills of local irrigation employees and the budgetary requirements to maintain and upgrade these systems as needed. Retaining staff, many hired on public-sector temporary contracts and at low wages, posed an ongoing challenge even in the areas targeted by donors. These interventions, however, did not address the disconnect between the technologies and forms of knowledge increasingly employed by ministry employees and those used in practice by small cultivators.

Restricting rice cultivation

A lack of infrastructural authority between small-scale irrigators and expert networks has similarly plagued attempts to conserve water by restricting the cultivation of water-intensive crops, particularly rice. Rice is a staple food item in Egypt and a significant source of export revenue. It is also a large consumer of water. In efforts to limit acreage under rice cultivation, the government maintains a host of administrative controls, including a centralized target for the total geographical area under rice production, the imposition of fines for excess cultivation, and export taxes and restrictions. Rice production is banned altogether in areas north of Cairo, and irrigation engineers are entitled to cut off water to areas where they observe excessive rice cultivation, regardless of disruptions to the agricultural sector (Ahmed, 2010).

With renewed investment in the agricultural sector as a consequence of market reforms, and rising prices for rice, the amount of acreage cultivated with rice has expanded rapidly in Egypt in recent decades. Rice is a staple food for most Egyptians, with per capita consumption at 40 kilograms per year (Foreign Agricultural Service, 2010). Rice cultivation provides an important source of rural income, consumption, and export revenue for many Egyptian farmers and companies. Labor-intensive in both the planting and harvesting phases, Egyptian rice commands premium prices in global markets.

Compiling estimates from various government agencies, one study estimated that the area under rice cultivation had risen from approximately 1.40 million feddans in 1995 to 1.77 million feddans in 2008, over a quarter percent increase in acreage for that period (Arafat et al., 2010). Total rice production increased from approximately 4.79 million tons in 1995 to 7.24 million tons in 2008, with yields per feddan increasing from 3.4 tons per feddan to 4.1 tons, making Egypt’s rice producers among the most productive in the world (Othman et al., 2011: 1935).

While seeking to restrict rice cultivation to conserve water, the government also supports keeping domestic rice prices low for domestic consumers and for the state’s food ration programs (Foreign Agricultural Service, 2010: 2). In addition, enough rice must be cultivated in the Delta to control soil salinity and limit saltwater intrusion. Particularly in the northern areas of the Delta, and in old reclaimed lands on the outskirts of the Delta, where seawater intrusion and soil salinization are important issues, rice leaches salt from upper soil layers, enabling farmers to continue cultivation. The government’s total goal for rice cultivation, including the reclaimed lands, is approximately 1.1 million feddans (Arafat et al., 2010).

Since the late 1980s, farmers have faced fines levied by local officials for exceeding their quotas of rice production. These fines, however, were nominal; rural parliamentarians consistently opposed attempts by the Ministry of Agriculture to raise the monetary amounts of the fines. Farmers with all sizes of landholdings have thus consistently flouted these quotas, preferring to pay fines and plant rice. Similarly, when faced with sporadic restrictions on buying domestic rice, Egyptian milling operations have sought to stay afloat by importing cheaper varieties of rice to mill for re-export (Foreign Agricultural Service, 2010).

Periodically, state officials have employed draconian measures to limit rice production. In 1997, as the state’s investment in large-scale land reclamation projects escalated, the then-Minister of Agriculture, Yusuf Wali, informed governors that they were responsible for limiting rice production. That year, growing rice in the governorate of Qalyubiyya fetched LE2,000 per feddan in profit for farmers, while cultivating corn brought a loss of LE500 per feddan. The governor of Qalyubiyya took these directives literally, ordering governorate employees to destroy rice nurseries using bulldozers. As one farmer recalled, the machinery sank in swampy fields, and the local government reportedly did not have the funds to hire enough workers to pull out the rice by hand.¹⁷ The governorate therefore moved to using herbicides to destroy rice nurseries. Approximately eighty feddans of rice nurseries, which would have supplied 800 feddans of rice paddies, were treated before the Minister of State for Environmental Affairs personally intervened.

The passage below is an account of this incident, as recounted by a modest landowner and journalist from Qalyubiyya. The landowner argues that centralized directives (“the paper targets” of bureaucrats) are not informed by knowledge of local conditions. The passage further highlights how even modest landowners draw on personal connections and threats of court action to contest coercive state actions. The landowner recalled:

The same year that the governor of Qalyubiyya tried to destroy rice nurseries with an herbicide, the Ministry of Agriculture formally approved five new types of rice for cultivation in newly reclaimed lands. These varieties, trumpeted the state-owned media, could be grown with modern drip and sprinkler technologies, thereby consuming less water (“Rice Varieties Approved for Toshka,” 1999). State endorsement of rice cultivation in the lands proffered by the new mega-projects, for agrobusiness investors using modern irrigation technologies, acknowledged farmers’ principal contentions: that rice was one of the few crops to tolerate high salinity, cleanse salts from surface soil layers, and produce a profit at the same time.

Recurrent conflicts between agricultural producers and the state over the production of water-intensive crops illustrate well how expert attempts to “conserve” water were often seen as inimical to the interests of many cultivators. Managerial networks based in irrigation institutions lacked infrastructural forms of authority that could have provided avenues for local-level information and cooperation from agricultural producers. The question that has emerged in Egypt’s rice policies—as in its water policies more generally—is not whether to cultivate rice, but who will cultivate it, where, and how.

Managerial water networks have proposed a few alternative “win–win” solutions that would sustain farm income from rice and yet limit water consumption. Several donor-state projects successfully promoted substituting short-duration rice varieties for long-duration strains. Short-duration rice varieties mature more quickly, thereby using less water but attaining similar yields. Farmers used the extra month following the rice harvest to cultivate winter crops, resulting in higher farm incomes. As one USAID report noted, however, the change in cultivation also required that the Ministry of Irrigation shift the timing of water rotations accordingly. “The failure to implement any part of the package,” cautioned the authors, “will result in the absence of measurable water savings” (International Resources Group and Development Alternatives Inc., 2003: 8). Implementing adequate water rotations again brought water experts back to the problem of accurate reporting of cropping patterns.

Government agencies remain unable to gather reliable information on the actual patterns of rice cultivation at different points in time and in different places and, by extension, have only limited knowledge of the amount of water consumed in rice production. One study found that figures for rice acreage varied by 30–40 percent between the Ministries of Irrigation and Agriculture, with the Ministry of Agriculture consistently underestimating cultivation in line with its preferred targets (Hoogland, 2002: 45).

To improve the accuracy of this data, government ministries have sought to use new technologies that bypass the need for communication and direct linkages with agricultural producers. Increasingly, the Ministries of Agriculture and Irrigation have sought to use remote sensing and satellite imagery to determine rice acreage. The findings highlight the gap between official targets and actual rice cultivation. A 2010 remote sensing study of the Delta governorates, conducted at the “urgent request from the Ministry of Agriculture,” found that actual rice acreage exceeded the government’s quotas by 46 percent on average (Arafat et al., 2010).

User associations and participatory management

Water experts sought to manage water consumption not only by restricting rice cultivation and promoting the use of new, capital-intensive irrigation technologies, but also by restructuring decision-making at the lower levels of the irrigation system through the creation of user associations.¹⁹ User associations at the lowest level of the irrigation distribution system emerged in USAID’s Irrigation Improvement Project in the 1980s, primarily to increase farmer participation in the maintenance and operation of small primary canals. By 1994, the Ministry of Irrigation and donors began experimenting with expanding user associations to the branch or secondary canals, which serve large, heterogeneous communities of users, ranging from 1,000 to 10,000 persons. Donor-funded projects focused on holding elections to create “water boards” that would include industrial and municipal representatives as well as agricultural interests. Donor-funded projects at the ministry established hundreds of elected water boards at the branch canal level during the 1990s and 2000s.

These reform efforts focused on creating new participatory institutions, but little attention had been given to how these would mesh with informal systems of gaining access to resources or existing forms of participation. In response to shortages and pollution, cultivators already petitioned local officials, made visits to and conducted sit-ins at local irrigation offices, and sought the intercession of locally influential individuals. Farmers also tried to cope with water scarcity by directly modifying the canals supplying their fields, through expanding offtake canals, installing additional pipes, and other means (Barnes, forthcoming). While most of these measures were formally illegal, farmers preferred to pay the nominal fines imposed by the Ministry of Irrigation rather than let their crops perish. As one official affiliated with the Institute for National Planning observed, “People have informal ways of getting water and other services that they need, and penalties for violations are usually dropped… They can always go through back doors.”²⁰

Incorporating branch canal associations (or water boards) into irrigation decision-making encountered another set of obstacles as well. The first wave of donor projects supporting user associations focused on enabling a central ministry department, the Irrigation Advisory Service, to organize associations, conduct elections, and sign memoranda of understanding between the associations and the Ministry of Irrigation. While managerial networks focused primarily on creating associations, the roles of the local-level employees of the Ministry of Irrigation were not similarly restructured. Elected water boards and district engineers frequently expressed mistrust of the other’s capacities and intentions (Radwan et al., 2006: 18). In surveys and workshops, local officials reported that the role of user associations was primarily to serve the ministry by carrying out mundane, labor-intensive tasks. They argued that user associations lacked technical expertise and, worse, sometimes organized against actions and decisions taken by the ministry itself (ibid.). These actions were viewed as “irresponsible, indicative of users’ ignorance, inexperience, and particularistic interests, rather than as a legitimate function for representatives of community-based organizations.”²¹ As a result, local irrigation officials offered associations almost no opportunity to participate in irrigation decisions, even though the associations had been present in some areas for a decade (ibid.: 12). These findings held across all areas of irrigation decision-making, including maintenance, operation and water distribution, and finance and administration.

State mistrust and suspicion of the branch canal user associations also derived from their formally representative character. While elected members were often from well-connected, wealthy families, ongoing elections produced significant rotations of power. In some branch canals, elections resulted in turnover of two-thirds of the delegates and the leadership.²² Moreover, women sometimes won the seats reserved for municipal representation. These delegates raised issues of water quality that had been considered outside the customary purview of local irrigation officials, and included the accumulation of trash in canals and lack of alternative disposal sites for solid waste and sewage discharge directly to drainage canals. Commonly, these delegates requested funds to repair septic tanks, finance hand pumps, and dig deeper wells to avoid contaminated water supplies.²³

The irony of rotating power in branch canal associations while the Mubarak regime manipulated national and local elections in order to prevent any real rotation of power did not escape either the consultants involved in organizing water user associations or the representatives themselves. As one consultant recalled, “There were lots of sly jokes contrasting the water boards elections with the lack of true elections at the local, parliamentary, and national levels.”²⁴

As a result, attempts to legalize the participatory role of user associations encountered further difficulties at the highest levels of the government. The creation of user associations at the masqa and branch levels was initially authorized by an administrative decree issued by the Minister of Irrigation, and later ratified through changes in law (World Bank, 2004).²⁵ Donors and the Minister of Irrigation sought similar amendments in Law 12 for 1984 to recognize branch canal associations as legal entities, grant them authority to collect fees, and allow them to sanction violators.²⁶ Although work on these legislative amendments began in 1998, they had still not been adopted by Parliament over a decade later.

Thus, while managerial networks regarded user associations as an essential step in moving the irrigation system toward an idealized farmer-managed and demand-driven system, these networks did not initially succeed in endowing associations with sufficient legal or infrastructural authority to facilitate significant participation in water management decisions.

Integrated water management districts: building infrastructural authority?

Water experts and consultants faced similar challenges in establishing integrated water management districts. As with most interventions in the water sector, the idea of an integrated district was tried first in two pilot areas, carefully selected to maximize the chances of success. Project documents noted that the pilot areas should have such desirable qualities as well-trained staff in sufficient numbers, closely coinciding boundaries between existing irrigation and drainage districts, easily monitored in-flow and out-flow points for water flowing through the district, functioning water user associations at masqa and branch canal levels, and the improved masqa infrastructure associated with the Irrigation Improvement Project (International Resources Group et al., 2001: 2–4). Inversing these ideal attributes suggests challenges that managerial networks encountered as they sought to replicate the integrated district outwards from the two chosen pilot districts.

Field surveys of the pilot districts brought to light the extent to which local agricultural producers had already intervened to address water scarcity and inequity in supply, one of the primary rationales for creating integrated districts. These surveys found that many farmers, particularly at the tail ends of canals, had invested in shallow groundwater wells to supplement inadequate surface-water flows in canals, dug illicitly without permits from the Ministry of Irrigation (ibid.). These were in addition to deeper wells operated by the ministry to supplement canal deliveries at peak demand times.

As in the agricultural policy reform projects, Egyptian and American water experts convened working groups and ongoing workshops with leading ministerial officials and water experts to find mutually agreeable blueprints for a new integrated district. This “markaz water resources office” was to combine irrigation, drainage, and pumping functions in a district office employing an estimated 270 staff (ibid.: 4–6). Experts also drafted the text of ministerial decrees to legally authorize the creation of the district entities.²⁷ As of 2008, twenty-seven integrated water management districts had been established with 600 branch canal user associations, covering 15 percent of Egypt’s arable land (United States Agency for International Development, 2011).

A 2008 USAID assessment report attributed the relatively rapid spread of integrated districts to lessons learned from previous interventions. Bypassing the central Irrigation Advisory Service (itself created as part of the original Irrigation Improvement Project), the USAID-funded LIFE Integrated Water Resources Management project (2004–8) worked directly with district employees in the newly formed integrated districts. These district-level officials were trained to establish branch canal user associations and then undertake a phased process of participatory irrigation management. That is, rather than overlooking the employees of the local state, later donor-governmental projects incorporated them as the main conduits to “reach” local users.

The decision to focus on district-level linkages between the irrigation authorities and agricultural users allowed managerial networks to shift their focus from intensive investment in a few pilot areas that represented ideal but unrepresentative features. Instead, later phases of the project provided technical assistance to all integrated districts and user associations but without direct financial transfers. The 2008 assessment argued that this approach allowed “the water users to partner with ministry staff to provide improvements in water delivery services, system maintenance, water quality, conflict resolution, and communications and information exchange” (International Resources Group, 2008: 59). The branch canal user associations and integrated districts jointly planned the rotation schedule for water deliveries. The involvement of the elected association in planning irrigation schedules provided farmers an incentive to provide more accurate information on cropping patterns. Because the user associations took part in substantive irrigation decisions, they were better able to serve as intermediaries between agricultural producers and the Ministry of Irrigation. The ministry also authorized the elected councils of the water boards to deal directly with farmer complaints and conflicts, seeking to diminish the practice of irrigators directly petitioning district engineers. By taking their concerns to the water boards, farmers could also bypass the mistrusted and often hated local police presence (ibid.).

The measures required to build infrastructural authority between branch canal associations and local-level ministry staff also highlighted the difficulties in sustaining these linkages. USAID provided extensive financing to train and upgrade the skills of employees in the integrated district. Retaining qualified personnel at the project’s conclusion thus faced the same obstacles as encountered elsewhere in Egypt’s sprawling public sector. Many competent district engineers were hired on temporary contracts, resulting in frequent turnover of trained staff and shortages of trained employees. As discussed in previous chapters, similar problems emerged in retaining experienced rangers in protected areas and keeping environmental experts at the environmental affairs agency (ibid.: 64).

Similarly, the Ministry of Irrigation had no provisions to meet the increased financial requirements of operating integrated districts, inspectorates, and directorates. As in dealing with pollution control issues at state-owned factories, the de facto stance of the Egyptian government was that these issues of financial sustainability would continue to be met through injections of external assistance on a project-by-project basis. In 2009, USAID met these expectations, starting funding for the LIFE Integrated Water Resources Management II project. The project, funded for 2009–12, was to expand the model of the integrated water resource district throughout the eastern portion of the Nile Delta.²⁸

Conclusion

Managerial networks have remade the constellation of key ideas and practices that constitute the “nature” of Egypt’s water-agricultural sector, promoting new technologies and practices (the irrigation improvement project), new forms of social organization (user associations), and new administrative routines and organizations (the integrated water district). Since the 1980s, these initiatives have been implemented by quasi-autonomous reform units within the Ministry of Irrigation or through donor-funded projects staffed by Egyptian water experts and external consultants. Discursively, these interventions have been framed in terms of decentralization, efficiency, participation, demand management, and integrated resource management.

While these efforts improved water delivery, established water user associations, and upgraded the physical infrastructure across some of Egypt’s agricultural lands, only recently have some of these initiatives begun to establish forms of infrastructural and legal authority that may prove to be substantively more participatory, decentralized, and integrated. These efforts to build cooperative linkages with cultivators in selected areas contrast with other ongoing state initiatives, such as coercively limiting rice cultivation.

Most expert initiatives have focused on intervening, often quite directly, in the communities of cultivators that are widely held to constitute the major source of water demands. Policy initiatives that restructure who receives water, who can cultivate which crops, and where and how water will be conserved have often been designed and implemented without sufficient knowledge of existing, informal systems for accessing and distributing water, and in the absence of infrastructural authority that would provide the kinds of local-level information and cooperation needed to address these gaps in knowledge and practice.

Interventions focused solely on agricultural producers tend to downplay water demands from a host of other actors and sectors that generate water demand in addition to small-scale agriculture. Government policies on trade, energy, industrialization, and land markets, which shape patterns of water consumption, have been largely left unaddressed (World Bank, 2007). As we saw in the case of the western Delta, agrobusiness interests have been largely shielded from problems of water quality or scarcity.

Instead, experiences of shortages and poor water quality have been decentralized and disaggregated, in villages with water shortages and inadequate sanitation, in poor agricultural households, and in peri-urban areas without adequate water and sanitation networks. Localized experiences with scarcity and water pollution are not communicated upward in any systematic fashion, and there has been no systemic crisis or institutional breakdown that would prompt more serious policy reforms from the political elite. Despite the assertions of water experts that widespread institutional reform is necessary, political leaderships, government authorities, and provincial officeholders do not see that such reforms are critical. Water reform initiatives have thus been relegated to donor-state projects staffed by managerial networks.

IWRM is a hegemonic discourse of these managerial networks, yet as Conca noted, it is only one of several competing “proto-norms” emerging around water management globally (Conca, 2006). Conca identified the marketization of water (i.e. the pricing of water resources) and the notion of water as a human right as two alternative framings of water issues. Neither of these emerging paradigms for water management has made much headway among managerial water networks in Egypt.

There are several ways in which this situation may change, however. The first is rapid and unexpected resource scarcity, such as the record-low Nile flows from drought that occurred in the late 1980s. Sustained drought in Israel and rapid drawdown of Saudi Arabia’s fossil aquifers sparked significant policy interventions to limit agricultural consumption of water. In Egypt, however, far larger numbers of people depend directly upon the agricultural sector for consumption, livelihoods, and income, which makes the stakes for adapting to natural fluctuations in water flows very high. For precisely this reason, the existing water infrastructure helps mitigate the variability of flood and drought relatively effectively, dampening the feedback from physical resource change.

Perhaps more likely in the wake of the 2011 uprising is the amplification of demands for more accountability and equity in the provision of public goods in the water sector. The idea of water as a fundamental right, with implications for equity and justice, is the norm in use by the vast majority of Egypt’s water users, particularly those in the agricultural sector. While this widely shared norm is often lamented by donors who promote marketization (particularly pricing) of water supplies, it also offers a different basis on which to think about integrated water management. In other words, IWRM’s notions of water efficiency, demand management, and participation would benefit from being grounded in a framework of social rights to water. This shift in discursive authority would suggest greater attention in identifying ways in which actual users are deprived of water and suffer from water pollution. A focus on water rights, then, suggests different kinds of interventions in constructing legal and infrastructural authority around water. A shift toward thinking about—and managing—water as a social right, however, will most likely not be proposed from above, but demanded from below.