Double-Edged Hydropolitics on the Nile - Center for Security Studies ...

Driving forces and patterns of water policy making in Egypt
more smoothly than socio-economic interventions. Supply-side management
remains the most obvious priority for many water sector representatives. The
prominence of technological options to increase water supply (e.g., desalinization)
and upstream water development project (e.g., diversion canals in the
Sudan) in the long-term planning visions – relative to non-technical demand
management approaches – indicates the inclination of the water sector to apply
routine solutions to evolving challenges. Furthermore, the limited influence
of environmental departments within different ministries and of the environmental
ministry itself leads to a notorious marginalization of environmental
policy targets – ranging from water quality control to protection of ecosystems
– in the design and even more in the implementation of water policy.
Quite obviously, the institutional reform plans of the MWRI, though
rationally designed to increase the efficiency of operations and foster financial
sustainability, face internal resistance in an organization mainly geared towards
the centralized provision of water services. Reforms potentially threaten the
positions of MWRI employees at district level, reshuffle the power relations
among the MWRI departments and among ministries, and to a certain extent
challenge the overall political fabric of state-citizen relationships. The
difficulties in coordinating different functions of ministerial actors or MWRI
departments both at the local level and in the design of national policies indicate
that the logic of organizational routine thinking often prevails over the ‘rational’
design of ‘ideal’ institutions. Initiatives to foster participatory planning and
decision-making have been only partly successful to date because they deviate
too far from a political system that neither encourages self-organization of
stakeholders at the local level nor favors the establishment of vocal civil society
organizations that could effectively promote the interests of water users.
Governmental politics
Policy outcomes regarding different water management issues depend to a
critical degree on the way the interests of a wider range of actors are traded
off, and actions taken by interest groups during the implementation phase.
The horizontal expansion in the West Delta is an example of a user-initiated
development that resulted in a major water sector project.
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