The Water Crisis in Yemen: Managing Extreme Water Scarcity in the Middle East

The array of critical water issues in the Middle East, from supply, quality, and equity to disputes and armed conflict, continues to aggravate governance, food security, development, and peace. “Water wars” are thought to loom significantly in the region's future, with a lack of information about the resource-institution-society nexus in particular complicating work toward viable solutions. Yemen is at the apex of the problem, combining extreme poverty, aridity, scarcity, institutional dysfunction, and societal division to make it the most emblematic of the problem. The book reviewed here, The Water Crisis in Yemen: Managing Extreme Water Scarcity in the Middle East, is significantly important in that it both examines the resource-institution-society nexus of the problem based on the author's decades of experience and focuses on Yemen. The book will be of considerable interest to governments, donors, and NGOs seeking to move forward with effective water policies and programs in the arid Middle East.Material for the book was gathered over the course of two decades, with the original research carried out in the five years just prior to Yemen's Arab Spring uprising in 2011. The book highlights just how critical the water crisis in Yemen is. The author notes that “in no country in the world is the rate of exhaustion of aquifers proceeding so fast,” and “in no county in the world is the capital city of a nation expected to run out of water in the near future” (xxi). While the volume focuses on contemporary water problems, there is an in-depth treatment of Yemen's history with regard to water, and the many ingenious ways the population developed and managed their water resources over the past 5,000 years, often with significant success. Massive diversion, irrigation, and terrace systems once supplied ample food to cities. These impressive water-control systems ultimately failed only when the attendant commercial and political systems also failed. Included in this historical view is a quite robust examination of the economy, religion, demographics, and tribal politics in the different eras of Yemen's history—pre-Ottoman, Ottoman, colonial and independence (south), socialist (south), unification, and contemporary. The book also does a very good job of explaining how Yemen's hydrology functions—including terminology and geography—in a way that is understandable to the nonhydrologist.A large part of the book describes the policies and programs attempted by donors and the National Water Resources Authority (NWRA) in attempts to pursue top-down policies and programs, often with significant local resistance. Such attempts included the application of legislation, technology, capacity building, and international best practices—and these are articulated in detail in the book. In describing the failure of NWRA's and others' top-down attempts to manage water resources, the book highlights a primary institutional dysfunction in Yemen that is important well beyond just the water sector. This is the assumption that state institutions are in a position to effectively influence local behavior through laws, policies, and the enforcement of these measures. In reality, state influence over much of the country through laws and policies is minimal to nonexistent. Instead, influence is practiced through government by various forms of patronage, division, selective alliances, or antagonism with tribal and other groups, and corruption. Thus efforts by donors and some segments of government to establish institutions and craft policies have been largely ineffective in actually managing water resources. And because traditional rules made for managing surface water have proved to be incapable of controlling the proliferation of wells accessing groundwater, there exists an institutional vacuum regarding the ad hoc installation of the enormous number of wells that are rapidly depleting the more easily accessible aquifers.Technology and the nature of groundwater as a resource have also played a role in the development of the current crisis. Technology such as the tubewell, diesel, and electric motors introduced in the 1970s facilitated the development of deeper groundwater reserves, while at the same time groundwater came to occupy a particular economic, social, and institutional space in Yemeni society. Unlike surface water, groundwater in Yemen provided a year-round water resource that was able to feed growing horticultural production. Farmers came to prefer water on their own land that they could control themselves, as opposed to cooperation with upstream and downstream users, which is necessary with surface flow. And because traditional water use rules could not be applied to groundwater, the latter became an “open access” resource susceptible to a variant of the “tragedy of the commons.” As with many cases of open access resource use, the powerful were able to appropriate a considerable amount of groundwater for their own use.The volume describes at length the content and problems of the many attempts to manage water in Yemen and comes to the conclusion that only local-level community organizational efforts will be able to provide solutions to Yemen's water problems. But even this task will be fairly daunting. Poverty, weak local institutions, patronage, and corruption, along with a very high diversity of local situations, will make collective action by local communities quite challenging, as will the widespread process of “resource capture” by powerful actors and constituencies that began during the water boom times and continues. Such actors and constituencies are unlikely to be willing to participate in decentralizing the control of water resources, particularly, as the book notes, in many areas of Yemen “might makes right” is the operative practice. Thus a primary constraint to the book's proposal for decentralization and empowerment of local communities for water-resource management is the impunity of the powerful, and the inability of the state and local communities (but not extremist groups) to confront the powerful. In far-flung communities, with little in the land-water mix that is valuable enough to attract the attention of powerful actors interested in resource capture, certainly local institutions and solutions are best positioned to manage water resources. However, where the land-water mix is valuable, in other words, arable land with sufficient water and proximity to transport and/or market, there is considerable interest in resource capture, and this means the land along with the water. In this regard the broad use of the term “local communities” is perhaps a bit problematic. Certainly the elite within communities and the outsiders who have confiscated the best of the land and water will not likely see themselves as part of the “local community” that will need to work together to manage resources.In this regard the book does not appear to make explicit the connection between the ownership of the over 100,000 wells in the country, and the ownership of the land those wells reside on and provide agricultural water to—including the extensive qat production in the country. The connection between land and water resources is important, particularly given the expropriation of most of the farmland in the south during the socialist period and the extremely poor restitution effort at unification, and then the subsequent widespread confiscations of southern lands by northerners, particularly after the 1994 war up to the 2011 uprisings, and the lack of restitution of these lands.The use of water in patronage networks noted by the book is important. Patronage regarding natural resources such as water and land are tricky things to undo, irrespective of the effectiveness of plans, institutions, and organizations. Before the better ways can be installed, the bad ways need to be undone—and accomplishing this often requires a degree of political will that simply has not existed in contemporary Yemen. Patronage involving water and land resources in Yemen played a significant role in propping up the Saleh government for the more than thirty years it was in power. And the Saleh regime greatly and purposefully exacerbated the competition over scarce resources by using it as a tool to manage tribal relationships.The connection with the patronage involving land in Yemen is illustrative. The best land in the country—that is used in patronage—is of course located where there is water, and the involvement of water in patronage occurs where there is land able to use the water resource. Thus undoing the water-patronage problem would also seem to involve undoing the land-patronage problem attached to it. This has proven quite difficult in Yemen, as illustrated by the extremely challenging work of the Southern Yemen Land Commission that was part of the national reconciliation efforts prior to the Houthi rebellion. This is, in part, because the problem involving land and water in patronage systems is that it comprises layers of patronage. For example, the Saleh regime allocated large tracts of land and the attendant water resources to certain government-appointed shaykhs, who in turn allocated parcels of this land and its water to others who were part of the shaykhs' own patronage system. In addition, land and water resources in southern Yemen were also used by the Saleh regime to absorb the repercussions of land grabbing in the north—with southern arable lands with water used to compensate those who were victims of land grabbing in the north. In order for decentralized water management to occur, it would seem that a good deal of the patronage-based claims on current water supplies, and their associated land resources, would need to be retaken and given back to the local communities who lost them, in order to mitigate the competitive pumping that goes on presently. Without this, local communities are likely to feel very little incentive to conserve or cooperate with those who currently claim local lands and water supplies they consider to be community resources.A related problem with the decentralization proposal is the resolution of the many land and water disputes in the country. Arguably, for the needed cooperation to occur in water management, mechanisms for natural resource dispute resolution would need to be robust. In Yemen, however, land- and water-related conflicts, grievances, confusion, and violence are a primary component of the current instability. The number of people killed over land and water disputes per year rivals those killed in the Houthi conflict, the Southern secession conflict, and al-Qaʿida activities. As of 2011 the proportion of cases in the Yemeni primary courts that concerned land and water disputes was estimated to be between 50 and 85 percent of all cases. This does not bode well for the cooperation needed in water resources management.Nevertheless, decentralization and local community empowerment is likely to be the only real way forward, and the author lays out a fairly comprehensive set of steps that could facilitate better water management. A number of different kinds of water-user associations are described, differing by the type of water resource to be managed. And the author devotes adequate space to delineating how such water-user associations could be improved upon and more widely established. This is a valuable part of the book and will be of considerable interest once the current set of wars in Yemen comes to a close and recovery is possible.The book closes with a final plea for all Yemenis to “work together to mitigate the impacts of inevitable water scarcity. In this, the imperatives are: community-based water management; efficient and sustainable agriculture; equitable inter-sectoral transfer; pro-poor public programmes; and structural shifts to a less-water intensive economy” (359). The trick, however, will be how to move from open warfare, a history of elite resource capture, and institutional dysfunction at the state level to these more pragmatic priorities.

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