Beyond the “donor-driven” water sector in southern Africa. Power struggle between bureaucrats in the resourcing of the SADC water sector.

A southern African water sector has been established in the 1980s and has been further institutionalised in the 1990s with the creation of the Southern African Development Community (SADC) (Swatuk 2005; 2017). Due to its member states’ financial constraints, the creation and functioning of this institutional order have been relying heavily on funds from foreign donors, mostly from western Europe and North America. This paper confronts the common knowledge amongst specialists that the SADC water sector is “donor-driven”. If this catchphrase correctly illustrates the structural influence of these donors (Schmeier, Gerlak, & Blumstein 2013; Gerlak & Schmeier 2016), it falls short on two accounts. First, it homogenises the funders with the term of “donor”, thus hiding a struggle between them for the core of the regional water sector. Second, it does not take into account the rise of specialists in the region whose careers are built on this regional order, thus establishing it as a regional bureaucracy (Winsback 2022). Together, they are challenging, as much as working for, the various donor organisations. This proposal is based on data gathered since 2017. It includes 100 biographical interviews with actors involved in the region, archives, and observations made both as an external agent as well as a programme officer for the Global Water Partnership southern Africa, which is the main executive organisation of the SADC water sector. In the first section, this paper highlights the differences in the allocation of funds by the main donors in the SADC water sector. Their differences of focus illustrate a division of the (water) development sector between donors, formally harmonised through the Water Strategy Reference Group (WSRG), an institution initially set up by the UNDP and later inserted within the SADC flowchart. Through a Multiple-Correspondence Analysis (MCA) of all the regional water projects from 1980 to 2020, it is possible to identify and materialise characteristics and specific roles for all these donors, thus contesting a homogenous “donor” category. In the second section, the institutionalisation of a regional bureaucracy of water development will be exposed, focusing on the careers of experts circulating between organisations within the SADC water sector. Observing the trajectory of these agents allows for a comprehensive understanding of the allocation of funds between and within regional organisations in the water sector. This perspective allows for a description of a division of roles within the regional water development sector, illustrating its increasing "autonomisation" (its partial divergence from the agenda of the different donors without constituting a formal emancipation or autonomy). More generally, the institutionalisation process of this regional bureaucracy is characterised by discrepancies in foreign support, forcing regional bureaucrats and member states to invest in it to ensure its stability.