Rural Water Management in Africa: The Impact of Customary Institu ...

For example, research has shown that women may be excluded from decision-making bodies due to customary or religious laws, even if state laws prohibit gender discrimination.¹⁹

The multiple legal institutions play a vital role in property rights and natural resource management.²⁰ At the local level, management of water resources may be guided and defined by local or customary laws that may significantly differ from other laws. Religious law can have a great impact on water management in one way or another, even if people appear not to seriously abide with it. Moreover, state laws may comprise different sets of laws that may interact with one another. Likewise, project or donor laws may have an impact on water management.

Thus, management of water resources using statutory institutions is faced with major challenges, such as interest capture by local elites, overexploitation of natural resources driven by the need to create local revenues, inadequate financing (taxation), arbitrarily imposed fees and levies, and lack of human resource capacity at the local level to plan, manage, and implement developmental activities and policies.

1.2. Research Questions and Objectives

The objective of this study is to analyze the impact of customary institutions on rural water management and show how they might be used to complement statutory institutions. I use the Bariadi district, located in northwestern part of Tanzania, as a case study. Institutions are defined as humanly devised rules and norms that structure human interactions. Institutions consist of formal and informal rules and their enforcement mechanisms. Formal rules include written laws and constitutions passed by legislative bodies such as parliament and local government councils. Informal rules include unwritten codes of conduct, norms of behavior and conventions. Enforcement mechanisms include punishment in the case of violation of a particular rule.²¹

Although other scholars have defined institutions as organizations or establishments founded for a specific purpose based on a set of working rules,²² it is important to distinguish between the two.