Water, Water Everywhere…? Examining Approaches to Rural Water Scarcity in Mindanao

This research addresses two themes: water scarcity and water resource management in the Philippines. Since 2004 the Philippines had been involved in the meeting the country’s Millennium Development Goal’s safe water target. Significant improvements have been achieved in access to drinking water in the rural areas, increasing coverage from 73 per cent to 91 per cent in 2012. Despite this achievement, there are still approximately 4.5 million rural residents in the country without access to safe water. I use the persistence of waterlessness in rural Philippines as a lens to examine the problems of the standardized approach to rural water provision in the Philippines. The core research question informing the research is: how do the conceptualisations of water scarcity by the households and the institutions that are tasked to manage it influence water access? I use ethnographic methodologies combined with mapping techniques to examine the experiences of rural villagers in three different case study sites that were identified as water scarce/waterless in the Province of Agusan del Sur in Mindanao in the Southern Philippines. These three villages characterize three landscapes (uplands, lowlands and wetlands) that face distinctive types of water scarcity issues. The empirical exploration of people’s experiences gives rise to questions how a basic service such as domestic water supply is provisioned by the state. In this regard, the communities’ practices of accessing and using water, government practices of providing water in the villages and the biophysical conditions of the area are points of interest. The case studies reveal that standardized approach to water scarcity, which assumes the communities’ water problems relate to lack of investment and infrastructure and mostly focusing on engineering solutions to provide groundwater, fails to address the concerns of the local people who perceived water scarcity in different ways than the government agencies. In some cases it does not work because it is not technically possible due to the site’s geology and hydrology, in others it does not address the problem of inadequacy of water for domestic needs of the community, or in some its salinity is unacceptable for the community. The study demonstrates the importance of examining the specific context of situations where water access is an issue. It also shows the value of ethnographic methodology in such research