The Political Ecology of Wetland Management in Kampala, Uganda

Author(s): Jasmine Okidi

Mentor(s): Christopher Keller Morris, Sociology and Anthropology

Abstract

Wetlands are vital ecological systems in Kampala, Uganda. Despite this, they are under threat of complete depletion caused by anthropogenic activity left poorly regulated by central government. Government interventions neglect the sociopolitical facets and implications of their management, especially the responsibility pinned upon and consequences endured by stakeholders with lesser power over wetland management i.e. poor informal residential communities. Instead, their management is largely technical: solely requiring the intervention of technical experts with the necessary training to address the issue. There is little inquiry in the current literature into the government’s depoliticization of their management and concurrent support of primarily privately funded encroachment; rather, the literature exhibits greater attention to the capacity of informal communities to mitigate wetland encroachment. The aim of this project is to investigate government’s use of public speech as a method of depoliticization. Deductive content analysis of publicly available speeches produced by government representatives was performed to highlight and examine the rationalities underlying wetland management as presented in the public sphere.

Video Transcript

Hi. My name is Jasmine Okidi and I am a rising junior in the Honors College majoring in English. This summer, I participated in OSCAR’s URSP developing my project on the Depoliticization of Wetland Management in Kampala, Uganda. During the summer session, I have investigated how Uganda government officials frame wetland management in public speech, and its effect on their practice of management –– namely, how it depoliticizes the issue or facilitates their disavowal of sociopolitical sides to their management. Kampala is the capital city and primary economic and industrial hub of Uganda, located in East Africa. As a densely populated and hilly city with two major wetland systems, Kampala greatly depends on wetland drainage to prevent flooding, among the other ecological, social, and economic functions wetlands serve. Despite this, increased human encroachment, ranging from informal agriculture and settlement to infrastructural proliferation, set the date for complete wetland depletion at 2040. This figure, for instance, was developed by researchers who were investigating the main forms of encroachment over wetlands––particularly in Lubigi wetland, one of the largest and major wetland systems in Kampala. As you can see, infrastructural projects such as roads, agricultural land, and settlements were increasing over time from 2002 to 2018. While multiple anthropogenic activities and stakeholders contribute to degradation and disruption of wetland function, the existing literature often isolates poor informal wetland settlement communities as bearing responsibility for mitigation strategies. This is at odds with the apparent lesser capacity of poor residents to manage wetlands. Central government presents a similar story in the public sphere, shifting focus to stakeholder groups with little power over wetland management. Further, government interventions primarily target and disadvantage poor wetland communities, employing strategies that neglect the social and political sides of wetland encroachment and rely on strictly technical solutions. For instance, this may look like the forceful eviction of people residing over the wetland without proper titles and the demolition of the communities, a method that only temporarily relieves the wetland of encroachment and devastates people’s housing and income security. At the same time, government actively supports encroaching projects often funded by private stakeholders, such as infrastructural expansion, but they also evade responsibility for this degradation in their public speech. Animated by the lack of research into this disparity, my project examines how government officials representing the agencies legally responsible for wetlands use public speech as a method of depoliticization. Specifically, I aim to understand the ideologies underpinning their management as conveyed through public speech, and how that enables their rendering technical of the issue. I draw on theories from areas including the anthropology of development and of government to interrogate this issue. Some of these concepts, I have mentioned earlier and will explain further now. When discussing power dynamics among stakeholders, I am referring to the political ecology of wetland management. This subfield examines how these power relations inform human interaction with the environment, including governance over it and the inequitable distribution of consequences as a result of environmental change. This aids my understanding of the context in which the texts are produced. Developed by anthropologist Tania Li, “Rendering technical” describes the practice of designating responsibility for improving a problematized phenomenon to authorities deemed experts, typically because they have a set of technical skills and training that align with the technical solutions available to the governing body. By focusing on the technical aspects of the issue, the authorities “exclude the structure of political-economic relations from their diagnoses and prescriptions. They focus more on the capacities of the poor than on the practices through which one social group impoverishes another” (7). This exclusion describes the process of depoliticization. These are the primary theories guiding my research that, together with other concepts, form a theoretical framework that elucidates the power dynamics among stakeholders in relation to govt’s construction of the dominant public narrative. It also helps me examine what is revealed by the narrative, itself, and its implications for government management. To analyze the public speech, I perform deductive content analysis of publicly available texts produced by government officials. This is a systematic approach to the interpretation of qualitative data, such as the texts I derive from public speech. My method is deductive, meaning my analysis is directed by a theoretical framework. My first step was the systematic search of online media archives including newspapers and broadcast media houses for relevant segments from which I could extract speeches. The temporal scope of my research was 2010-2020, to retrieve more relevant speeches, but also influenced by the limited digitization of records. After transcription, I move on to coding, the process of identifying key concepts and patterns in the text and tagging them with a “code” that represents this concept. In deductive coding, I annotate the texts with a set of predetermined codes drawn from the theoretical framework known as the codebook. To thoroughly analyze my texts, I go through several cycles of coding, through which I refine my codebook and identify prominent themes across the texts. I am currently working through this step. Ultimately, I will produce a write-up where I construct a narrative based on my findings. I consider this summer project a preliminary stage in my research journey. Upon completion of the URSP, I aim to produce a write-up that serves as the basis for future continuation of my project. Ideally, I would seek approval to conduct primary research in Kampala related to on-the-ground messaging and reception. Thank you very much for viewing my presentations. Please feel free to post any questions or comments below.

4 replies on “The Political Ecology of Wetland Management in Kampala, Uganda”

Well done. I look forward to hearing your results when the coding is finished. If you can do your next steps in the research, what would that look like, on the ground? Interesting and important work. Best,
Dr. Lee

Thank you for your comment, Dr. Lee. Broadly, I know I would like to conduct my own interviews with key informants and among focus groups with individuals from different stakeholder groups, including members of informal wetland communities and local government leaders. I also wonder how this messaging is received by members of the public with no direct or explicit stake in the wetlands (but of course do because of citywide benefits).

This was so interesting, Jasmine! It was really incredible to speak with you at the beginning of the summer about the plans you had for your project, and then to experience the results and planned next steps that you have now. Your video was very comprehensive and insightful for someone such as myself who has very little knowledge of how wetland management in Kampala is portrayed. I look forward to hearing about all of the great things you do with this project in the future!

Hi Amanda.
I really appreciate your comment and interest in my project. I aimed to make my presentation accessible to people with varying background knowledge because I believe this is an important issue and more people should be aware, even beyond Kampala’s context.

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