Practicing Resilience: How Ghana’s Water Utility Adapts to Climate Change Impacts through Pragmatism

Water utilities around the world are faced with escalating climate change impacts. In poorer countries, they are also faced with limited financing, ageing infrastructure and shocks and stresses resulting from rapid urbanization and land use change. This study explores how Ghana’s water utility, Ghana Water Limited (GWL) navigates the pressures imposed by climate change impacts such as floods, drought, and raw water quality deterioration. Using a qualitative case study approach, we employ concepts of resilience, pragmatism and capital portfolio analysis to examine how GWL practices resilience and sustains service delivery under climatic stresses.

Pragmatism is discussed using the four P’s framework (practicality, positionality, pluralism, and provisionality) developed by Brendel (2006) and Shields (2008), and adapted by Schwartz and Boakye-Ansah (2023). Water utilities with resource constraints practice resilience by mobilizing their available capitals (natural, financial, human, physical/infrastructural, institutional and social capital) to address challenges they consider most problematic. Resilience is assumed to stem from the mobilization of resources or capitals that most water utilities in the Global South don’t have access to. So we ask: How does GWL practice and enhances its resilience in a resource-constrained environment where large-scale idealized resilience concepts do not seem applicable? Using interview data from several field visits at the water utility, in which we investigated how different actors in the system recall specific crisis events (pollution caused by gold-mining in the catchment and an episode of drought, both of which led to the shutdown of the water treatment plant for one month, each). The findings highlight that water utilities practice resilience by mobilizing different capitals that they have access to in a pragmatic manner. Interventions that are more resilient are often imperfect and temporary in nature, but in the prevailing contextual realities represent the most suitable option for the utility. The four P’s discussed here highlight that being resilient for water utilities in developing countries requires more than just technical and infrastructure fixes. Rather the degree of resilience depends on capitals that the utility has at its disposal coupled with the experience and adaptability to replace strategies with more effective and impactful ones. For a water utility like GWL, pragmatism appears as both a survival strategy as well as a means of building resilience in situations where permanent, ‘best-practice’ solutions remain elusive.

REFERENCES

Brendel, D. H. (2006). Healing psychiatry : bridging the science/humanism divide. MIT Press. http://site.ebrary.com/id/10173550 

Schwartz, K., & Boakye-Ansah, A. (2023, 2023). Pragmatism as an approach for decision-making: Why two Kenyan water utilities opted for pre-paid water dispensers. Utilities Policy, 84, 101623. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jup.2023.101623 

Shields, P. M. (2008, Mar-Apr). Rediscovering the taproot: Is classical pragmatism the route to renew public administration? Public Administration Review, 68(2), 205-221. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-6210.2007.00856.x