Project Description

Due to persistent water insecurity, recent years have witnessed an increasing focus on water as a source of conflicts. Disputes over water can greatly contribute to broader social conflicts and undermine existing social institutions. Effective water management can also be a focus of cooperation with great potential to promote sustainable and equitable use of water hence build resilient institutions that can moderate and reduce the disruptive impacts of conflict but also facilitate peacebuilding in water development and management Using a transdisciplinary research design, qualitative data collection methods and the conceptual framework on resource conflict, collective action, and social-ecological Resilience, this research seeks to analyse the role of collective action towards conflict mitigation under community-based water management in rural Uganda. The study focus is particularly important because over 80% of the population in Uganda lives in rural areas and over 78% of the population receives water from communally used water sources which presents common-pool resource related challenges such as over-use and free-riding prompting conflicts and contention among users. The novelty of this research lies on interrogating the often neglected local contestations and conflicts triggered by natural resource use and management at community and household levels.

Bio

Naiga Resty is a Lecturer at Makerere University, Department of Development Studies, the College of Humanities and Social Sciences. She has a PhD in water governance from University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences (BOKU) Vienna, Austria; Masters in Development Studies from University College Dublin, Ireland and Bachelor of Social Sciences from Makerere University, Kampala, Uganda. She teaches Research Methods and Gender and Development at Makerere University. She has special interest in natural resources governance, gender, collective-action, conflict, peacebuilding, child-focused research, participatory methodologies and transdisciplinary research design and mixed methods approach. She has published widely in the area of water governance, conflict and peacebuilding, gender and collective-action.

Resty Naiga’s CV

The Foundation acknowledges that Resty Naiga has successfully completed her project.