“They are the gatekeepers!” Ethnography of a Meeting of the Regional Government for Water Affairs in Southern Africa
Paul-Malo Winsback Paul-MaloWinsback is a PhD candidate in political sociology at the Laboratoire des sciences sociales du politique (LaSSP) from Sciences Po Toulouse, and teaching fellow at the Lille 2 University of Health and Law. His doctoral research focuses on the social anchors of multilateralism and transnational expertise, from the specic case of the dynamics of regional government over freshwater in southern Africa. His work benetted from the support of IFAS-Research, the Centro de Estudos Africanos (CEA) from Eduardo Mondlane University (Maputo) and the Department of political and administrative studies from the University of Botswana (Gaborone).
Abstract On the 8th and 9th of May 2018, at the beginning of the Namibian winter, the Safari Hotel of Windhoek hosted the RBOWorkshop, the workshop for transboundary river basin organisations in Southern Africa.An ethnographic study of this gathering made it possible to reveal structural issues at play in the region. This event is indeed a key meeting within a dense institutional body. Its objective is to build consensus, an undertaking which is found in how space is managed during the meeting, and which shows how all participants internalise their role.This meeting is, as such, an opportunity to physically see the embodiment of the regional order, and to distinguish members in post and rank. Keywords: experts; SADC; performance; rite; group
Introduction On the 8th and 9th of May 2018, at the beginning of the Namibian winter, the luxurious Safari Hotel in Windhoek hosted the RBO Workshop, i.e. the workshop for transboundary river basin organisations (RBO). For two days, around 170 national and international civil servants, as well as many experts, met during this major administrative ritual of water affairs in Southern Africa. On observing the meeting, it was possible to understand some of the social phenomena at play in the construction and cohesion of a group of people who, together, form a framework for a regional government for water affairs. In order to prevent limiting oneself to a formal description, this ethnographic study is enriched with a
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Lesedi #22 | Field notes | IFAS-Research | October 2020
theoretical apparatus, for which we will roughly outline the foundations. Indeed, we suggest the possibility that the meeting allows participants to produce themselves as a collective, thereby making the specific rules of this regional institutional order visible. This performative premise (the idea that the group exists partly through its formulation) relies on the study of the institutional context and interactions between participants (Tambiah 1979).To this end, we mobilise works on the social rites of two classic sociologists, those of Émile Durkheim and Erving Goffman. With reference to the former, we observe the meeting as a celebration that makes it possible to build, stabilise and maintain a social order by celebrating it – which Durkheim designates in the religious case as a “positive cult” ([1912] 1990, 494). However, while the meeting held in Windhoek is one of
