Enhancing Local Users in Water Resources Decision Making in Burkina Faso : How to Modify the Balance of Power

People in the watershed of the Bougouriba 7 are facing multiple issues to ensure their access to water for drinking and irrigation purpose, livestock watering and fishery activities, but also in terms of quality as artisanal mining activities or bad fishing practices led to water pollution. In 2010, a local water management committee, the CLE, has been set up in the context of a broader Integrated Water Resources Management policy developed since 1998 in Burkina Faso. But after its establishment, the CLE remained inactive for 3 years, largely because water was not a priority for its president, the High Commissioner, whose mandate concerns the overall development of a province that is much larger than the Bougouriba 7 watershed.

However, the CLE is meant to be a dialogue platform where representatives of deconcentrated technical administration, decentralized government, users and civil society can discuss local water management issues. Whereas the CLE has been created with the hope that it would «give a way to overtake the usual and exclusive focus on an administrative regulation, which puts public authority and its departments at the center of the institutional, legislative, statutory, and normative plans» (MAHRH, 2004) our study shows that local users have still limited decision-making power which is not an isolated situation as the comparison of 13 other CLE has shown.

In this communication we analyse the process of implementing the CLE to show that it was not a “bottom up” approach. Then we describe how we have given voice to users and local stakeholders to express their viewpoints about water issues in front of national to provincial administration representatives. As result, the CLE has been stimulated, the users have pushed and built their own action plan, some of them envision now to ask for decisional positions in the new board.