Co-developing strategies to promote inclusive water governance in Malawi

Abstract

This thesis explores how rural water governance in Malawi is shaped through social relationships, everyday practices, and power dynamics across interconnected community, district, and national actors. Drawing on critical institutionalism and a distributional lens, it conceptualises governance as a relational process through which water access and reliability are co-produced as actors mobilise resources, enact authority, and negotiate meaning in practice. Empirically, the thesis examines three connected sites of governance: the domain of rural water point repair, the policymaking arena of the 2023 National Water Policy review, and the wider governance field, analysed as a network of cross-sector relationships. The study uses qualitative narrative inquiry to examine how different actors experience and interpret rural water point breakdown response and national policy formulation. These analyses are complemented by actor mapping and an interpretive social network analysis that examines structural features relevant to coordination, influence, and accountability. Findings show that rural water point repair is governed through multiple pathways assembled through institutional bricolage and cross-scale relationships rather than policy ideals, and that repair options and timing are shaped by access to flexible finance, legitimacy, and brokerage. Analysis of the 2023 policy review indicates that proximity to central decision-making, procedural constraints, and assumptions about representation structured whose perspectives carried weight, while contentious implementation issues relevant to operation and maintenance (O&M) were frequently deferred. Mapping the wider field reveals a large, cross-sector actor landscape (475 actors across more than 28 sectors and 19 organisational forms) characterised by high connectivity but weak coordination, and highlights influential actors beyond the core technical water sector, particularly political, traditional, and planning/finance actors whose roles in resourcing and agenda-setting condition what is feasible within the O&M domain. Overall, the thesis argues that improving O&M outcomes requires working with existing relational arrangements while addressing structural misalignments between lived practice, policy influence, and the sector’s resourcing and accountability architecture.