Negotiating access to water in central Mozambique: Implications for rural livelihoods

Abstract

Access to water underpins a range of smallholder livelihood strategies. Consequently, it is the intersections of water and land use and access that structure rural livelihoods. Drawing on eighteen months of ethnographic research in the town of Sussundenga in central Mozambique, this article examines how residents differentiated by class and gender negotiate access to water under a fragmented water regime. Increasing competition for commercially valuable wetlands and stream-bank plots is creating new exclusions from these sites that have long been central to subsistence production. While the commercialization of the town's rural water supply network also has the potential to exclude residents who are unable to pay new water users' fees, residents have been less willing to exclude poorer households from using the new infrastructure. Exploring how the commercialization of some water use produces exclusions while other forms do not, this article suggests that water's meanings and values change as it moves across the hydrosocial landscape.