Infrastructuring Community People: The social trajectory of Swedish water supply programs in Ethiopia in the 1970-1980s

Starting with the so-called „Golden Age of Resource-Based Development“, the importance of infrastructures for constituting, enacting and materialising the colonial/imperial setting and subsequently, the global connections between the European countries and the (newly) independent African states grew continually. New infrastructures were perceived as drivers of change, a vehicle of political, economic and social integration as well as an exchange hub for universal, portable knowledge and expertise on the one side, and the place-based knowledge on the other side. Especially the second one — the locally situated knowledge and thus the community participation — has received a great deal of attention in the 1980s, after the „white elephants“ disclosed the disintegrative dimension of western-driven technological articulation. The local and social cohesion started to be seen as equally important as the international one. That is the theory. How did the practice of constructing local infrastructure by international means and infrastructuring the community people in a cooperative way look like, how dis-/intergrativ was it, and how and what kind of social “enrollment” of the engaged and/or indifferent actors did take place and what side-effects did it have?

These questions are going to be discussed alongside some case studies of Swedish technical assistance and programming of rural water supply projects in Eastern and South Ethiopia in the 1970s-1980s that from early on has become the most important cooperative partner of the Swedish International Development Authority. The water supply programs, seen as the backbones of the development and the policy of reduction of global inequalities, were usually designed by Swedish-Ethiopian team in accordance to local geological, economical and anthropological/sociological studies as well as Swedish experience in international hydrogeological research. By tracing the changes in infrastructuring the community people and thus the international-local cohesion from the 1970s until the 1980s, this paper revisits, how the different human and non-human actors of the infrastructuring the community people were drawn together, how they were enrolled in the network, and what kind of social/regional/transnational cohesion was created and empowered by that. It asks further, how different groups of actors tried to combine interests, forces and material resources to create a regional program for water supply that would compromise interests from below and from above, by making them materialised in a local and international way at the same time.