Competing claims for water resources in the Central Rift Valley of Ethiopia: Global drivers and local opportunities

Thanks to favourable policies for agricultural investments, both small scale and large scale irrigated agriculture has expanded rapidly in the Central Rift Valley of Ethiopia. This closed river basin encompasses a chain of three lakes with unique hydrological and ecological characteristics including a biodiversity rich national wetland park. The irrigation development has been associated with the over-exploitation of the limited water resources and the increased competition for land and water resources. Policy makers and other stakeholders seem to have a limited capacity to respond to the negative impacts of the ongoing resource degradation on the local livelihoods and the ecosystem. This paper describes the application of a framework to better understand the competing resource claims in the Central Rift Valley as a basis for identifying and implementing locally-owned and action-oriented R&D options. The framework proved useful to disentangle myths from facts and to highlight the fact that local responses are often constrained by policies at higher societal levels. Maybe more importantly the framework served to build new alliances among stakeholders addressing resource claims in a locally-owned and action-oriented R&D agenda.