Water service provision as socio-technical bricolage: understanding the everyday practices of frontline bureaucrats in Malawi

Over the last three decades significant progress has been made globally in providing water services to the rural poor. However, sustaining these services remains a challenge. This thesis provides a critical but sympathetic account of the experiences of frontline government staff, whose work often goes unrecognised in the quest to improve policy outcomes. These actors play an important role in supporting communities to manage water services, as per the community-based management (CBM) model. Yet they are not neutral conduits of state policy, they are individuals with their own identities and values, who actively (re)interpret policies in the face of complex local realities and significant resource constraints. This thesis demonstrates how frontline bureaucrats “get their jobs done” through creative and negotiated practices of socio-technical bricolage, advancing critical institutionalist theory and shedding light on how decentralised public services actually function and hence might be improved or transformed.

Employing an actor-orientated ethnographic approach, the research investigated the work-lives of six Water Monitoring Assistants (WMAs) in a rural district of Malawi, revealing how these actors navigated and (re)shaped the state-community interface and water technologies in their everyday work. The analysis shows that, despite facing numerous challenges, these frontline bureaucrats endeavoured to fulfil their mandates and produce outcomes that were acceptable to both state and community. In doing so, they employed a number of different strategies to work around structural constraints and to reconcile multiple interests, values and policy goals. To be successful, they had to exercise both social and technical know-how, skilfully leveraging a variety of material and non-material resources to carry out their tasks and engaging in various forms of institutional, ideational and technological bricolage. These practices helped to ensure that much needed water services functioned. Further research would be valuable to ascertain the longer term implications of such practices, and how they manifest in other contexts.