ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at factors that come into play during the preliminary stages of establishing a water user association (WUA). It draws on a year of ethnographic observation that the author conducted in Egypt with a participatory water management project in 2007-08. First, the chapter shows how different parties debate and challenge the rules of participation according to their contrasting understandings of what it means to be a water user. Second, it demonstrates how those who coordinate the establishment of the WUAs shape what the WUAs come to be through their communication to the community members of what it means to participate. Then the chapter focuses on one specific locale where international donors, working in partnership with a national water ministry, are seeking to implement the notion of participatory water governance. Finally, it argues that efforts to promote participation could benefit from closer attention to how the concept travels and, in the process, evolves.
