“We’re not there yet”: Navigating colonial structures of knowledge production 

Jeltsje Kemerink-Seyoum, an interdisciplinary scholar and associate professor at IHE Delft, discusses how Dutch academic institutions privilege certain ways of knowing water, and how her team is trying to decolonise current knowledge systems.

“I took over a programme that was considered successful in many ways, yet it was inherently failing in its core objective of redressing colonial injustices,” Jeltsje Kemerink-Seyoum. said with palpable discomfort, as she spoke about the Water and Development Partnership Programme. This programmatic collaboration between the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs and IHE Delft Institute for Water Education, a Dutch organisation, seeks to address rampant water challenges worldwide. It does this by investing in education and research to “establish networks and strengthen the capacities of the water and development sector in low- and middle-income countries”.

As an associate professor of Water Governance and Justice at IHE Delft, Jeltsje picked up the baton from her predecessors to lead the programme’s third phase. However, the programme’s transition to a more critical approach prompted Jeltsje to reflect on the colonial legacies that continue to shape international development programmes and the production of water knowledge. Soon, she found herself questioning how to decolonise what she describes as an inherently colonial programme.

In this case, “It is Dutch funding (from the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs), which goes to a Dutch organisation (IHE Delft), and is coordinated by a Dutch academic, me, or my former Dutch colleagues,” she introspected as an entry point to her journey to decolonise water education.

The invisible coloniality in knowledge production

Jeltsje highlighted the slew of pernicious challenges confronting the team nearly every day, starting with IHE Delft’s history. The water institute was established in 1957 at Bangladesh’s request due to its frequent encounters with floods. “Bangladesh came to us, the Dutch, for its water expertise and experience in Europe, based on the widely held perception that the Global North brings knowledge to the Global South. It created different hierarchies within the water and development sector,” Jeltsje said. For decades, delegations from the Global South have visited the Netherlands to learn from its water management expertise. These visits often occur as part of a broader Dutch strategy that frames its own knowledge and solutions as indispensable to global water development.

She pointed to another challenge in the water sector that bears strong colonial imprints: the educational curriculum on water and related disciplines. “Irrigation engineering, for instance, was always about controlling water and people living in certain areas to maximise agricultural output. The underlying logic extends market-driven economic performance, which was part of colonial expansion strategies,” she noted. Similarly, other water-related education programmes were set up with input from Western universities. Gradually, Western logics continued to shape the curriculum, carrying colonial legacies in how we envision water and see people’s interaction with it.

The Dutch programme also bears similar traces. It was launched in 2008 as a characteristic Eurocentric, top-down vision. IHE Delft concluded agreements with university authorities in other countries on how to develop water-related educational topics. Lecturers and other water sector professionals, mostly trained in European ways of knowing and managing water, were expected to implement them. While the programme provides crucial support for projects that aim to be innovative and draw on multiple disciplines, this funding-backed arrangement comes with strings attached, which, in turn, influence the research and education content.

By ‘strings attached’, Jeltsje meant specific conditions set by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Some of the programme’s focus countries are in the Sahel region, the Horn of Africa, and West Asia. However, these regions are not selected based on longstanding political collaborations or where development cooperation is needed most, “but largely based on the assumed risks of migration to Europe, as people from these regions may cross into Europe to seek asylum or settle as undocumented migrants,” she said.

The framing is worth interrogating, as the underlying assumption is colonial in character. It centres Europe’s concerns rather than ground realities, which are also evident in the programme’s rigid reporting systems. The project in Palestine, for instance, demands that project partners report progress to the Dutch coordinators twice a year, and submit receipts and reports on time. “Because I need to report to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, I must ask for progress reports and updates from our partner organisations, even when bombs are flying over their heads. It is part of my job to put that responsibility on the partners who have been forced into a war,” Jeltsje challenged.

Decentring European influence and decolonising knowledge production also demands attention to funding, according to Jeltsje. That was the starting point for the team’s failing forward strategies.

We can turn to a trove of research to contest the water sector’s colonial roots. “But unless voices beyond the usual ones can influence where the funding goes, little will change, as more funding will go to mainstream studies on water than other ways of knowing,” she reasoned. This necessitates diverse responsibilities in knowledge production, including being mindful and continuously challenging asymmetries, prejudices, and underlying biases.

Decolonising knowledge production

As the third person and the first woman to coordinate the Dutch programme, Jeltsje, along with the funding committee, decides where the fund goes, who gets it, and who becomes part of the programme. She mandated major funding for Global South partners, with budgets set for women and marginalised persons. She envisioned a diversity-anchored transdisciplinary programme, in which IHE Delft would work not just with universities, but also with actors who experience a particular problem. For instance, agriculture and water management projects had to include farmers’ collectives or non-governmental organisations (NGOs) that work with farmers.

The team sent open calls for proposals that contributed to decolonising and pluralising knowledge on water. Scholars and organisations could submit proposals on water-related issues, including water supply, sanitation, river basin management, or agriculture. They had to be interdisciplinary, focusing on technical, environmental and social aspects of the issues. The team also offered training to candidates who found it challenging to articulate their ideas. However, despite the good intentions of inclusive collaboration and non-mainstream science, Jeltsje acknowledged that the training remained trapped in standard Western proposal-writing frameworks.

Besides navigating the paternalistic structures, Jeltsje recounted navigating the gender dynamics – a familiar, rampant reality across sectors around the world. “When women are put in charge of projects, male colleagues could undermine them. It creates another layer of challenge.” This catalysed Jeltsje to bring more women into the programme.

Not there yet

On the one hand, people across the globe share bold, socio-culturally rooted ideas, including ways to resolve water issues. On the other hand, creating the conditions needed to shift towards a decentralised approach to managing projects remains a challenge. It cannot happen without broader structural transformation, and if the economic system and powerful elites maintain the status quo, it won’t. “We are still not moving towards more sustainable and socially just ways of managing water. Yes, we are failing forward by working in inter- and transdisciplinary ways of understanding water, but we are not there yet,” said Jeltsje.

The first critical step towards decolonising Eurocentric, neocolonial programmes is acknowledging the underlying colonial structures. This entails intense, open-minded reflection on the dynamics shaping programmes like the Water and Development Partnership Programme and understanding where the failings originate. As a corollary, in development programmes, we could decentralise funding mechanisms (think no-regret or trust-based funding with minimal requirements or no tedious bureaucratic reporting) and knowledge production rather than gatekeeping these collaborative, inclusive processes. As Jeltsje said, “We need to continue to struggle and push in the right direction.”