Speaker: Yasmina Choueiri, PhD Candidate, UC Davis Geography

Talk: A large body of literature tries to explain conditions that facilitate cooperation among stakeholders as venues for better management and use of water systems. However, cooperation doesn’t always lead to positive outcomes, it can lead to negative ones, and in some cases it can occur in conflictual situations. Coexistence of cooperation and competition has been rarely studied in social networks.Our case study focuses on understanding drivers that lead to simultaneous cooperation and competition between informal water tankers in Beirut (Lebanon). Many communities, that experience chronic water shortages, rely on informal water tankers to satisfy their daily water needs. Not accounting for the role of informal water actors obscures the actual governance of the overall water system and its performance.

Our case study fills this gap. Informal tankers constitute the nodes of a network, while their cooperative (positive) and competitive (negative) social relations, form the network’s ties. We divide the overall network of informal tankers in two: a cooperative and a competitive one. For both cooperative and competitive network, we compare different network structure including type of ties, key individuals and centrality, and homophily, using qualitative descriptive analysis, combined with different Exponential Random Graph Models (ERGMs).

The results reveal that informal tankers tend to compete more than cooperate. Yet, cooperation still happens on smaller scales, among nodes that have been in the market for longer period of time, and among those that share same religious backgrounds, indicating a positive religious homophily. While, the cooperative network has a high level of bonding ties, leading to information redundancy, inaccessibility of innovative ideas and overall isolation; competitive actors form bridging ties that help them acquire new market information and connect with religiously diverse nodes. They have recently entered the market, which also coincides with some recent droughts that the region has experienced. These results suggest the possibility of a correlation between climate change and the disruption of the informal water network in Beirut.

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