Dr. Benessaiah's research over the past six years has aimed to ground contemporary debates around climate and socio-ecological change in local experiences and contexts. In the North African Sahara region, as with other desert ecologies, the pressing socio-ecological concern remains water resources management and security. Benessaiah's doctoral thesis, entitled Authority, Anarchy & Equity: Explaining agrarian change in the Algerian Sahara,offers a useful perspective on the everyday governance of desert oases in the Algerian Sahara, from the view of the M’zab, a pentapolis that has been continuously inhabited and irrigated with date palms for over a millennia. The research primarily examined management problems around water, land, and labour. In using research methods from both anthropology and ecology, the study challenges key assumptions in both disciplines as to the use of adaptive management and current systems approaches.
A key aspect of governance in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region involves customary structures such as the djema’a and the patriarchal household. Islamic notions of egalitarianism may stand at odds with domestic hierarchies based on age, gender, ethnicity and wealth, among others. Such norms are increasingly contested through encounters with alternative value systems and often result in new constructions/understandings of Islamic modernities. Legal systems embody these contestations of values as different ethical fields are encoded in the various bodies of law (such as Roman law, Sharia, and customary ‘law’), which in turn, are ranked and employed in alternative ways in the various MENA countries by authorities and the populace. Water governance is affected by these different systems, in whether it is conceived as a resource that is a commons, privately owned, or state property, not to mention the diverse conventions of dealing with communal management of such resources. Furthermore, these systems interact, through individual actors, in a state of contested non-equilibria, yet individual actors may also exploit such plurality to their own advantage, as occurs in the M’zab.
In Dr. Benessaiah's recent work, he investigated the role of voluntary associations in contemporary water management, which he conceptualised as ‘micro-movements’ in North Africa in order to contrast how they may be key to managing (new) change, as opposed to customary governance regimes which are configured to maintain the status quo. These movements may be seen in relation to a general shift in popular consciousness toward participatory governance and away from authoritarian modes of control, culminating in the recent ‘Arab Spring’. Associations deal with a range of social issues and needs, such as welfare, managing local infrastructure and resources. While anthropologists have challenged the idea that ‘civil society’ holds emancipatory potential (Benthall 2000; Comaroff & Comaroff 1999), Benessaiah, along with Butcher (2014), argues that the recent opening of the civic sector has nevertheless created an opening for new directions within the Algerian political landscape.
Finally, Dr. Benessaiah' research on governance poses new questions to classic anthropological debates around structure-agency (see also Nadil & Fernando 2015, on morality, piety and everyday ethics), in considering the interplay between structural regulation and individual ethics. Furthermore, Benessaiah's investigations into the nature-culture nexus have led him towards a new theoretical point of departure, encapsulated by the phenomenological approach partly inspired by Ingold (2000; 2013), situated within constitutive political structures at the local and larger levels. Future research interests also aim to address a key disjuncture at the policy level of law and regulation: at the local level, adaptive management inherently requires flexible systems of governance. And yet state legal systems are, by contrast, inherently monolithic and inflexible. This potential impasse requires detailed multidisciplinary collaboration to move forward.
Benessaiah has published in Ethnobiology Letters and Quaternary International, and has book chapters forthcoming in Law and Property in Algeria: Anthropological perspectives, Ben Hounet & Dupret, and eds. African Anthropologies in the Postcolony eds. Nyamnjoh & Boswell (HSRC Press). Benessaiah has presented at international and departmental conferences in the UK, France, South Africa and the USA.
