Water Administration in Mayotte: Islandness in a French Overseas Department

This paper explores the impacts of prolonged drought in Mayotte, a French Overseas Department in the southwestern Indian Ocean. The study examines how islandness, characterized by notions of smallness, boundedness, and remoteness, shapes local discourses, public mobilisations, and interactions among diverse territories in the administration of water resources. It underscores the critical water crisis affecting daily life, exacerbated by inadequate infrastructure and socio-economic challenges, which disproportionately impacts vulnerable communities. By conceptualising islandness as situated and relational, the article contributes to recent debates in island studies that move beyond fixed geographical understandings of insularity. Ultimately, this research offers an ethnographic perspective on islandness as a construct that influences the management of resources in Mayotte and as a coping strategy that led to logics of communality, sharing and relationships.