Fluid rights: water allocation reform in South Africa

This book gets to grips with the complexities of policy change in South Africa, asking how evolving doctrines and policies shape the way water use rights are conceptualised and governed. It offers an historical overview of the evolution of water resources policy and legislation, before going on to explore in-depth the process of formulating the Water Allocation Reform policy. This is then contrasted with an 'on-the-ground' case study that brings into relief the dynamics occurring at the policy level. The book offers a new perspective that emphasises the discursive construction of rights - how different principles are privileged in diverging discourses around scarcity, equity, efficiency and sustainability, and how such 'allocation discourses' are transformed at the local level by new processes of politics and power. The book sets these processes within the wider context of political and economic change in South Africa, and draws lessons for the broader experience of water policy and legislation in an international context. The book is aimed towards researchers, policymakers and practitioners and a broader international readership interested in water policy and development.

Emergence, interpretations and translations of IWRM [Integrated Water Resources Management] in South Africa

South Africa is often regarded to be at the forefront of water reform, based on Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM) ideas. This paper explores how the idea of IWRM emerged in South Africa, its key debates and interpretations and how it has been translated. It maps out the history, main events, key people, and implementation efforts through a combination of reviews of available documents and in-depth semi-structured interviews with key actors. While South Africa sought to draw on experiences from abroad when drawing up its new legislation towards the end of the 1990s, the seeds of IWRM were already present since the 1970s. What emerges is a picture of multiple efforts to get IWRM to 'work' in the South African context, but these efforts failed to take sufficient account of the South African history of deep structural inequalities, the legacy of the hydraulic mission, and the slowness of water reallocation to redress past injustices. The emphasis on institutional structures being aligned with hydrological boundaries has formed a major part of how IWRM has been interpreted and conceptualised, and it has turned out to become a protracted power struggle reflecting the tensions between centralised and decentralised management

Introduction to the Special Issue: Flows and practices-The politics of Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM) in southern Africa

For the past two decades, IWRM has been actively promoted by water experts as well as multilateral and bilateral donors who have considered it to be a crucial way to address global water management problems. IWRM has been incorporated into water laws, reforms and policies of southern African nations. This article introduces the special issue 'Flows and Practices: The Politics of IWRM in southern Africa'. It provides a conceptual framework to study: the flow of IWRM as an idea; its translation and articulation into new policies, institutions and allocation mechanisms, and the resulting practices and effects across multiple scales – global, regional, national and local. The empirical findings of the complexities of articulation and implementation of IWRM in South Africa, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Tanzania and Uganda form the core of this special issue. We demonstrate how Africa has been a laboratory for IWRM experiments, while donors as well as a new cadre of water professionals and students have made IWRM their mission. The case studies reveal that IWRM may have resulted in an unwarranted policy focus on managing water instead of enlarging poor women’s and men’s access to water. The newly created institutional arrangements tended to centralise the power and control of the State and powerful users over water and failed to address historically rooted inequalities

The 'Trickle Down' of IWRM: a case study of local-level realities in the Inkomati Water Management Area, South Africa

The historical legacy in South Africa of apartheid and the resulting discriminatory policies and power imbalances are critical to understanding how water is managed and allocated, and how people participate in designated water governance structures. The progressive post-apartheid National Water Act (NWA) is the principal legal instrument related to water governance which has broadly embraced the principles of Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM). This translation of IWRM into the South African context and, in particular, the integration of institutions related to land and water have faced many challenges due to the political nature of water and land reforms, and the tendency of governmental departments to work in silos. The paper explores the dynamics surrounding the implementation of IWRM in the Inkomati Water Management Area, and the degree of integration between the parallel land and water reform processes. It also looks at what these reforms mean to black farmers’ access to water for their sugar cane crops at the regional (basin) and local levels. The empirical material highlights the discrepancies between a progressive IWRM-influenced policy on paper and the actual realities on the ground. The paper argues that the decentralisation and integration aspects of IWRM in South Africa have somewhat failed to take off in the country and what 'integrated' actually entails is unclear. Furthermore, efforts to implement the NWA and IWRM in South Africa have been fraught with challenges in practice, because the progressive policy did not fully recognise the complex historical context, and the underlying inequalities in knowledge, power and resource access

The politics of IWRM in southern Africa

This article offers an approach to the study of the evolution, spread and uptake of integrated water resources management (IWRM). Specifically, it looks at the flow of IWRM as an idea in international and national fora, its translation and adoption into national contexts, and the on-the-ground practices of IWRM. Research carried out in South Africa, Zimbabwe and Mozambique provides empirical insights into the politics of IWRM implementation in southern Africa, the interface between international and national interests in shaping water policies in specific country contexts, and the on-theground challenges of addressing equity, redress and the reallocation of water

Social Justice and Groundwater Allocation in Agriculture: A French Case Study

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