Fluid Rights

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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 a historical overview of the evolution of water resources policy and legislation before exploring in-depth the process of formulating the Water Allocation Reform policy. This is then contrasted with an 'on-the-ground' case study that relieves 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 practitioners and a broader international readership interested in water policy and development.

List of tables and figures
Acknowledgements
Acronyms and abbreviations

1. Introduction
   Water, scarcity and governance
   Allocation discourses
   South Africa: Pioneering water allocation reform
   An overview of this book
2. Water rights in context: Evolution and reform
   A tale of conquest
   The pre-colonial era
   The arrival of the Dutch and English
   Indirect rule
   Force and featherbed: The growth of mining and agriculture
   Deepening dispossession: The National Party’s ‘segregated development’
   A legacy of inequality
   The evolution of water rights regimes
   Roman-Dutch law comes to the Cape
   The British doctrine of riparian rights
   The capricious creation of colonial judicial policy
   The Water Act (No. 54 of 1956)
   Transition
   A fledgling democracy: Crafting policies for change
   The nature of the negotiated settlement: Protecting property
   The resurgence of traditional authority
   A brief review of the political economy context
   Black economic empowerment and corporate interests
   Commercialisation, de-agrarianisation and the notion of ‘two economies’
   Getting the Act together: Processes and drivers
   The geophysical backdrop
   The initiation of reform
   Focus on services
   Environmental concerns
   The National Water Act 1998: Key features and debates
   Recognised water uses, the Reserve and Resource-Directed Measures
   Water use categories
   Contested compensation: The ‘safeguard clause’
3. WAR in the making: Crafting the Water Allocation Reform Programme
   Water Allocation Reform: The basis and the process
   Through the lens of scarcity
   The pillars of reform: Registration and compulsory licensing
   The Water Authorisation and Resource Management System (WARMS)
   Compulsory licensing
   Processes, actors and perceptions
   The DWAF and the DFID
   The Expert Panel and other actors
   Consultation and participation
   Emerging perspectives
   The industrialist/institutionalist perspective
   The agriculturalist/livelihoods perspective
   Water Allocation Reform: On paper
   From WARP to WAR
   Policy narratives and the construction of social identities
   Existing lawful uses and historically disadvantaged individuals
   Efficiency and equity
   Links to land: The absence of attention to acquisition
   Narrowing down the ‘room for manoeuvre’
4. Water allocation in the Inkomati
   Context: Into the Inkomati
   Historical legacies shaping patterns of water use
   Settling the Transvaal
   Sweet dreams: The growth of sugar as a political force
   Creating the KaNgwane homeland
   Sharing waters: The 1992 Agreements and the forging of new boundaries
   Characteristics of the Inkomati Water Management Area
   Geography and water availability
   Water management structures
   DWAF regional office and local municipalities
   Provincial Department of Agriculture and Land Administration
   The Catchment Management Agency
   Non-governmental organisations (NGOs)
   Patronage and paternalism
   Sugar in the Inkomati: A recipe for success?
   Emerging farmers
   Land access
   Gender relations
   Water control and capacity constraints
   Established farmers
   Perceptions of sharing and co-operation
   Emerging farmers’ lack of leverage
   Contested allocations
   Scarcity and the blame game: Sugar versus non-sugar
   Domestic uses
   Dryland farmers
   Inter-departmental struggle for allocative authority
   Trading
   Trumping intersectoral transfer
   ‘The little man against the State’
   Preparing for compulsory licensing
   Validation and verification of water use
   Uncertainty and dynamics
   The difficulty of determining water abstractions
   Messy legal contexts
   Outcomes
   Impasse
5. Conclusions
   Drawing it all together
   Emerging insights
   How discourses shape water rights
   Narrowing the frame of the problem: Naturalising scarcity
   Equity hinging on efficiency
   The separation of land and water: Parallel processes, detached dynamics
   The difficulty of determining use
   What of the future?
   The current status of WAR, and the emergence of new strategies
   Capacity constraints
   Challenges of regulation
   The politics of redistribution
   Wider Implications

References
Appendices
Index

Synne Movik currently holds a postdoctoral position in Global Environmental Governance at the Institute of International Environment and Development Studies, Norwegian University of Life Sciences. Prior to this, she worked on water and sanitation issues with the STEPS Centre at University of Sussex. She received a DPhil from the Institute of Development Studies, also at the University of Sussex, in 2008. The focus of her research was on water policy, water use rights, allocation and governance in South Africa, which provides the basis for the book.