The politics of water: a Southern African example

This report examines the political contradictions embedded in water reform processes across different levels in Zimbabwe, South Africa and Mozambique. It argues that implementing ideas on water reform often borrowed from extremely different contexts is not an automatic and unproblematic process, but involves complex local political negotiation. It also questions how easily ‘good resource governance’ can be devolved within complex, changing socio-political environments as shifting property rights regimes generate new political classes and state-society actors, involving new understandings and meanings of resources and ownership.The paper identifies and examines three key areas in water reform processes:the process of institution-building that accompanies policy reform and the impact of establishing new structures in complex and contested political environments, leading to sometimes perverse anticipated and unanticipated outcomesthe different meanings attached to water by different stakeholders and the implications of these contested meanings being brought into new decision-making processes under such new institutional structuresthe ‘grey area’ in much policy development that allows water to be used productively, but at the domestic level, either to be excluded from decision-making in policy arenas or to be misunderstood in terms of its links to poverty reduction and the behaviour of new local institutionsFrom this exercise four key issues emerge:the linkage of locally generated revenues to local development of the resourcethe creation of means within the new institutional structures to understand the ‘grey areas’ of water for broader livelihoods uses and, at a minimum, to bring some clarity to the issues of payments for water usage that are non-commercial, yet go beyond the basic ‘primary’ or domestic level usagebringing greater local knowledge into decision-making, as well as increasing the linkage between decision-making in new institutions and the demands placed on local political actorsthe challenges and competition over formal and informal systems of authority