Water, water everywhere: is Integrated Water Resource Management the right institutional prescription for South Africa's water management challenges?

Madigele, Patricia K; Snowball, Jeanette D; Fraser, Gavin C G

Title: Water, water everywhere: is Integrated Water Resource Management the right institutional prescription for South Africa's water management challenges?
Creator: Madigele, Patricia K
Creator: Snowball, Jeanette D
Creator: Fraser, Gavin C G
Date Issued: 2015
Date: 2015
Type: text
Type: article
Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/68555
Identifier: vital:29282
Identifier: http://2015.essa.org.za/fullpaper/essa_2849.pdf
Description: Publisher version
Description: Ostrom (2007) and Ostrom and Cox (2010) argue that natural resource management has been plagued by the “panacea problem": that one-size-fits-all solutions to allocation and management problems have been applied without due consideration of the specific context. The outcome has been the disappointing results of many development and management programs. Integrated Water Resource Management (IWRM) has been recognised as a potentially effective way of allocating water where there are multiple, sometimes competing, users (Saravanan et al. 2009). It has been used successfully in a number of other developing country contexts, including Mexico, Brazil, India and Thailand (Orne-Giliemann 2008; Meinzen-Dick 2007). The principles of IWRM were also adopted in South Africa under the National Water Act (1998). Water User Associations (WUA) are seen as one of the key institutions driving IWRM, since they are designed to allow stake-holders at local level a say in the allocation and management of this important public good (Aoki 2001). However, WUAs in South Africa have mostly not been a success and are currently being reviewed at national level. For the most part, emerging black farmers and rural communities still do not have equal access to water, or a meaningful role in decision-making, and there are significant security of supply and allocation issues with regard to municipal users as well. Using the AID (Institutional Analysis and Development) framework (Ostrom 2007), with particular reference to economic theory relating to incentives and transactions costs, this paper asks if IWRM is a panacea treatment that does not fit the diagnosis of South Africa's water management problems. A case study approach is used, focusing on one of the few established WUAs in the Sundays River Valley Municipality in a rural area of South Africa.
Format: 17 pages
Format: pdf
Publisher: Economic Society of South Africa (ESSA)
Language: English
Relation: Economic Society of South Africa (ESSA)
Relation: Madigele, P., Snowball, J., Fraser, G. (2015) Water, water everywhere: Is Integrated Water Resource Management the right institutional prescription for South Africa's water management challenges? Economic Society of South Africa (ESSA). Presentation to the Economic Society of South Africa (ESSA) conference 2nd-4th September, 2015
Relation: Economic Society of South Africa (ESSA) volume number 1 17 2015
Rights: Copyright held by the Authors
Rights: Use of this resource is governed by the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

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