Barbara van Koppen

Community-based water law and water resource management reform in developing countries.

The lack of sufficient access to clean water is a common problem faced by communities, efforts to alleviate poverty and gender inequality and improve economic growth in developing countries. While reforms have been implemented to manage water resources, these have taken little notice of how people use and manage their water and have had limited effect at the ground level. On the other hand, regulations developed within communities are livelihood-oriented and provide incentives for collective action but they can also be hierarchal, enforcing power and gender inequalities. This book shows how bringing together the strengths of community-based laws rooted in user participation and the formalized legal systems of the public sector, water management regimes will be more able to reach their goals. Evaluating the interface between community and formal water laws, chapters consider examples from Africa, Latin America and Asia and provide valuable insights for policy makers, managers, researchers and field implementers.

Catchment Management Agencies for poverty eradication in South Africa

Abstract This paper discusses the changes in water law in South Africa since the new dispensation. The focus is on the poverty dimensions of the early experiences of implementation of one of the components of the National Water Act: the establishment of Catchment Management Agencies (CMAs). From a diversity of recent experiences in decentralizing integrated water resources management, key areas emerge where future actions by the government are crucial to establish pro-poor, developmental CMAs.

Moving beyond integrated water resource management: developmental water management in South Africa

This article traces the history of integrated water resources management (IWRM) in South Africa since the 1970s. It examines IWRM according to its three common pillars, which are also reflected in South Africas National Water Act: economic efficiency, environmental sustainability, and equity. The article highlights how the principles of economic efficiency and the environment as a user in its own right emerged under apartheid, while equity was only included in the post-1994 water policies, with evolving influence on the other two principles. In 2013, the Department of Water Affairs overcame the widely documented flaws of IWRM by adopting developmental water management as its water resource management approach, aligning with the political and socio-economic goals of South Africas democratic developmental state.

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-the-ground challenges of addressing equity, redress and the reallocation of water.

The human right to water: The importance of domestic and productive water rights

Abstract The United Nations (UN) Universal Declaration of Human Rights engenders important state commitments to respect, fulfill, and protect a broad range of socio-economic rights. In 2010, a milestone was reached when the UN General Assembly recognized the human right to safe and clean drinking water and sanitation. However, water plays an important role in realizing other human rights such as the right to food and livelihoods, and in realizing the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women. These broader water-related rights have been recognized but have not yet been operationalized. This paper unravels these broader water-related rights in a more holistic interpretation of existing international human rights law. By focusing on an emerging approach to water services provision—known as ‘domestic-plus’ services—the paper argues how this approach operationalizes a comprehensive range of socio-economic rights in rural and peri-urban areas. Domestic-plus services provide water for domestic and productive uses around homesteads, which challenges the widespread practice in the public sector of planning and designing water infrastructure for a single-use. Evidence is presented to show that people in rural communities are already using their water supplies planned for domestic uses to support a wide range of productive activities. Domestic-plus services recognize and plan for these multiple-uses, while respecting the priority for clean and safe drinking water. The paper concludes that domestic-plus services operationalize the obligation to progressively fulfill a comprehensive range of indivisible socio-economic rights in rural and peri-urban areas.

Community-based water law and water resource management reform in developing countries: rationale, contents and key messages

Water resources management reform in developing countries has tended to overlook community-based water laws, which govern self-help water development and management by large proportions, if not the majority, of citizens: rural, small-scale water users, including poor women and men. In an attempt to fill this gap, global experts on community-based water law and its interface with public sector intervention present a varied collection of empirical research findings in this volume. The present chapter introduces the rationale for the volume and its contents. It further identifies key messages emerging from the chapters on, first, the strengths and weaknesses of community-based water law and, second, the impact of water resources management reform on informal water users’ access to water and its beneficial uses. Impacts vary from outright weakening of community-based arrangements and poverty aggravation or missing significant opportunities to better water resource management and improved well-being, also among poor women and men. The latter interventions combine the strengths of community-based water law with the strengths of the public sector. Together, these messages contribute to a new vision on the role of the state in water resources management that better matches the needs and potentials of water users in the informal water economies in developing countries.

Roman water law in rural Africa: the unfinished business of colonial dispossession

This paper discusses four questions about the recent water law reforms in Sub-Saharan Africa, which strengthen permit systems. First, do permit systems continue to dispossess rural small-scale users, as intended by European colonizers who introduced principles of Roman law? Second, is it wrong to assume that one can convert one legal system (customary water rights) into another legal system (permits) in the short term? Third, do current permit systems discriminate against small-scale users? And lastly, do fiscal measures ingrained in permits foster rent seeking and strengthen water resources as a commodity for nationals and foreigners who can pay? As all the answers are positive, the paper concludes by recommending measures to recognize and protect small-scale water users and render state regulation more realistic.

Targeting Irrigation Support to Poor Women and Men

Gendered poverty alleviation is an important aim of many governmental and non-governmental irrigation agencies. This paper argues that the contribution of irrigation agencies to poverty alleviation is optimal if agencies target their support, and vest rights to newly developed irrigated land and water primarily in poor women and men. It is shown that the often-assumed trade-off between poverty alleviation and production growth probably does not exist. Further, agencies themselves play a preponderant role in including or excluding poor women and men in respect of rights in irrigated land and water. This role is especially strong in public irrigation, the focus of this paper. Evidence on the role of public irrigation agencies in allocating irrigated land and water rights is reviewed. Irrigated land is allocated through the site selection of infrastructural intervention, with or without changes in land tenure in the command area. Inclusion and exclusion occur implicitly through three principles of water righ...

Gender in Irrigated Farming: A Case Study in the Zerafshan River Basin, Uzbekistan

Abstract The division of Central Asia into several independent states, and the transition from the centrally planned economy to a market economy in the majority of those states, affected all sectors and all social levels in the region. One such example is irrigation. Centrally planned and financed from Moscow, on-farm irrigation systems were managed by collective farms. The process of decentralization through the dismantling of collective farms led to a restructuring of services and infrastructure throughout Central Asia. Water users associations (WUAs) have been established to transfer on-farm irrigation management to farmers throughout the region, including Uzbekistan. Many women in Uzbekistan actively participate in farming activities, so their role in the on-farm irrigation restructuring process is important. Yet, the findings from this study suggest that participation of women is very limited in WUAs as very few women are registered as land owners. Because of high levels of migration by men to other countries, farm activities are mostly carried out by women. Despite this, women’s decision-making power within their farms is limited.

Are good intentions leading to good outcomes? Continuities in social, economic and hydro-political trajectories in the Olifants River basin, South Africa.

Beginning in the early 19th century, land and water resources in South Africa’s Olifants basin were systematically mobilized to benefit commercial agriculture, mines and industries owned by a tiny minority of the population. During the 20th century, the majority African population was increasingly confined to small areas of the basin having little agricultural potential or access to water. This resulted in dramatic contrasts between the wealthy minority and the extremely poor majority. Since the early 1990s, under the new democratic regime, South Africa’s constitution, with its basic rights guarantees, including access to water, and its world-famous Water Act, intended both to reverse the wrongs of the past and to conserve scarce water resources for future generations, have raised high expectations. The Water Act is being implemented by politicians and professionals whose good intentions cannot be questioned. However, to date, access to water remains highly inequitable in the Olifants basin, and socio-economic well-being is improving very slowly. Setting the Physical Scene