Issue 3

ABSTRACT: Zimbabweʼs water reforms that were undertaken in the 1990s were meant to redress the colonially inherited inequalities to agricultural water, increase water security against frequent droughts, improve water management, and realise sustainable financing of the water sector. They were underpinned by the 1998 Water and Zimbabwe National Water Authority Acts, which were based on Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM) principles. This article describes how IWRM has been implemented against a backdrop of an ever-evolving land reform programme and a struggling agriculture sector. We examine how water is accessed and used in and around three water sources in the Middle Manyame Sub-Catchment, one of the seven sub-catchments of the Manyame Catchment. The Sub-Catchment is of particular significance because there was significant agricultural production on white-owned large-scale farmers, which have now been extensively allocated to small black farmers. The study demonstrated that while the land reform has, in theory, broadened access to water, irrigation water usage has remained low because of a depressed agriculture sector, shortage and high costs of electricity, and lack of capital needed to restore damaged or stolen irrigation equipment. The findings indicate that the assumption of a self-financing water sector, based on a well-functioning agriculture sector, which is the largest water user, has not been realised, and this has negatively affected implementation of IWRM in the Middle Manyame area and in Zimbabwe in general.

KEYWORDS: Water reform, land reform, agriculture, IWRM, Zimbabwe

ABSTRACT: This paper focuses on the application of the concept of Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM) in Tanzania. It asks: how did IWRM affect the rural and fast-growing majority of smallholder farmersʼ access to water which contributes directly to poverty alleviation and employment creation in a country where poverty and joblessness are high? Around 1990, there were both a strong government-led infrastructure development agenda and IWRM ingredients in place, including cost-recovery of state services aligning with the Structural Adjustment Programmes, water management according to basin boundaries and the dormant colonial water rights (permits) system. After the 1990s, the World Bank and other donors promoted IWRM with a strong focus on hydroelectric power development, River Basin Water Boards, transformation of the water right system into a taxation tool, and assessment of environmental flows. These practices became formalised in the National Water Policy (2002) and in the Water Resources Management Act (2009). Activities in the name of IWRM came to be closely associated with the post-2008 surge in large-scale land and water deals. Analysing 25 years of IWRM, the paper identifies the processes and identities of the losers (smallholders and – at least partially – the government) and the winners (large-scale water users, including recent investors). We conclude that, overall, IWRM harmed smallholdersʼ access to water and rendered them more vulnerable to poverty and unemployment.

KEYWORDS: Integrated Water Resources Management, water law, basin management, taxation, Tanzania

ABSTRACT: In Tanzania like in other parts of the global South, in the name of 'development' and 'poverty eradication' vast tracts of land have been earmarked by the government to be developed by investors for different commercial agricultural projects, giving rise to the contested land grab phenomenon. In parallel, Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM) has been promoted in the country and globally as the governance framework that seeks to manage water resources in an efficient, equitable and sustainable manner. This article asks how IWRM manages the competing interests as well as the diverse priorities of both large and small water users in the midst of foreign direct investment. By focusing on two commercial sugar companies operating in the Wami-Ruvu River Basin in Tanzania and their impacts on the water and land rights of the surrounding villages, the article asks whether institutional and capacity weaknesses around IWRM implementation can be exploited by powerful actors that seek to meet their own interests, thus allowing water grabbing to take place. The paper thus highlights the power, interests and alliances of the various actors involved in the governance of water resources. By drawing on recent conceptual insights from the water grabbing literature, the empirical findings suggest that the IWRM framework indirectly and directly facilitates the phenomenon of water grabbing to take place in the Wami-Ruvu River Basin in Tanzania.

KEYWORDS: Integrated Water Resource Management (IWRM), water grabbing, development policies, agricultural development, water governance, Tanzania

ABSTRACT: Uganda lies almost wholly within the Nile Basin and is a country characterised as well-endowed with water resources. Receiving considerable inflows of aid since the early 1990s, some of this aid emerging after the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro enabled the country to begin a process of Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM), taking the lead from Chapter 18 of Agenda 21. With a focus on more comprehensively managing the country’s critical water endowment amidst growing pressure on the resource, bilateral technical assistance and financial support played a large part in backstopping these national efforts. Nevertheless, in spite of this support and government backing, some two decades later implementation on the ground remains thin and the exercise of IWRM in practice is limited. This paper examines the Ugandan IWRM experience and identifies complex political-economy issues lying at the heart of current challenges. It argues that rarely is there likely to be an easy fix to sustainable financing and suggests the need for stronger citizen engagement and buy-in to the wider logic of IWRM to support longer-term effectiveness and sustainability.

KEYWORDS: Water Policy, IWRM, governance, decentralisation, political economy, development, Nile, Uganda

ABSTRACT: While it is claimed that the founding principles of integrated water resources management are the Dublin Principles this does not appear to be the case for Principle No. 3, which underlines the importance of women in water provision, management and safeguarding. Mozambique, South Africa, Tanzania and Zimbabwe are members of SADC and have signed the SADC Protocol on Women and other international human rights instruments. However, we do not see an incorporation of these instruments and other empowerment frameworks into water policies. We find that Principle No. 3 has been sidelined in the implementation of Integrated Water Resource Management (IWRM). In examining the gender practices in these four nations of Africa, gender equality remains distant from the concerns of the water sector. We enumerate many of the commonalities among these countries in how they are marginalising women’s access to, and use of, water.

KEYWORDS: Gender, IWRM, Dublin Principles, southern Africa

ABSTRACT: This viewpoint article critically discusses how IWRM travelled to each of the researchers of the Flows and Practices team, through which networks they personally engaged with IWRM, what opportunities the IWRM saga offered these researchers and how they tried to translate the concept and policy idea of IWRM into something more aligned with their concerns. By providing this self-reflection we aim to apply the conceptual framework used for the study of the travel and transformation of IWRM as a policy idea to ourselves, as a group of water professionals, realising that we ourselves have actively attempted to influence, transform, promote or resist the IWRM policy agenda. The viewpoint calls for enhancing transparency, self-reflection and appreciating the role (and power) of researchers and practitioners both as individuals and groups in shaping concepts and ideas.

KEYWORDS: IWRM, policy articulation, policy networks, translation, personal reflection

ABSTRACT: The concept of institutional path dependence offers useful ways of understanding the trajectories of water policy reforms and how past institutional arrangements, policy paradigms and development patterns constrain current and future choices and limit institutional adaptability. The value of this concept is demonstrated through an analysis of environmental water recovery in Australia’s Murray-Darling Basin, where while significant water volumes have been reallocated to the environment, the costs have also been significant. While there are significant lessons from the Australian experience, attempts to emulate the approach involve substantive risks and may be prohibitively costly for less wealthy nations. Context-specific institutional analysis is emphasised as fundamental to water reform and critical for reform architecture and sequencing. A key finding is that while crisis can provide powerful catalysts for institutional innovation, institutional path dependence in the absence of active and disruptive policy entrepreneurs fosters a strong tendency to reinforce the status quo and limit innovation, potentially exposing social-ecological systems to greater shocks due to climate change and other sources of escalating uncertainty.

KEYWORDS: Water reform, environmental water, institutional path dependence, policy entrepreneurship, vested interests, polycentricity

ABSTRACT: A considerable amount of research in the field of International Relations (IR) has acknowledged the interplay between domestic politics and foreign policy. Few studies, however, have investigated this phenomenon in the narrower field of transboundary water politics. There is also a general lack of research exploring how the formation of a national identity can overlap with the construction of a large hydraulic infrastructure, and how this can have repercussions at the international level. This paper draws on Robert Putnam’s (1988) two-level game theory to illustrate how the interrelation between the domestic and the international dimensions matters in transboundary water politics. Perspectives from IR, political geography, and water politics serve to present a conceptual framework which is then linked to studies on nationalism. This helps to highlight the analytical relevance of such a perspective to understand the issue of large dams. The paper takes the cases of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam in Ethiopia and the Rogun Dam in Tajikistan as examples.

KEYWORDS: Transboundary water politics, hydropolitics, international relations, nationalism, dams, Ethiopia, Tajikistan

ABSTRACT: How did the idea of IWRM emerge at the global level? Why has IWRM become so popular and so resilient, at least in discourse and policy? What has caused IWRM policies to diffuse across time and space? The principal goal of this article is to identify a set of concepts and mechanisms to study the global diffusion and translation of IWRM through coercion, cooperation, or learning from the ground. The article will also highlight the extent to which this global diffusion was contested and translated into different meanings in terms of policy orientation. Overall, IWRM was a mindset of a particular period where the water policy paradigm was evolving in the same direction as sustainable development and other related paradigms in a post-Rio moment. There were no clear alternatives at the time but now IWRM is being questioned. This IWRM fatigue is leading to other framings and discourses around the water-food-energy nexus and the green economy.

KEYWORDS: IWRM, water, policy process, global diffusion, global translation

ABSTRACT: This article explores the entry and spread of IWRM in the Southern African Development Community (SADC) region. It traces how the idea of IWRM was promoted and sustained throughout the region by mapping key events, actors and networks that were involved in promoting the approach. It highlights the importance of regional networks in promoting IWRM and shows how regional dynamics, playing out at the interface between the global and local levels, influenced the adoption/adaptation and spread of IWRM. The article finds that the idea of IWRM 'hit the ground running' in SADC due to several contributing factors. These include: historical political connections between the member countries; historically rooted well-established channels and connections with bilateral and multilateral donors; the success of networks such as the Global Water Partnership and WaterNet whose mandate was to promote the concept; and the fact that two-thirds of the region’s population live in transboundary basins with IWRM providing a suitable hook for transboundary cooperation, often inspired by European models. The article further argues that IWRM thrived because of strong donor agendas that were adapted by key SADC actors to suit strategic interests. It thus provided a platform for complex politically charged negotiations to reconcile apparently divergent goals such as infrastructure vs management and regional vs national interests. The practice of IWRM in the region is very much shaped by a conflation of regional, national and donor interests and has now acquired a life of its own, despite changing donor priorities.

KEYWORDS: IWRM, regionalisation, regionalism, SADC, southern Africa

ABSTRACT: The first substantive piece of water legislation ever adopted in Mozambique, the Lei de Águas of 1991, was crafted before IWRM was endorsed as the newly emerging global consensus on water governance. Yet, the Lei de Águas already incorporated the river basin concept and its decentralised water management, making Mozambique a case of IWRM 'avant la lettre'. In this paper, we reconstruct the drivers behind four key policy episodes that shaped the travel of IWRM to Mozambique, viz. the Lei de Águas 1991, the SADC Water Protocol, the National Water Policy 1995, and the 2007 national reforms and regulations, drawing from the experiences of two Mozambican river basins, the Limpopo and the Pungwe. In terms of process, we observe that domestic concerns, a small Mozambican water policy elite nurtured by international donors, and the agenda of financial institutions highly shaped the articulation of IWRM. In terms of outcomes, several contradictions emerge: i.e. centralised State management seems to have become further entrenched, stakeholders have virtually no say in water matters and the most powerful and wealthy stakeholders use payments to secure water cheaply at the expense of unregistered smallholder users who depend for their livelihoods on primary water.

KEYWORDS: IWRM, policy articulation, elite, stakeholder participation, Mozambique

ABSTRACT: Drawing from the experience of the Limpopo River Basin in Mozambique, the paper analyses the articulation of a water rights framework in the context of decentralised river basin governance and IWRM-inspired reforms. The nexus between financial autonomy, service provision, stakeholder participation and the resultant allocation of water within the river basin is explored by scrutinising the newly instituted system of water permits and payments. Three cases are examined: (1) parastatal agencies managing large perimeters of irrigated land; (2) large-scale commercial companies irrigating land; and (3) so-called focal points representing groups of smallholder irrigators. The three presented cases show that structural challenges, local geographies and power relations shape the final outcome of water reforms in relation to decentralised river basin management, stakeholdersʼ participation and accountability. Rather than improving accountability to users and securing the financial basis for sustainable infrastructure operation and maintenance, the permit system in place reinforces existing inequalities.

KEYWORDS: IWRM, policy articulation, elite, water permits, stakeholder participation, Mozambique

ABSTRACT: 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.

KEYWORDS: Land and water reform, IWRM, equity, water access, Inkomati, South Africa

ABSTRACT: 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.

KEYWORDS: IWRM, interpretations, institutions, historical legacies, South Africa

ABSTRACT: In the mid-nineties Zimbabwe formed participatory institutions known as catchment and sub-catchment councils based on river basins to govern and manage its waters. These councils were initially funded by a range of donors anticipating that they could become self-funding over time through the sale of water. In this article, we explore the origins of three of the councils and the political context in which they functioned. The internal politics were shaped by the commercial farming elites who sought to control the councils with a 'defensive strategy' to keep control over water. However, external national political processes limited the possibilities for continued elite control while simultaneously limiting water reform. Despite significant efforts to alter the waterscape, fast track land reform which began in 2000 led to the undermining of the first phases of IWRM and water reform and to the privileging of land over water. The economic foundations for funding the new participatory institutions were lost through the withdrawal of donors, the loss of large-scale farmers able to pay for water and the economic and political crises that characterised the period from 2000 to 2010.

KEYWORDS: IWRM, power, water reform, catchment councils, Zimbabwe

ABSTRACT: In the 1990s, the Government of Zimbabwe undertook water reforms to redress racially defined inequitable access to agricultural water. This paper analyses how a water reform process, seemingly informed by a clear political economy objective, was hijacked by efforts directed at implementing Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM). It uses the notion of policy articulation to analyse why and how IWRM 'travelled' to and in Zimbabwe and with what outcomes. The paper shows that attempts at introducing and implementing IWRM in Zimbabwe have had a chequered history. The efforts of Zimbabwe in pioneering implementation of IWRM in southern Africa, have subsequently waned, and prospects for resurrecting IWRM in its original form are low. Introduced in the 1990s when Western donors jumped on the bandwagon of the liberal economic agenda inspired by the IMF/World Bank, it declined between 2000 and 2009 due to a combination of poor economic performance, national-level politics and international isolation. In 2011 IWRM was reintroduced as the country re-engaged with the international community. The re-emergence of IWRM, however, seems to be largely rhetorical as the focus is now on fixing a crisis-ridden water sector, with a new political dispensation adding another layer of complexity. The paper concludes that the development of IWRM in Zimbabwe mirrors broader national-level socio-political processes and their complex relationship with the international community.

KEYWORDS: Water reform, IWRM, policy (dis)articulation, Zimbabwe

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