Reforming Water Rights in South Africa: Exploring the Process of Formalisation

Increasing pressures on water resources world-wide have led to a number of countries reforming their water policies in order to mitigate what is perceived as an acute environmental problem. Lack of water poses a potential threat to poor people's livelihoo ds, and also represents an obstacle to social and economic development. Reform processes tend to emphasise decentralisation of management, cost-recovery measures, and the institutionalisation of formal water rights. The popularity of formalisation of righ ts as a policy option demands a thorough understanding of how such rights are conceptualised, defined, implemented and enforced, the process of allocation, and how issues of equity are dealt with. This project aims to contribute to an increased understand ing of the dynamics and politics of formalisation processes, and will address the question of how such processes affect allocation of, and poor people's access to, water. The overarching question is sub-divided into questions relating to different scales, the first subset of questions deals with the formation and implementation of policy at the national/regional levels, exploring concepts of rights, allocation, and equity, whilst the second subset studies the outcome of formal rights "on-the-ground". It i s believed that such a multiple-scale approach, bringing together policy-level analysis with a multi-sited ethnographic approach, will contribute to a greater understanding of the policy processes at work and their impact. The proposal is grounded in the theory of property rights, paying particular attention to Munzer's pluralist theory of property, and the overlapping of formal vs. informal rights. As it may be argued that allocation arguments are produced discursively, the analytical framework will be o ne of Foucauldian discourse analysis. Such a framework explicitly recognises the relationship of power/knowledge, and holds that power relations are reflected in discourses, that in turn shape allocation decisions.