Integrated water resources management: comparing Brazil and South Africa
Amrita Lamba
Doctoral Candidate, Faculty of Law and Social Sciences, Department of Development Studies
School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London
Summary and Introduction: Internationally, Brazil and South Africa are at the forefront of applying innovative approaches to water and river basin management. By comparing their attempt to arrive at substantive state-society engagement in water governance, vital lessons could be drawn for other countries. Based on my recently concluded doctoral research fieldwork in Brazil and South Africa, this paper attempts to compare water management practices in these countries in an attempt to bring out the necessary but not sufficient principles for sustainable water management that could be illustrative for other countries.
Methods: In this paper, using the conceptual – analytical framework of Judith Tendler’s and Peter Evans’s State-Society Synergy approach and Francis Fukuyama’s State Building model, I describe a novel institutional architecture, which I call the Strong State-Society Synergy (4-S) approach by knotting the aforementioned threads of thinking about governance. I use the 4-S heuristic approach to compare water management practices in Brazil and South Africa.
This approach provides a fine-grained analysis of the mechanisms at work in the fuzzy space created by the overlap of formal and informal institutions. This space has the potential to engender effectiveness and accountability in governance through invoking norms of trust and networks of civic engagement between the state and the community. The study deploys a mixed methods approach.
Results and Discussion: I will specifically focus on water management in the Crocodile sub-catchment in South Africa and the Jaguaribe river basin in Brazil. I choose these cases because they provide a good ‘fit’ to explore through the lens of the 4-S heuristic approach. There is prevalence of state-society exchanges, overlap of formal and informal institutions, existence of norms of trust and networks of civic engagement between the state and the community.
Conclusion: An examination of institutional responses to water stress coupled with the policy reform that focuses on integrated water resources management makes the studies in the Jaguaribe river basin in Ceará and the Crocodile sub-catchment in South Africa mirror each other – and, therefore makes these studies easily comparable. However, their histories and water resources management practices are sufficiently different to provide valuable insights.
