Water Resources Management and Governance in Southern Africa: Towards Regional Integration for Peace and Prosperity

Larry A. Swatuk is associate professor at the School of Environment, Enterprise and Development, University of Waterloo, Canada. Joanna Fatch is a graduate student in Earth Sciences at the University of the Western Cape, South Africa.

The Southern African Development Community (SADC) is an organisation of long-standing. Created in 1979–80 as a “development coordinating conference” (SADCC) of regional states actively opposed to apartheid and minority rule, SADC became a “development community” in 1994, welcoming a majority-ruled South Africa into the fold. Devoted to regional economic integration, SADC for twenty years has been taking deliberate policy, programme, legal and institutional steps to create a functional framework for sustainable and equitable wealth creation. Importantly, the initial regional protocol—i.e., the established code of procedure or behaviour for any group or organisation—concerned shared watercourses. The symbolic value of this protocol was clear: for the region to recover from a century of colonial misrule and maldevelopment characterised by cycles of violence, destruction and disorganisation, it would have to overcome the artificial territorial divisions contrived and codified by the European imperial powers at the Berlin Conference of 1884.

The practical value of the protocol was that these political boundaries disrupted the natural rhythm and flow of people, animals and resources laid down by the geo-historical patterns of the region’s hydrological cycle; for the region to prosper, it would have to return to the collective utilisation of its shared water resources (see Table 1 below).

As this short essay demonstrates, a great deal has been achieved over the ensuing twenty years, so much so that the region is often put forward as a case of “best practice” in transboundary water governance and management. Notwithstanding the numerous barriers to sustainable and equitable development in a region of abiding underdevelopment, one must start somewhere and, it seems to us, SADC has made a significant start.

In this paper we discuss regional achievements in the following way. First, we describe the SADC regional water protocol, setting it within the broader context of international water law. Second, we highlight its role as foundation stone for a wide series of legal–institutional and functional achievements in transboundary water governance and management, with a particular focus on river basin organisations. Lastly, we reflect on the inspirational value of this document to a region trapped in abiding forms of poverty and underdevelopment. The paper draws on both primary and secondary sources, including a series of semi-structured interviews conducted between 2011 and 2013 and the results of a 2011 survey administered among regional water professionals with expertise in areas such as the politics of water, river basin management, and transboundary water governance. At various points in this paper, interviewees and participants in our survey are quoted, identified by the tag “Respondent”. Their request for anonymity has been respected.

Windows of Opportunity

Resilience scholars often speak of “windows of opportunity”, i.e., of a society’s ability to seize opportunities in a timely fashion in order to facilitate the transformation from one relatively stable but sub-optimal condition to another that is more robust and collectively beneficial.¹ In southern Africa, one can point to the near-simultaneous advent of several interrelated factors that served to push the region’s decision-makers in a new direction:²

● The global focus on freshwater resources deriving from both the Rio Summit and the Dublin conference in 1992.

● The formal end of apartheid in South Africa and the Nelson Mandela–led “new” South Africa’s becoming “part of” the SADCC region, rather than being “apart from” it.

● Widespread multi‐year drought across the region from the late‐1980s to the mid‐1990s.

● South Africa’s desire to fit into the world and become a good global citizen after apartheid.

● The rise of the “basin approach” to water management, fitting nicely with a region already interdependent on water resources because of colonial/imperial border delineation.

● Regional need for energy combined with South African need for water.

● Donor-state interest, particularly of the Nordic countries (especially Sweden) in water, and of the European Union in regional integration.

● National goals for sustainable economic development and poverty alleviation. 

Legal Foundation: The Protocol

SADC leaders reacted positively to these pressures and opportunities through the creation of the regional water protocol (signed in 1995 and acceded to in 1998). With the 1997 creation of the United Nations Convention on the Law of Non-navigational Uses of International Watercourses (UNC), however, the 1995 protocol was revised in 2000 and ultimately adopted in 2003. The protocol was based on article 22 of the SADC Treaty, and viewed as “a vehicle for regional integration”. Its spirit and intent were to manage collectively the region’s shared water resources for the sustainable economic and social development of all SADC citizens. Specifically, the objective of the protocol as spelled out in its article 1 is “to foster closer cooperation for judicious, sustainable and coordinated management, protection and utilisation of shared watercourses and advance the SADC agenda for regional integration”. The background to the protocol has been studied extensively.³ The protocol is meant to inform the actions of all member states with regard to water resources policy, law and management at national level. At the same time, it underpins a wide variety of inter-state actions, particularly in the context of developing transboundary river basins and their management, including the setting up of relevant basin institutions.

Given that 70 per cent of the region’s land falls within international river basins, and the centrality of water to economic development, the revised SADC Protocol on Shared Watercourses is a seminal document in international water cooperation. The protocol grew out of riparian states’ inability to move forward on a Zambezi River agreement in 1993, at which point it was decided to pursue a regional agreement instead (Respondent 7). The revised protocol takes into account the 1966 Helsinki Rules and the UNC. The 1966 Helsinki Rules by the International Law Association (ILA) most notably established the principle of a state’s right to a “reasonable and equitable share in the beneficial use of the waters of an international drainage basin”. The UNC is a framework convention therefore enabling flexibility for basin states