The hydropolitical battlegrounds of Johannesburg and Durban (South Africa's largest and third-largest cities) represent some of the Global South's most intense conflicts over household water and sanitation access, affordability, and service standards. Large social movements, community-based organisations, trade unions and a very divided 'expert' network have disputed everything from the bulk supply systems (especially large dams), to public-private partnerships (e.g. Suez in Johannesburg and Veolia in Durban), to the slope and shape of tariffs, to disconnection systems, to constitutional water and environmental rights, to the character of household sanitation systems. The climate crisis has major implications, as well, for stormwater drainage and infrastructural resilience. Some major gains were won by activists, but the overall delivery, cost and reliability of water and sanitation remain subject to dispute. While the battles have raged in both sites since the early 1990s, hydropolitics are not yet settled, and municipal service delivery protests continue at rising rates.

The water utility serving the most populous South African province (Gauteng), Rand Water, was officially established in 1903, with the intention of supplying the gold mining industry of Johannesburg. Inter-basin transfer schemes bringing water from Lesotho and the Drakensburg mountains to the south, were necessary even once Johannesburg gold mining was exhausted, to support the resulting industrial complex, other mining in the region, coal-fired power plant cooling, agriculture and domestic use. Rand Water’s main revenue was initially from mining, but today that represents only 10% of the total. Rand Water’s primary mandate has shifted to providing potable water to Gauteng. The business model Rand Water ran on very clearly does not fit the current setting in South Africa. More than 60% of the South African population live in poverty, and many consumers cannot afford to pay capital and interest costs for new infrastructure development. In addition, large amounts of energy, supplied by Eskom, are required to pump water into Gauteng. Energy costs and chemical costs to purify polluted water are Rand Water’s largest expenses. A complete rethinking of how Rand Water and even broader infrastructure networks operate is necessary. In this research we examine the role of the state in water resource management both in the past, acknowledge the dramatic changes and need to incorporate climate change factors (such as unpredictable long-term droughts and extreme weather events), and offer suggestions for future water management from bulk supplies to household consumption.

Individual Presentation Submission

Activists working at the local level, and academic-activists who work in solidarity with them, focus on the pressing need for transformative change so that households can cope with worsening climate conditions such as water scarcity. This paper explores three case studies in South Africa: Nqushwa in the Eastern Cape, Madibeng in North West, and eThekwini/ uMzinyathi in KwaZulu Natal. It examines how people’s frustrations around their lack of access to clean water are embedded in and constructed through their articulation with local power dynamics. Capturing local voices, it shows how the failure of the state to secure people’s access to water and to protect water resources affects people’s perceptions and support of democracy. Without access to water and other resources, their despondency results in a dismissal and lack of support for democracy. The paper develops the concept of “empty democracy” in a socio-economic and ecological terms. It concludes by asking how local challenges to the very nature of governance may create the very openings that are needed for fundamental, transformative change at national and global levels. Might people’s lack of support for democracy and their desire for a form of governance that secures water and other resources unintentionally provide a basis for crucial political and ecological change?