Search

South Africa's legally binding National Water Resource Strategy specifies a people-oriented prioritization for the equitable allocation of the nation's public trust of surface and groundwater resources. This article analyses how the Inkomati–Usuthu Catchment Management Agency seeks to operationalize the three highest priorities in the Sabie Sub Catchment: the Basic Human Needs Reserve for domestic and constitutionally based productive water uses; customary water tenure in former homelands prioritized over the upstream commercial forestry and large-scale farming and the downstream Kruger National Park; and priority General Authorizations overcoming administrative injustices of current licensing. These highest priorities imply curtailment of the lowest priority, high-impact economic uses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Successful community institutions in the global South, which are contributing to livelihoods' improvement while conserving water and other natural resources, can sustainably build the resilience that policy makers at different tiers are seeking. This article assesses different models of community institutions in Nepal in governing water resources from various lenses, based on Ostrom's and others' design principles, including bricolage. Illustrated by three empirical cases, it analyses key features of community institutions in integrated water governance, their contributions to health, nutrition, food security, and environmental conservation, and ways for empowering these institutions as viable and sustainable solutions to address various livelihood challenges. However, inequalities along gender, caste, and ethnicity lines persist. We argue that the recently established local governments under the federal system in Nepal provide new opportunities for gender and social inclusion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To purchase or authenticate to the full-text of this article, please visit this link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1477-8947.2006.00158.x Byline: Krishna C. Prasad (1), Barbara van Koppen (2), Kenneth Strzepek (3) Keywords: Equity; Water productivity; Olifants; Assessment; Method; River basin management Abstract: Abstract Emerging approaches to water resources development and management typically highlight equity and productivity as two main objectives. In the context of integrated water resources management within a river basin, managers and stakeholders often need a comparative assessment of different options for water augmentation and/or allocation. Pitting such options against predefined objectives, such as equity and productivity, requires an assessment of the effects that available options will have on these objectives. Available documentation indicates that not only does the interpretation of such objectives vary widely, but also the available methods for assessing equity and productivity run into significant limitations in the availability of adequate data. This limitation has largely kept decision makers from gaining a comprehensive overview of equity and productivity scenarios, whether within or across sectors, that could facilitate better-informed decisions. To address this methodological gap, this article scrutinizes different notions associated with equity and water productivity, and limitations in prevalent assessment methods with the view to develop and demonstrate pragmatic methodologies for assessing equity and productivity in data-scarce contexts. The discussion and findings are based on a review of relevant literature and empirical and consultative research work in the Olifants River basin in South Africa. The demonstrated methodologies for assessing equity and productivity, besides being useful in data-scarce contexts, are insightful for initiating several policy measures and also for exploring the relationship between equity and water productivity. Author Affiliation: (1)Krishna C. Prasad is a Researcher with the International Water Management Institute, presently Senior Lecturer at UNESCO-IHE Institute for Water Education, Westvest 7, PO Box 3015, 2601 Delft, The Netherlands. E-mail:k.prasad@unesco-ihe.org. (2)Barbara van Koppen is a Principal Researcher, International Water Management Institute, 141 Creswell Street, Weavind Park 0184, Pretoria, South Africa. E-mail:b.vankoppen@cgiar.org. (3)Kenneth Strzepek is a Professor with the Department of Civil, Environmental and Architectural Engineering, University of Colorado, Boulder, CO 80309-0428. USA. E-mail:strzepek@colorado.edu.

The article examines gender as a factor in the allocation of water resources within rural households, including both input, as for agricultural cultivation, and consumption, as in cooking and cleaning. Research indicates that women's access to water resources is interrelated to their access to land, income and markets, and is therefore a valid criterion in developing water policies.

During apartheid, South Africa formalized legal pluralism as territorial and institutional segregation that legitimized the white minority's grab of most land, water and mineral resources. In the homelands on the remaining 13% of the country, allied tribal chiefs controlled second-class customary land and water rights. Under the democratic dispensation, the new Constitution (1996) and National Water Act (1998) aim at redressing this racial discrimination. However, these goals have not been achieved. Building on literature, field research and ongoing policy and legal debates, this paper traces causes for this failure and examines whether and how a different interpretation of statutory law can decolonize past legal pluralism. A main cause of this failure is the continued power by white large-scale water users and their consultants and lawyers. Monopolizing technical and legal knowledge, they fiercely defend apartheid era's Existing Lawful Uses by 1998 and relatively easily obtain administrative licences for post-1998 water uptake, while claiming excessive monetary values of entitlements to water resources that the state, with tax payers, as custodian holds. In contrast, black water users' pre-1998 Existing Lawful Uses have not been defined as yet and burdensome licences processes for new water uptake are inaccessible to the many smaller-scale black water users. The paper concludes that, in former homelands, the legal status of living customary water tenure should be elevated and protected. Inclusive facilitated processes can further clarify the "sharing in" of water resources flowing over or under the communities' territories inside the boundaries of former homelands, also to enable gradual alignment with constitutional rights. However, in "sharing out" these water resources with powerful third parties, including foreign investors, customary water tenure should be fully protected. As a core minimum of highest priority water resource rights across the country, the current Basic Human Needs Reserve should include all water-related constitutional rights, so also water for sufficient food, and be implemented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite progressive policies and a legal framework that includes the constitutional right to sufficient water, there are still enormous problems with water service delivery in low income rural South Africa. To understand the factors responsible for the observed discrepancy between ambitious policies and disappointing water service delivery, we undertook an analysis of the implementation of these policies in Sekhukhune District, South Africa; we scrutinised the public service water delivery in that district using an actor-oriented approach. We found that during the four phases of public water services delivery - identification, planning, construction and operation - practices often deviated from the stipulated policies; we also found that accountability relations between service delivery agencies and end users were undermined by gatekeeping and patronage. We argue that there is no need for major policy changes; we concluded from our research that by mobilising mechanisms that are based on existing policies, accountability relations can be strengthened and service delivery improved. We describe an experimental approach which focuses on budget transparency and end-user-driven development; it is an approach which aims at strengthening the agency of end users while limiting possibilities for rent-seeking and gatekeeping by councillors and contractors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Multiple-use water services (MUS) have been promoted and piloted globally for two decades as a socio-technical innovation. Yet the MUS approach has hardly extended beyond donor-funded projects to public policies. We use a collective action framework to analyze the non-institutionalization of MUS in Nepal. We find that MUS has much cognitive legitimacy, but discourse fragmentation has reduced its socio-political legitimacy. Yet the latter is essential to overcome the institutional challenges of a fragmented public water sector and to mainstream MUS into policy debate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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 farmers' 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 smallholders' access to water and rendered them more vulnerable to poverty and unemployment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Wastewater is increasingly regarded as a valuable resource, but to fully and safely exploit the potential, sound institutional arrangements governing its reuse are crucial. This article presents a case study of a self-managed irrigation scheme in Western Cape, South Africa, that uses treated effluent directly, formally and safely. By applying the Institutional Analysis and Development framework, the variables within the context, action arena and patterns of interaction that have enabled this outcome are systematically identified and evaluated. Key variables include: water scarcity; an effective policy and regulatory framework; public pollution prevention awareness; self-organization; and capital-intensive water use linked to profitable markets. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article traces the history of integrated water resources management (IWRM) in South Africa since the 1970s. It examines IWRM according to its three common pillars, which are also reflected in South Africa's National Water Act: economic efficiency, environmental sustainability, and equity. The article highlights how the principles of economic efficiency and the environment as a user in its own right emerged under apartheid, while equity was only included in the post-1994 water policies, with evolving influence on the other two principles. In 2013, the Department of Water Affairs overcame the widely documented flaws of IWRM by adopting developmental water management as its water resource management approach, aligning with the political and socio-economic goals of South Africa's democratic developmental state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article offers an approach to the study of the evolution, spread and uptake of integrated water resources management (IWRM). Specifically, it looks at theflowof IWRM as an idea in international and national fora, itstranslation and adoptioninto national contexts, and the on-the-groundpracticesof IWRM. Research carried out in South Africa, Zimbabwe and Mozambique provides empirical insights into the politics of IWRM implementation in southern Africa, the interface between international and national interests in shaping water policies in specific country contexts, and the on-the-ground challenges of addressing equity, redress and the reallocation of water. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines community-driven multiple use water services (MUS) as pioneered by the Rural Village Water Resources Management Project (RVWRMP) in the Far and Mid-Western development regions of Nepal. These regions are characterised by poverty, remoteness, rugged terrain, food insecurity, water scarcity, and post-conflict legacy. Water provision for domestic and productive uses provides opportunities to address poverty and livelihoods in environments with highly decentralised governance. This study explores the first-hand lessons learned in the RVWRMP in Nepal since 2006. This project is embedded within the local government. Key project entry points are decentralisation, participation and empowerment. This article reflects how the community-managed systems are used for multiple uses whether they were designed for it or not. It focuses on household- and community-level changes and related institution building and participatory planning through Water Use Master Plans and a Step-by-Step approach. Recommendations are made for scaling up multiple use services. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses four questions about the recent water law reforms in Sub-Saharan Africa, which strengthen permit systems. First, do permit systems continue to dispossess rural small-scale users, as intended by European colonizers who introduced principles of Roman law? Second, is it wrong to assume that one can convert one legal system (customary water rights) into another legal system (permits) in the short term? Third, do current permit systems discriminate against small-scale users? And lastly, do fiscal measures ingrained in permits foster rent seeking and strengthen water resources as a commodity for nationals and foreigners who can pay? As all the answers are positive, the paper concludes by recommending measures to recognize and protect small-scale water users and render state regulation more realistic. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper explores gender aspects of smallholders’ private technology adoption for groundwater irrigation in Ghana and Zambia. It focuses on two variables of quantitative farm-household surveys: household headship and gendered plot management. The paper compares adoption rates and types of technologies for female- and male-headed households; examines adoption rates when women have their own plots; and compares women’s decision making on irrigated plots and rainfed plots. The findings suggest that there are largely untapped synergies between gender-equality and irrigation-policy goals. Systematic gender differentiation in surveys is recommended. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the past decade, smallholder groundwater irrigation with motor pumps has increased considerably in Zambia. This study analyzes an important but hitherto ignored factor for adoption: the supply chain of imported motor pumps. The main obstacles for farmers are identified as: the highly centralized supply chain and financing facilities in urban hubs; lack of information about prices, which vary significantly for the same make and model of pump; lack of information and training on proper use and maintenance; and lack of financing facilities. The Zambia National Farmers Union seems best placed to remove these obstacles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through investigating the reactions of commercial farmers to land and water reforms in the Trichardtsdal-Ofcolaco area, Limpopo Province, Olifants Basin, South Africa, from 1997 to 2006, it is shown that water claims are key to land redistribution processes, and that commercial farmers make strategic use of arguments for nature conservation and ecological stewardship to defend their claims to water. Given these observations, caution is warranted with respect to the implementation of land and water reforms as separate policy packages; it may be more effective to design water and conservation policies as an integral part of land reform programmes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Water transfers to growing cities in sub-Sahara Africa, as elsewhere, seem inevitable. But absolute water entitlements in basins with variable supply may seriously affect many water users in times of water scarcity. This paper is based on research conducted in the Pangani river basin, Tanzania. Using a framework drawing from a theory of water right administration and transfer, the paper describes and analyses the appropriation of water from smallholder irrigators by cities. Here, farmers have over time created flexible allocation rules that are negotiated on a seasonal basis. More recently the basin water authority has been issuing formal water use rights that are based on average water availability. But actual flows are more often than not less than average. The issuing of state-based water use rights has been motivated on grounds of achieving economic efficiency and social equity. The emerging water conflicts between farmers and cities described in this paper have been driven by the fact that domestic use by city residents has, by law, priority over other types of use. The two cities described in this paper take the lion's share of the available water during the low-flow season, and at times over and above the permitted amounts, creating extreme water stress among the farmers. Rural communities try to defend their prior use claims through involving local leaders, prominent politicians and district and regional commissioners. Power inequality between the different actors (city authorities, basin water office, and smallholder farmers) played a critical role in the reallocation and hence the dynamics of water conflict. The paper proposes proportional allocation, whereby permitted abstractions are reduced in proportion to the expected shortfall in river flow, as an alternative by which limited water resources can be fairly allocated. The exact amounts (quantity or duration of use) by which individual user allocations are reduced would be negotiated by the users at the river level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Wetlands are a key livelihood resource in southern Africa. Historically they have been managed using local knowledge systems, but these systems have in many instances been undermined by colonial and postcolonial legal requirements. The IUCN's Ramsar initiative, supported by organisations such as BirdLife International and the WWF, seeks to protect wetland resources. This qualitative study examined the political ecology of the Kapukupuku and Waya areas of the Lukanga wetlands in Zambia, designated a Ramsar site. This designation has given rise to competing ‘narratives’ by politicians and local community leaders over how Lukanga should be managed and used, and the resulting conflict is threatening its sustainability. The paper warns that the various parties' arguments are value-laden and that power asymmetry threatens to exclude poor local communities. Policy must take power interests into account to ensure that developments in the name of the poor really do benefit the poor. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Governments, NGOs and financers invest considerable resources in rural domestic water supplies and irrigation development. However, elite capture and underuse, if not complete abandonment, are frequent. While the blame is often put on 'corrupt, lazy and indisciplined' communities, this article explores the question of how the public water sector itself contributes to this state of affairs. Four case studies, which are part of the research project Cooperation and Conflict in Local Water Governance, are examined: two domestic water supply projects (Mali, Vietnam); one participatory multiple use project (Zambia); and one large-scale irrigation project (Bolivia). It was found that accountability of water projects was upward and tended to lie in construction targets for single uses with already allocated funding. This rendered project implementers dependent upon the village elite for timely spending. Yet, the elite appeared hardly motivated to maintain communal schemes, unless they themselves benefited. The dependency of projects on the elite can be reduced by ensuring participatory and inclusive planning that meets the project's conditions before budget allocation. Although such approaches are common outside the water sector, a barrier in the water sector is that central public funds are negotiated by each sector by profiling unique expertise and single livelihood goals, which trickle down as single use silos. The article concludes with reflections on plausible benefits of participatory multiple use services for equity and sustainability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: As the pressure on the water resources mounts within a river basin, institutional innovation may occur not as a result of a planned sequence of adjustments, but arising out of the interplay of several factors. By focusing on the basin trajectory this paper illustrates the importance of understanding how local-level institutional arrangements interface with national-level policies and basin-wide institutions. We expand Molle''s typology of basin actors responses by explicitly introducing a meso-layer which depicts the interface where State-level and local-level initiatives and responses are played out; and focus on how this interaction finds expression in the creation and modification of hydraulic property rights. We subsequently apply this perspective to the case of Pangani River Basin in Tanzania. The Pangani River Basin development trajectory did not follow a linear path and sequence of responses. Attempts by the state government to establish ‘order’ in the basin by issuing water rights, levying water fees and designing a new basin institutional set-up have so far proven problematic, and instead generated ‘noise’ at the interface. So far water resources development in the Pangani has primarily focused on blue water, and the paper shows how investments in infrastructure to control blue water have shaped the relationship between water users, and between water user groups and the State. It remains unknown, however, what the implications will be of widespread investments in improved green water use throughout the basin – not only hydrologically for the availability of blue water, but also socially for the livelihoods of the basin population, and for the evolving relationships between green and blue water users, and between them and the State. The paper concludes with a question: will green water development engender a similar double-edged material-symbolic dynamic as blue water development has. The findings of this paper demonstrate that the expanded typology of basin actors’ responses helps to better understand the present situation. Such an improved understanding is useful in analysing current and proposed interventions. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The division of Central Asia into several independent states, and the transition from the centrally planned economy to a market economy in the majority of those states, affected all sectors and all social levels in the region. One such example is irrigation. Centrally planned and financed from Moscow, on-farm irrigation systems were managed by collective farms. The process of decentralization through the dismantling of collective farms led to a restructuring of services and infrastruc-ture throughout Central Asia. Water users associations (WUAs) have been established to transfer on-farm irrigation management to farmers throughout the region, including Uzbekistan. Many women in Uzbekistan actively participate in farming activities, so their role in the on-farm irrigation restructuring process is important. Yet, the findings from this study suggest that participation of women is very limited in WUAs as very few women are registered as land owners. Because of high levels of migration by men to other countries, farm activities are mostly carried out by women. Despite this, women’s decision-making power within their farms is limited. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Multiple-use services (MUS) have recently gained increased attention as an alternative form of providing rural water services in an integrated manner. This stems from the growing recognition that users anyway tend to use water systems for multiple purposes. This paper aims to characterise this practice on the basis of case evidence collected in eight countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America. The cases show that people almost universally use water for both domestic and productive activities at and around the homestead. Although seldom the main source of people's income or food production, these activities are of considerable importance for people's livelihoods. The extent to which people use water for multiple purposes is closely related to the level of access to water expressed in the form of a water ladder in this paper. The case studies presented demonstrate how access is created by different types and combinations of well-known technologies. Additional financial and management measures are required to ensure sustainability of services. Despite the practical feasibility of the MUS approach, it is not yet widely applied by service providers and sector agencies due to observed barriers in institutional uptake. A better characterisation of MUS, alongside a learning-driven stakeholder process was able to overcome some of these barriers and improve the consideration of multiple uses of water in policy and practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the 1990s, South Africa, like other southern African countries, embarked on an Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM)-inspired water reform process that culminated in the promulgation of the National Water Act in 1998, four years after achieving democracy. The adoption of IWRM, which emphasizes second generation water issues (such as demand management, water quality, environmental flow requirements etc), and not the development of water infrastructure, begs the question whether this can make a meaningful contribution to the development agenda in a country where, during apartheid, the water rights of millions of the black majority population were systematically expunged due to unjust legislation and underinvestment in water infrastructure. This paper analyzes the suitability of post-apartheid water legislation and water investments vis-a-vis the water needs of the historically disadvantaged individuals, and how local people have tried to cope with the situation. While the post-apartheid water legislation contains some useful pro-poor provisions these have not been complemented by strategies to operationalize them, a situation not helped by state funding that is biased towards formal irrigation. We use the concept of 'hydraulic property rights creation' to investigate how local people, as individuals and as groups, assert rights over water, and how such claims are legitimized. Self initiative and poor performing public-owned/managed domestic and productive water schemes have become important catalysts for local investment. However, local efforts need to be strengthened by ensuring that the favorable legal provisions are operationalized, appropriate financial support mechanisms for individuals and groups for development of water infrastructure are in place, and institutional shortcomings are addressed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Accurate information on irrigated areas' spatial distribution and extent are crucial in enhancing agricultural water productivity, water resources management, and formulating strategic policies that enhance water and food security and ecologically sustainable development. However, data are typically limited for smallholder irrigated areas, which is key to achieving social equity and equal distribution of financial resources. This study addressed this gap by delineating disaggregated smallholder and commercial irrigated areas through the random forest algorithm, a non-parametric machine learning classifier. Location within or outside former apartheid "homelands" was taken as a proxy for smallholder, and commercial irrigation. Being in a medium rainfall area, the huge irrigation potential of the Inkomati-Usuthu Water Management Area (UWMA) is already well developed for commercial crop production outside former homelands. However, information about the spatial distribution and extent of irrigated areas within former homelands, which is largely informal, was missing. Therefore, we first classified cultivated lands in 2019 and 2020 as a baseline, from where the Normalised Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) was used to distinguish irrigated from rainfed, focusing on the dry winter period when crops are predominately irrigated. The mapping accuracy of 84.9% improved the efficacy in defining the actual spatial extent of current irrigated areas at both smallholder and commercial spatial scales. The proportion of irrigated areas was high for both commercial (92.5%) and smallholder (96.2%) irrigation. Moreover, smallholder irrigation increased by over 19% between 2019 and 2020, compared to slightly over 7% in the commercial sector. Such information is critical for policy formulation regarding equitable and inclusive water allocation, irrigation expansion, land reform, and food and water security in smallholder farming systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the views of the authors on the most important constraints to achieving food security in various parts of Africa. According to Sabina Anokye Mensah, low investments in agriculture at the processing level are major constraints to achieving food security. Francois Ruf states that land tenure issues constitute an important constraint to achieving food security. David Hall-Matthews says that weak state capacity and accountability are important constraints to food security.

This article discusses whether agricultural subsidies in developed countries benefit or harm the majority of the poor in developing countries. Subsidized agricultural exports to developing countries and food aid kill the output markets of smallholders. The unfair competition, especially in sub-Saharan Africa, together with blatant neglect of agriculture in public policy, hinders agricultural growth. It mentions that agricultural growth throughout history has been the engine of overall economic growth.

The case study describes large-scale environmental change related to, and recent responses associated with, growing water scarcity in the Usangu Plains, a catchment of the Great Ruaha River in south-west Tanzania. The analysis uses outputs from two recent projects to critically examine various theories of environmental change and the ‘fit’ of new river basin management strategies to the problems found, arguing that various perspectives are worryingly at odds with each other. We find that the investigators of the two projects presented a reasonable and sufficient case of the causes of water scarcity. Yet despite efforts to disseminate scientific findings, different stakeholder groups did not agree with this case. This, we believe, was due to three combined factors; firstly highly entrenched views existed that were also based on quasi-scientific reasoning; secondly, the projects’ deliberations to date, in acknowledging their own uncertainty, were not assertive enough in ascribing causation to the various processes of change; thirdly, policy-uptake was not sufficiently managed by the scientists involved. We conclude that this complexity of the science–policy interface is a feature of integrated water resources management (IWRM) and that the norms of scientific uncertainty in the face of competing theories (held by their protagonists with greater certainty) obliges scientists to take a more active role in sensitively managing the advice-to-policy process in order to improve management of water within river basins. Thus, the paper argues, the nature of integrated water resources management is one of ‘action research’ to move towards an improved understanding of change, and of ‘action policy-advising’ to draw policy-makers into a cycle of considered decision-making. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This article discusses ways in which the South African Government and grassroots organizations envisage and implement democracy achieved since 1994 in the field of water resources management. The focus is on the democratic, political and economic freedom and equality in resource rights for poor black women, who are central to poverty eradication. While the new water policy and law provide an enabling framework for achieving these goals, implementation on the ground encounters both new opportunities and constraints. This is illustrated by several cases of establishing South Africa's new water management institutions: catchment management agencies and water user associations. The important nexus between state-led democratization of water resources management and bottom-up grassroots movements is also discussed. The article concludes that the Government's affirmative and targeted intervention is indispensable for redressing gender inequalities and eradicating poverty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]