New Water Policy and Practice Volume 1, Number 1 - Fall 2014 | Page 6

New Water Policy and Practice - Volume 1, Number 1 - Fall 2014

A More Useful Agenda for Water Management
Mike MullerA1
In this opinion editorial, New Water Policy and Practice International Advisory Board member Prof Mike Muller (Wits University Graduate School of
Governance and former Director General of the Department of Water Affairs
and Forestry, South Africa) begins with his thoughts on a more useful agenda
for water management. Reflecting on examples of rights to water, privatisation
and commoditisation of water in South Africa, the debate about dams and
development in Africa, and river basins, regional institutions and state sovereignty, Mike presents the case that the current water management discourse
has been distorted by strong interests with, on occasion, very significant negative impacts.
Keywords: water management; right to water; commoditization; dams and
development; inter-governmental cooperation

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review of current literature suggests that water management discourses outside of strictly technical
domains are dominated by voices that are
isolated from practice and, increasingly, are
raised in order to promote narrow interests.
Such voices have many incentives to create
and maintain a divergence between theory
and application, practice, and polemic.

Does this matter? To the extent that
such discourse is removed from practice, it
may be of little consequence. But the nature
of water resources and the services derived
from them means that many decision-making processes about the way that that they
are developed, managed, and used—as they
must be to sustain a world of nine billion
people whose social and economic aspirations involve many dimensions of the resource—lie in a set of public domains that
are widely accessible, at least to those with
power and resources. So there is a concern—and empirical evidence in support of
it—that what can be characterized as wide
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but weak public interests are increasingly
trumped by strong, minority, and private
interests.

This can pose a serious threat in
many societies. Water management is a
complex though not impossible task. It involves working with an often fugitive renewable resource whose availability and
variability is extremely unpredictable and
varies over daily, seasonal, annual, and
multi-annual timeframes. This poses challenges to formal political and administrative systems that are designed to manage
the predictable and measurable as well
as the less formal institutions that enable
communities and societies to live within
the specific constraints of their water resources at local, regional, and national levels.

Although the presence or absence
of water may limit the choices that can be
made at any particular location, the resource itself need not be a constraint on
social and economic development if broad

University of Witwatersrand, South Africa
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