New Water Policy and Practice Volume 1, Number 1 - Fall 2014 | Page 9

New Water Policy and Practice

had to carry water from communal water
points. They would not be helped by an increase in their nominal entitlement to an increased volumetric amount of water to levels greater than could practically be drawn.
But they would also likely suffer from the
reallocation of financial resources to meet
the louder and more visible urban demands.

Even in the urban areas, poor people have not benefited greatly from the campaign to increase the volume of free water
provided. Municipal leaderships, recognizing that their budgets could be threatened
by the need to provide an ever-expanding
amount of water, sought options. Conservative policy advisors, who were offended
by free water going to the “non-poor” and
opposed the general free allocation, were
obvious allies. The predictable outcome of
this coalition was that many municipalities
have introduced means-testing and offered
free basic water only to “indigents.” Means
tests are well known to exclude theoretically
eligible recipients of benefits, because of the
transaction challenges that they pose, which
include exposing poor and vulnerable people to new modes of administrative corruption. Also lost was the broader principle
that had been established, which was that all
members of a community should have access to a basic amount of water, a provision
that specifically sought to “decommodify”
basic water supply. And the Constitutional Court judges explicitly commented that
“…. the applicants proposed no third way as
an alternative to the provision of universal
benefits or means-tested benefits” (Constitutional Court 2009).

Aside from the impact on the poor,
these campaigns have had an impact on
scholarship and policy. Other authors uncritically take as fact assertions that are repeated sufficiently often even though they
are not referenced against any formal source
but merely repeated; as a result, many re-

searchers continue to report that South Africa’s water supplies were being privatized
on a large scale, that wildly exaggerated
numbers of people were being cut off for
non-payment, and that the amount of water provided was not adequate (although it
complied with World Health Organization
guidance). The misinformation provided also distracted policy-makers from the
fact that the main cause of lack of access to
safe water in a country which has provided
nominal access for 95% of its population are
management failures, aggravated by extreme
decentralization and autonomy for local authorities, which was a product of South Africa’s negotiated settlement in 1994.

The activist campaigns and the
scholarship that underpins them have thus
been unhelpful across a variety of dimensions. As I wrote at the time,
“For the minority, the practitioners
who simply seek to achieve the broad
goals of service delivery, it remains important to develop an understanding
of the larger politics so as to be able to
promote the interests of the communities they seek to serve as effectively as possible. There continues to be a
need, if not for parish pump politics, at
least for a politics that will help communities to keep their parish pumps
working. That is a requirement of a
modern society, without which many
of the higher goals are unlikely to be
achieved.” (Muller 2007)

Example 2: Dams and Development

T

he dams and development debate
was promoted by a coalition of strong
voices from northern environmental
groups working with southern social activists to oppose the construction of large
dams. There have undoubtedly been many

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