Water governance and justice in Cape Town: An overview
Funding information: AXA Research Fund
Abstract
The drought that drew the world's attention to Cape Town in early 2018 was the worst on record, threatening to cut off household taps for 4 million people. Even before the drought, the city's relation to water was complex; South Africa still struggles with the legacy of racial inequality including its implications for water justice. Spatial and economic segregation of people initiated when Europeans first settled in the Cape culminated during the apartheid era 1948–1994. It forcibly moved hundreds of thousands of “colored” and “black” Capetonians to inferior housing in low-lying areas prone to flooding and with limited access to water, sanitation, and other services. Post-1994 policies have aimed to promote water justice for all citizens, but municipalities have struggled with implementation especially in rapidly growing informal settlements. During the recent drought, the City of Cape Town ramped up its program for water demand management, including pressure reduction, leak repairs, and public awareness-raising campaigns. However, poor communication and a lack of trust contributed to a near-panic situation at the threat of “Day Zero” as dams almost ran dry in the first half of 2018. Saved by winter rains, Cape Town is now exploring additional water sources and developing a new Water Strategy. Taken together, the City's experiences demonstrate that sustainable water governance needs to acknowledge the interrelated threats of drought and flooding, and the range of impacts these threats as well as the City's responses have on a population still defined by extreme inequality.
This article is categorized under:
- Engineering Water > Planning Water
- Human Water > Water Governance
- Science of Water > Water Extremes
Abstract
Cape Town's water crisis was triggered by a 3-year drought leaving reservoirs with just 10% usable water. Thanks to a joint effort by government, residents, and businesses, water used dropped massively and household taps remained open until winter rains replenished dam levels.
1 INTRODUCTION
In January 2018, global news reports introduced the world to a new, ominous threat said to “surpass anything a major city has faced since World War II or the Sept. 11 attacks” (New York Times, 2018). After 3 years of drought, Cape Town, South Africa, found its dams dangerously low and heading toward “Day Zero” when household supply would be turned off leaving 4 million residents to queue for water at public taps. In a city of extreme economic inequality, with a legacy of state-led racial discrimination depriving many of adequate access to public amenities, these prospects seemed to herald potential disaster for social order—not to mention the city's economy, employment, environment, and public health.
Water security—including both safe water supply and protection from water-related disasters—is a critical challenge for cities, especially in southern Africa where climate change and urbanization are projected to occur faster than most other places (Grasham, Korzenevica, & Charles, 2019; Nagendra, Bai, Brondizio, & Lwasa, 2018). Declining water supply and growing demand is not unique to Cape Town, but the rate of declining supply alongside the consumption made the situation in 2018 extreme from a global perspective (Mariño, 2017). Climate change is estimated to have tripled the likelihood for the drought to occur (Otto et al., 2018), and with coming decades projected to be even hotter and most likely drier, climate change will be an increasingly important factor in water governance (Jack, Wolski, Steynor, & Lennard, 2016; Schiermeier, 2018). Such changes in precipitation and water flow have multiple knock-on effects on how urban land is managed, which highlights how many of Cape Town's core activities are intertwined with water—from basic functions like hospitals and schools to economic values generated by industries ranging from construction to tourism, to food security from peri-urban and rural agriculture, and more indirect benefits from maintained employment in these sectors (Pengelly et al., 2017; Ziervogel & Parnell, 2014). Safe water is critical for human well-being and development, but globalization and the dominance of neoliberal policies often favor powerful actors' control of the resource at the expense of more marginalized groups (OECD, 2015; Zwarteveen & Boelens, 2014). Events like droughts often impact people differently depending on structural reasons such as class, gender, and historical legacies of discrimination and segregation (Batchelor, 2009; Grasham et al., 2019; Harris, McKenzie, Rodina, Shah, & Wilson, 2016). Promoting water justice implies political negotiations, contestations, and struggles, and needs to address not only fair distribution of water, but also equality in terms of recognized water rights and participation in decisions concerning it, as well as protecting ecological integrity (Zwarteveen & Boelens, 2014). A “water crisis” is therefore not simply about too much or not enough water, but often a “governance crisis” where the institutions put in place have failed to build resilience and adapt to changing conditions (OECD, 2015; Ziervogel et al., 2017).
This paper provides an overview of Cape Town's water governance arrangements. By this we refer to the set of political, social, economic, and administrative systems that formally and informally control decision-making around water resources development and management (Batchelor, 2009; Woodhouse & Muller, 2017). Water governance is necessary because as a resource, water connects people, places and different sectors of society; it is of both local and global concern and involves public, private and nonprofit actors; and it often requires high capital investments and is critical for development needs (OECD, 2015). Governance systems often include normative ideas of what defines “good governance”: for example, adequately liberalized markets, transparent decision-making, water justice, etc. (Batchelor, 2009). Water governance geared to address injustices and meet the needs of the most underserved can therefore conflict with objectives like increasing efficiency or cost recovery (Harris et al., 2016). Alongside general challenges such as growing water demand, limited and increasingly polluted resources, water governance needs to consider issues justice and equity. Our review therefore also describes key stakeholder groups in terms of vulnerability to water scarcity and environmental risk across the urban landscape.
Cape Town presents a uniquely valuable case study of these water governance challenges from an international perspective by drawing attention to the increasingly relevant dynamics of rapidly urbanizing global South cities. For the South African context, our paper provide a valuable overview of the city's recent and historic water woes at a time when dam levels are back at a more comfortable albeit below-normal level, and city authorities are developing a new Water Strategy (City of Cape Town, 2019b). We approach this from a broad, interdisciplinary perspective, since focusing only on the “hard science” limits one's ability to learn; South Africa's failure to learn from previous water crises is part of what has punished it today (Vogel & Olivier, 2018).
We conduct a combined “Overview” and “State-of-the-art” literature review (sensu Grant & Booth, 2009) of published academic articles as well as reports and documents from government agencies and nonprofit organizations. We employed a combination of online literature searches, collecting documents issued by the City of Cape Town, and use of formally and informally shared reports, commentaries and draft manuscripts circulated in the research and water governance community in Cape Town (in which the second author has been embedded for several years). The aim is not to provide a systematic, replicable analysis of an entire body of literature but rather to present a comprehensive overview of one specific case, to be used for further analysis, discussion, and critique.
Our overview starts with a summary of the city's historical relationship with water, then presents its current governance arrangements and efforts to mitigate both floods and droughts. We then discuss issues of inequality and the municipality's strained relations with the public especially in terms of communication during the water crisis. We end with a summary of and reflection on Cape Town's key lessons for water governance, especially regarding the notion of water justice.
2 HISTORICAL OVERVIEW: CAPE TOWN'S WATER USE AND SUPPLY
To understand water in Cape Town, it is critical to reflect on past experiences and local circumstances that lead to the current situation (Vogel & Olivier, 2018). Water availability has defined conditions for permanent and temporary human settlement on the Cape Peninsula for millennia (Wilkinson, 2000). Before Cape Town was founded, the area was occupied and/or regularly visited by San, Strandloper, and Khoikhoi people benefiting from the grazing, wild game, and edible plants supported by the water in the area (Brown & Magoba, 2009). The Cape climate is considered Mediterranean, with warm dry summers and cool, wet winters with strong winds. The iconic Table Mountain creates multiple local microclimates, with average annual rainfall ranging from about 400 mm in the wind-swept Cape Flats to up to 1,000 mm in the nearby lush mountain slopes in and around Constantia (Brown & Magoba, 2009).
2.1 Colonial era and independence (1652–1948)
Plentiful water was a key reason why the Dutch East India Company chose to settle by Table Mountain in 1652, despite better natural harbors further north. Reliable streams were needed to replenish Company ships' drinking water, and to produce food to sustain ship crews. The Company established control by instituting laws to keep water sources from being polluted by its own settlers, and by driving away Khoikhoi cattle herders and other indigenous groups from the area by force (Brown & Magoba, 2009). From the start, the settlement that grew to become Cape Town was built on racial-based conflict over access to water. In following centuries, territorial expansion, slavery, and colonial policies would systematically serve the white population while marginalizing communities indigenous to the Cape, as well as other African peoples and the descendants of slaves originally brought from South-East Asia (Wilkinson, 2000).
Dutch Company executives never invested in extensive water infrastructure, and it was not until the 1840s, after 30 years as a British colony, that Cape Town's economy was deemed important enough for such expenditure (Brown & Magoba, 2009). The first reservoir was established on the mountain slopes above the city to secure steady water supply in 1850 (Kaiser & Macleod, 2018). Modern sewerage infrastructure, which requires water to flush out waste, had previously been held back by water scarcity (as well as engineering and funding issues). A sanitation and drainage system was finally constructed in the 1890s, laying the groundwork for the city's modern service provisioning (Brown & Magoba, 2009; Wilkinson, 2000). While this was intended to improve sanitation, there was also at this time a widespread idea that disease spread from nonwhite populations. This was often used to argue for segregated residential areas to protect the white population (Taing, 2015). After an outbreak of bubonic plague in 1901, residents who were not considered white were forcibly removed from residences in the center of the city (Wilkinson, 2000). Such institutionalized racial discrimination in access to land and water was provided for both in the British government's Act of Union of 1910, which gave South Africa its independence, as well as the subsequent Native Land Act of 1913 (Rawlins, 2017; Wilkinson, 2000). Displaced residents initially belonged to the large so-called colored population, a socially constructed category of people descending from slaves, the indigenous population and whites. In 1927, the first larger new settlement Langa was established as a “model Native village” for black Africans who were displaced away from the city center (Brown & Magoba, 2009; Wilkinson, 2000).
2.2 Apartheid rule and protest struggle (1948–1994)
The National Party won 1948 elections, benefiting from white people's anxiety over informal settlements that had grown to house the many black African laborers attracted during World War II industrial mobilization. The party's infamous apartheid policies extended previous segregation through the expulsion of at least 150,000 people by the end of the 1960s into “colored” and “black” townships in the Cape Flats (Wilkinson, 2000). The Flats is a vast area to the east of Table Mountain, which because of its low elevation and sandy soils is prone to flooding during winter rains. With substandard buildings and infrastructure and inadequate public services, this left its new residents highly exposed to environmental risk (Wilkinson, 2000; Ziervogel, Waddell, Smit, & Taylor, 2016).
During apartheid, Cape Town (and other cities) attracted many young black South Africans as migrant laborers since the rural “homelands” they had been moved to offered scarce employment opportunities. Between 1950 and 1980, Cape Town's black population increased over three times faster than the whites and almost twice as fast as the coloreds (Wilkinson, 2000). To provide water for the growing population, a series of investments were made to extend water supply infrastructure further away from Cape Town. The Western Cape Water Supply System (WCWSS) had previously consisted of the initial Table Mountain dams constructed in the 1800s and the Lower Steenbras Dam from 1921 (Figure 1); this was complemented by the Voëlvlei Dam in 1952, Wemmershoek Dam in 1957, Upper Steenbraas Dam in 1977, and Theewaterskloof Dam in 1980 (Brown & Magoba, 2009).
During apartheid, water and sanitation services—and most other public amenities—were primarily provided to white South Africans. The “Black Local Authorities” set up to govern townships generally struggled with a much weaker tax base, overcrowded neighborhoods, mismanagement and corruption (Smith, 2004). Divided into 25 different municipalities, service delivery in Cape Town was highly differentiated and primarily served white South Africans giving little priority to developing townships and informal settlements where most black and coloreds lived (Beck, Rodina, Luker, & Harris, 2016; Smith, 2004).
The public housing machinery started collapsing in the 1970s, with increasing revolts protesting apartheid policies and making townships effectively ungovernable by the 1980s (Wilkinson, 2000). Protest included refusal to pay for water and other services that were deemed inadequate; for instance, inferior pipes often leaked which generated water bills far beyond what users could pay (Smith, 2004; von Schnitzler, 2008). From 1986, Cape Town authorities were pressured to start upgrading amenities in disadvantaged areas, and provide new housing for the thousands living in informal settlements (Wilkinson, 2000). Dunes and wetlands were bulldozed to make space for public housing in areas like Khayelitsha (established 1988), but flooding continued to be a reoccurring winter problem both in the formal and informal dwellings that emerged (Brown & Magoba, 2009).
2.3 Democratic reform (1994–present)
South Africa was struck by a serious drought in the early 1990s, during the political turmoil of the last years of apartheid. The failure of the government's drought response and management to reach the most vulnerable parts of the population drew attention to it injustice of prioritizing white commercial agriculture interests (Vogel & Olivier, 2018). Around the time of South Africa's first democratic election in 1994, 20% of the country's population had no access to piped water at all—a figure that varied from 1 to 98% across different municipalities (Cole, Bailey, Cullis, & New, 2018).
Following democratization, the Mandela government introduced extensive political reforms to integrate historically marginalized groups and distribute public services more equitably (Smith, 2004). The new constitution (1996) explicitly emphasized every citizen's right to access to water and sanitation (Beck et al., 2016), and the Water Services Act (1997) further specified the standards, regulatory frameworks, and roles for carrying out these tasks. The national Department of Water Affairs and Forestry (changed to Department of Water and Sanitation, DWS, in 2014) is designated as the main regulating body, the Water Boards (operating at catchment level) are responsible for providing bulk water, and municipalities are in charge of delivering services to end users (Pengelly et al., 2017).
In Cape Town, the 25 separate municipalities were merged first in 1997 into six and then in 2000 into one single City of Cape Town metropolitan municipality (henceforth “the City”) (Beck et al., 2016; Smith, 2004). This was to enable redistribution of tax revenue from the entire metropolitan area across city center, suburbs, and townships (Mills, Hamukoma, & Doyle, 2019). The national government's Water Act (1998) sought to support a more equitable service delivery and black people's access to water allocation rights by requiring community participation in water management and water services development (Beck et al., 2016). However, the Act also introduced formal requirements for water conservation and demand management which came to have an indirect negative impact on disadvantaged communities. Since infrastructure in low-income areas was often poorly maintained and leaky, some household water meters registered extreme usage levels adding further debt to thousands of households in colored and black neighborhoods where nonpayment protest during apartheid had been common (Smith, 2004). High debts undermined willingness and ability to pay anything at all, which made it difficult for municipal authorities to meet market-based governance norms of full cost recovery for water services (von Schnitzler, 2008). Instead, authorities decided to cut off supply to indebted consumers. This was highly controversial, and left some areas (usually black African) without running water in 90% of the households (Smith, 2004).
More broadly, the formal requirements for water conservation and demand management represented a shift away from the previous water governance approach of building new dams to meet growing demands. Water use increased by 4.1% per year from 1965 to 2000, but actually decreased by 20% from 2000 to 2005 respite a growing population (Brown & Magoba, 2009; Smith, 2004). Since 1960, city authorities had gradually shifted toward “block tariffs,” where households using more water paid a higher rate per liter than those using less. After 1994, block tariffs were reinforced on the principle that medium users should cover the costs of themselves and the poorest, while high-end users would also pay for the cost of new water sources (Smith, 2004). The Berg River Dam, considered to be the last suitable dam to in the catchment (Figure 1), was planned for years and was eventually completed in 2008 (Brown & Magoba, 2009).
The early 2000s thus represented a change of course for the City, both in response to the 1998 Water Act as well as to an increasingly constrained supply in its hinterland. The remarkable demand reduction was achieved through repairing leaks, public awareness campaigns, and introducing market-based pricing (Brown & Magoba, 2009; Smith, 2004). The results were impressive, but also a result of sacrifices made by the most vulnerable residents. A large part of the growing population ended up in informal settlements where most residents rely on public taps and therefore use less than a third of the water that other Capetonians do (DWS, 2018a; Rawlins, 2017). In households with indoor taps, government-installed “water management devices” (WMDs) became a tool from 2007 onward for the City to allow for a basic water allocation for nonpaying users, but cut off supply in case of leaks or excessive use (City of Cape Town, 2007). WMDs come with a promise of debt relief and are therefore said to “help” low-income households detect leaks and limit their use to what they could afford (Beck et al., 2016; Mahlanza, Ziervogel, & Scott, 2016; Yates & Harris, 2018). As we return to below, devices became important during the most recent drought but faced strong opposition from community organizations and activists.
3 CURRENT WATER GOVERNANCE
3.1 Water supply
Water use in South Africa is regulated primarily at the national level through the National Water Act and the Water Services Act. The former dictates how water from a specific source can be accessed and used, while the latter focuses on what water-related services should be provided to citizens, and by what authority (Pengelly et al., 2017). The main authority, DWS, is responsible for policy development, implementation, regulation, monitoring, enforcement, and administration (Figure 2; Rawlins, 2019). The country's water sources are managed at catchment level, which for Cape Town means WCWSS dams in the Berg River Catchment and the Theewaterskloof Dam in an adjacent catchment (Pengelly et al., 2017). Three of the WCWSS dams (Upper and Lower Steenbras and Wemmershoek) have been built and are owned by the City; however, the national DWS maintains regulatory control, full ownership of, and right to allocate all water in the “big six” dams Cape Town relies on (Rawlins, 2019).
For each catchment area, DWS allocates water according to licenses for municipal needs, irrigation, hydropower, industrial, and commercial activities. Licensing is supposed to be based on priorities set out in the Water Act and detailed in the National Water Resources Strategy, but are in practice often issued routinely and without a broader strategic consideration of the implications for long-term water needs (Pengelly et al., 2017). The City, as a “designated service provider”, receives and treats “raw” water from WCWSS and distributes it to households, private sector, schools, and hospitals (Pengelly et al., 2017; Rawlins, 2017). The City of Cape Town's Water and Sanitation Department (not to be confused with the national DWS) falls under the Directorate of Informal Settlements, Water and Waste Services. Within the department there are a number of branches including Bulk Water, Reticulation, Wastewater Treatment Works, Water Demand Management and Strategy, Catchment, Stormwater, and River Management among others (City of Cape Town, 2018c).
As a water service provider, the City is required by national legislation to plan for water management including conservation, recycling, supply, and sanitation, and also to keep track of future supply (Taylor, 2017). If dam levels are low, DWS can issue requirements to license holders (such as municipalities) to reduce consumption; municipalities can then issue recommendations and by-laws regarding what water uses are permitted within their jurisdiction (Ziervogel, 2019b).
3.2 Flood management
Cape Town receives most of its rain during the cold winter months (May–August), and heavy downpours frequently cause problems especially in the low-lying Cape Flats (Ziervogel et al., 2016). Flooding is typically caused by a combination of social and biophysical factors. In the Flats, high groundwater levels paired with ineffective water management and inadequate stormwater infrastructure (drains often lacking or blocked, stormwater flooding sewers, nonexisting wastewater disposal) expose settlements to harsher conditions than wealthier neighborhoods on higher ground (Jozipovic, 2015).
Flooding was particularly serious in 2004, and drew attention to the poor integration of climate change risks in the strategic planning of several municipal departments, including the Catchment, Stormwater and River Management (renamed as the Stormwater and Sustainability Branch in 2014) (Taylor, 2017). An exception was the Environmental Resource Management Department (ERMD), which initiated its work on climate change in 2001 (Ziervogel & Parnell, 2014). Following the 2004 floods, interdepartmental coordination enabled ERMD to play an important role in developing climate change adaptation strategies as well as promoting stormwater management using ecosystem-based approaches in addition to conventional engineering options (Taylor, 2019).
National legislation (the Disaster Management Act of 2002) requires municipalities to ensure that disaster responses follow an “integrated approach” that involves a broad set of actors, including nongovernmental organizations and the private sector alongside government actors. However, cross-departmental and -sectoral coordination has proved to be a challenge even in the wake of the 2004 floods, especially regarding issues that require high technical expertise that is only held by some (Taylor, 2017). Departments that are supposed to work together vary considerably in their approaches to flood risk management, depending on institutional structures, resources, technologies, and mentalities among its staff, making long-term planning especially difficult (Ziervogel et al., 2016). Flooding is therefore likely to be a continuing challenge, involving a range of technical, legislative, hydrological, and political dimensions, which are all linked to different components of the governance apparatus (Jordhus-Lier, Saaghus, Scott, & Ziervogel, 2018).
3.3 Drought management
Disaster management during Cape Town's recent drought has been even more complex than during flooding. This is partly because water resource management involves all levels of government from municipal to national levels, as described above, and because the drought affected all parts of society, was more prolonged, and its severity highly dependent on the city's response to the water shortage (Ziervogel, 2018).
The direct cause of the crisis can be traced to the 3-year drought starting in 2015 with a dry, hot summer, and extremely low winter rains, followed by a moderately dry 2016 giving little chance to recover, then culminating in a record-breaking low rainfall in 2017 (Figure 3). The rainfall was lower than any 3-year period on record, and estimated to occur only once every 311 years (Wolski, 2018)—the City, similar to international standards, had planned for 50-year droughts (DWS, 2018a). The crisis was further exacerbated by DWS failure to maintain WCWSS adequately, letting alien vegetation spread and leaving pumps and canals needed for augmented water harvesting out of operation (Ziervogel, 2019b).
After low rainfall in 2015, the City introduced voluntary water restrictions in January 2016, the hot summer month when water use normally peaks (Kaiser & Macleod, 2018). By February 2017 water consumption had dropped to 800 million liters per day (ML/day) from 1,200 ML/day 2 years earlier (City of Cape Town, 2018a). The City was concerned that DWS did not do enough to conserve water in WCWSS dams by enforcing restrictions in the agricultural sector in 2016 and 2017 (Ziervogel, 2019b). Despite not having any legal ownership of neither surface water nor groundwater, the municipality announced in 2017 that it would take responsibility for solving the crisis rather than rely on national government (Ziervogel, 2018). While remarkable, this should be seen against the backdrop of party politics and competition between the African National Congress controlling the national parliament, and the Democratic Alliance governing the City and the Western Cape Province. With dams only 38% full at the end of the 2017 hydrological year (1 November), Cape Town faced an extremely challenging situation. At this time, a team of World Bank experts were consulted to assess and advise on the situation. The group commended the City for its long-running demand management program, work to secure emergency augmentation funds, and relations-building with some of the other regional water users—all three areas needing continued efforts (Ziervogel, 2019b). However, options moving forward were constrained by the city's reliance almost entirely on surface water, shared with the agricultural sector and allocated by national-level DWS (Mariño, 2017).
Through 2017 and until the arrival of 2018 winter rains, the City embarked on an intensive and increasingly desperate campaign to reduce water consumption. This involved escalated water demand management efforts, including increased tariffs and penalties especially for high volume users, an extensive communication campaign, reduced pressure in the reticulation system, and ramped-up installations of WMDs in households consuming more than the allowed quota (DWS, 2018a; Mariño, 2017; Ziervogel, 2018). Including wealthy high-volume users with fees and WMDs was not uncontroversial; because of the block tariff system they paid more than other users, meaning that 10 ML water saved per day (<2%) would cost the department 40% of its revenues at a time when new investments were critical (Mariño, 2017).
After the record-low 2017 rains, the City's Safety and Security Department published its Critical Water Shortages Disaster Plan in October. The plan serves to guide and coordinate the different departments required for disaster preparedness, and outlines three phases in the city's drought response. Phase 1: Preservation Restrictions, was initiated at the Plan's publication, in response to DWS requiring Cape Town to cut its water use by 40% (City of Cape Town, 2017). This phase emphasized efforts to limit supply, manage water pressure in order to keep down the amount of available water in the system, and continued installation of WMDs in individual households to combat overuse (City of Cape Town, 2017).
Phase 2: Disaster Restrictions was to become more infamously known by the term Day Zero, referring to the date when the phase would be triggered: when WCWSS dam levels dropped to 13.5%. Day Zero would activate strict water rationing to make water last at least 3 months before hitting 10%—the point below which water might not be safely extracted from the dams (City of Cape Town, 2017; DWS, 2018a). Under Phase 2, the City would turn off supply to most private taps and direct citizens to municipal water collection sites (City of Cape Town, 2017). Lastly, Phase 3: Disaster Implementation would come into effect when all accessible surface water runs out and the collection sites would offer groundwater and bottled water for drinking purposes only. This phase is seen as a full-scale disaster, which is why Phases 1 and 2 include strict measures to avoid the further crisis escalation of Phase 3. The disaster plan thus balances between taking a “pessimistic approach”—assuming minimal new water sources will be added—and being prepared for the worst-case scenario (City of Cape Town, 2017).
Along with the publication of the disaster plan, the City continued to explore approaches to curb water use, focusing primarily on the domestic sector which consumes 70% of the city's water. Authorities ramped up WMDs installations, extending the program also to force wealthier households using over 10.5 kiloliters per month to stay below 6 kiloliters (DWS, 2018a; Ziervogel, 2018). Other efforts included public information campaigns in old and new media, including regular “Water Outlook” reports with the most recent statistics on dam levels and water use; pressure reduction; and new tariffs that introduced a fee also for households consuming less than 6 kiloliters per month (previously exempt from paying), leaving only indigent households earning less than R6,000/month with a free or rebated basic water allocation (City of Cape Town, 2019a).
February 2018 was a critical turning point. Day Zero had just been announced as less than 3 months away, and Level 6B water restrictions were introduced limiting the daily water allowance to 50 L per person (DWS, 2018a, 2018b). The combined effect of restrictions, massive local and international media coverage, and the prospect of queuing for water brought much of the city close to panic (Lang, 2018; Ziervogel, 2018). Water consumption reached a new low of 500 ML/day, from 800 ML/day 1 year earlier and 1,200 ML/day in February 2015 (City of Cape Town, 2018a). This was also helped by DWS finally deciding to enforce restrictions in the agricultural sector, unlike previous years. Through the extreme water rationing, reduced agricultural use, pressure management, and a water transfer from a nearby private agricultural dam, Cape Town was able to keep consumption around 500 ML/day until winter rains arrived in June (DWS, 2018a; Lang, 2018). Although Day Zero was pushed back first to 2019 and then indefinitely, the City continued to encourage water conservation through media campaigns and a cautious easing of water restrictions, which since December 1, 2018 are at Level 3 allowing 105 L/person (City of Cape Town, 2018b). Preliminary analyses of water meter data indicate that rather than restrictions and tariffs, household consumers responded most strongly to the publication of the City's Disaster Plan and the ensuing media frenzy reporting of a coming Day Zero with queuing for water—but also to messages about how much water their neighbors were saving (Booysen, Visser, & Burger, 2019; Brick, De Martino, & Visser, 2017; Brick & Visser, 2017). This indicates that social norms and the threat to one's lifestyle might be more effective than official recommendations to save water. Qualitative studies indicate similar findings, with water tariffs having little impact on behavior change while Day Zero created most concern and water restrictions influenced behavior the most (Matikinca, 2019).
Overall, the drought put the city under immense stress—both municipal staff and resources, as well as nonwater-related services with cut budgets, but also regular residents, the region's tourism industry, the agricultural sector, and local ecosystems (Ziervogel, 2019b). Throughout the crisis, Capetonians played an increasingly important role—not least as the message from the mayor shifted from guaranteeing that a well-run city will not run out of water (Ramphele, 2017), to “a majority of people do not seem to care” (de Lille, 2018). While the Disaster Plan makes no reference to public engagement, information campaigns or education (City of Cape Town, 2017), the city clearly worked hard to influence residents and the recently drafted Water Strategy emphasizes collaboration and public involvement as critical for building a “water sensitive city” (City of Cape Town, 2019b). Many residents responded in various ways to help mitigate the crisis, including monitoring excessive use among neighbors and organizing to provide support for vulnerable community members that may not be able to collect water at public taps if Day Zero would come (Ziervogel, 2018). Others reacted negatively to the City's actions and mobilized protests against what was claimed to be a privatization of water, or seen as unfair punishment when a proposed water tariff increase was announced just as Capetonians' collective effort was said to have avoided Day Zero (Armitage, 2018; Ziervogel, 2018).
4 WATER JUSTICE AND PUBLIC PERCEPTION
Water provides a useful illustration of inequality and poverty in South Africa—both in how people are affected by scarcity of water, and by dangerous amounts of it. We view water justice as a critical challenge for water governance and therefore central to our story; it also needs continued examination and analysis beyond the scope of this paper. The selected issues presented below featured prominently in debates during recent crises, and exemplify some ways that justice need to be addressed for building sustainable water governance institutions.
4.1 Justice and inequality in water access and vulnerability
The Western Cape is South Africa's most equal province in terms of water access, while problems are most severe in traditional and tribal areas of Eastern Cape and KwaZulu-Natal (Cole et al., 2018). Cape Town similarly delivers reliable water to a greater proportion of its residents than the national average, but in informal settlements and peri-urban townships the situation can still be very dire. One example is Khayelitsha, where service delivery protests have increased over the past two decades. Many have expect higher levels of service delivery in cities compared to countryside, and are frustrated by the inconvenience and lack of safety in relying on public taps (Rodina, 2016). The most disadvantaged residents in Cape Town more often get their water from such taps compared to South Africans in general. About 10% of residents in Khayelitsha have neither access to running water nor any form of toilet (Beck et al., 2016; Pengelly et al., 2017).
Addressing inequality is partly a matter of finding new technical solutions for piping water into informal settlements, but more broadly the situation is a result of political priorities which have historically often catered to the interests of rural, commercial, white farmers (Cole et al., 2018; Fisher-Jeffes, Carden, & Armitage, 2017; Vogel & Olivier, 2018). To promote more equal service delivery, the South African government passed the “Free Basic Water” policy in 2001, mandating that municipalities provide a daily 25 L per person, or a monthly 6 kiloliters for a household of eight, at no cost to end users and accessible no more than 200 m from their homes (Beck et al., 2016).
In revisions of the Free Basic Water policy in 2007 and 2014, DWA acknowledged municipalities' limited capacity to implement the policy and decided that it would only apply to indigent homes (Beck et al., 2016; Taing, 2015). In Cape Town, such households get their allocation bumped up to 10.5 kiloliters per month if they agree to install a WMD (Beck et al., 2016). However, this system does not necessarily spare indigent households of water costs, as households might fail to register as indigent due to lack of awareness, inconvenience, socioeconomic restrictions, fear, or political motivations for remaining off-list (Yates & Harris, 2018).
Financially, Cape Town and many other South African cities fund poor residents' water needs through “block tariffs,” where high-volume households are charged a higher per liter rate (Wilkinson, 2000). While this is meant as a pro-poor policy, charging for water at the household level tends to punish low income groups who are typically above the set standard of four individuals per households—with extended family members and rented-out backyard shacks, some township properties can house 15–30 people (Smith, 2004). Even a very low per capita water use then adds up to an above-average household consumption, resulting in a higher block rate.
Block tariffs were also problematic during the water crisis. As most households restricted their use to the lowest, sub-6 kiloliter block, the city lost important revenue previously generated by high-volume consumers (Sorensen, 2017; Wilkinson, 2000)—threatening the fiscal stability of a City relying on service charges as its main source of income (Mills et al., 2019). Tariffs were therefore changed in July 2017, forcing everyone but indigent households to pay also for the most basic water needs (Yates & Harris, 2018). However, since low-volume users had much less room to reduce their consumption compared to households with pools and gardens, this typically left them with a higher water bill while rich people paid the same—negating the redistribution target (Jansen & Schulz, 2006).
Low-income areas, predominantly occupied by black or colored residents, have borne the brunt of the program to install WMDs, which only started targeting high-income households once the crisis became acute. Many installations are done by subcontractors, impeding direct communication between municipality and residents. There have been reports of residents being manipulated to sign forms accepting the WMD without understanding the implications (Mahlanza et al., 2016). Those that later realize the implications and hire an independent plumber to by-pass the device risk punishment for breaking the legal agreement (Yates & Harris, 2018). WMDs are also controversial because, like the water tariffs, they enforce water restrictions that assume a household has no more than four inhabitants (Mahlanza et al., 2016). Further, the poor quality of water infrastructure in low-income areas means leaks occur more often (Smith, 2004), further punishing poor households that risk getting their water shut off even if they comply with the restrictions.
4.2 Public perception and communication
Water crises are complex and typically require broader societal responses than just technical experts (Dilling et al., 2019; Vogel & Olivier, 2018). In Cape Town, media and public opinion came to play critical roles during the water crisis; while little discussion occurred during 2015 and 2016, awareness grew in 2017, and escalated into near panic in early 2018 as Day Zero seemed certain (Lang, 2018; Ziervogel, 2019b). Importantly, the fastest reductions in water use happened not in response to new restrictions or higher tariffs being announced, but rather when an increased likelihood of Day Zero was communicated and the implications became known to the public (Booysen et al., 2019).
While effective, the Day Zero campaign was also controversial. Some argued that it relied on scare tactics to change people's behavior (Lang, 2018), and the City only reluctantly adopted the term in 2017 on the advice of a crisis communication consultancy (Ziervogel, 2019b). As the date for Day Zero was moved forward multiple times some came to question the true motives of the government. Further, the drought response was criticized by others for not sufficiently acknowledging the thousands of households in the city that already had “Day Zero”-like conditions, such as no running water (Lang, 2018).
The City's Disaster Plan acknowledges the challenge of conveying the seriousness of the situation while avoiding a sense of panic (City of Cape Town, 2017). Introducing water restrictions without clear communication about the reasons why can signal that the City has failed in its task to manage water resources (Ziervogel, 2019b). Unfortunately, many practical steps taken in response to the crisis failed to involve the public; while both municipal and provincial governments initiated meetings and committees to coordinate responses, citizens were scarcely represented (Vogel & Olivier, 2018). Poor communication instead contributed to erode trust and public support (Kaiser & Macleod, 2018). First, the City's decade-long work with demand management was not effectively communicated to the public, making it seem like authorities had done nothing in response to early reports of coming water scarcity (Lang, 2018). Second, WMD installations were criticized for sometimes being installed without securing free, prior and informed consent from residents (Mahlanza et al., 2016)—especially when installations were ramped up as the crisis worsened. Third, poor coordination between municipal, provincial, and national governments resulted in confusing messages around restrictions, using different metrics and sometimes creating inconsistent or perverse incentives (Booysen et al., 2019). Fourth, a proposal in May 2018 to raise tariffs for all including those consuming the least water was interpreted as a cruel punishment of water-wise consumers, when the real reason was that there were simply too few high-volume consumers left to cover the cost of water services (Lang, 2018; Visser & Brühl, 2018).
Overall, the water crisis drew attention to the lack of trust and partnerships between public authorities and civic groups and other nongovernment actors. The City demonstrated a capacity to carry out certain responses, especially technical, but effective communication and public engagement would perhaps had been even more important particularly in a Day Zero scenario (Ziervogel, 2018). While communication and data sharing increased considerably—especially toward the end of 2017 when the Day Zero started to seem inevitable—this was mainly done in English via Internet such as the launch of the regular Water Outlook updates, thereby not accessible to all residents (Lang, 2018; Ziervogel, 2019b).
Cape Town's experiences from flood management has shown that residents and municipal officials can have conflicting views on who should be responsible for risk mitigation (Ziervogel et al., 2016). This is important to consider for public engagement efforts; it may or may not facilitate the intended governance processes. On the other hand, similar disagreement can be found among technical experts who are assumed to work toward the same goals (Cousins, 2017). Recent studies on the drought indicate that with the right incentives, Capetonians are willing to adjust their water use for the common good—especially if they also receive public recognition (Brick et al., 2017). Importantly, the events that seemed to achieve the greatest behavior change (the publication of the disaster plan, announcements about Day Zero and water restrictions [Booysen et al., 2019; Matikinca, 2019]) were largely controlled by the City, which means that it holds some tools that can be used more or less strategically in communication according to what outcomes are desired.
5 A SUSTAINABLE WATER FUTURE FOR CAPE TOWN
To cope with and adapt to climate variability and recurrent cycles of increasingly intense drought events, cities need a mix of proactive and reactive response measures (Buurman, Mens, & Dahm, 2017). Cape Town dodged Day Zero, but water scarcity is a “new normal” that means the city cannot return to business as usual (Mariño, 2017). Climate change projections for the Cape confidently indicate a hotter future, but uncertain rainfall with possibilities ranging from slightly wetter to considerably drier than the past. The latter has stronger support in models, and creates higher risk to the region (Jack et al., 2016). The recent drought demonstrated that Cape Town was able to survive even on the record-low rain falling in 2017 without leaving the dams emptier than a year earlier (DWS, 2018a). However, this placed extreme strain on the city and showed that reactive responses such as small-scale, temporary desalination and water treatment plants were too little too late to have a meaningful impact (Lang, 2018; Ziervogel, 2018); moving forward, it will need new, proactive strategies.
The City started investigating the cost and delivery time of various options through its Water Resilience Programme in 2017; and more recently in drafting a new Water Strategy. Surface water is considered cheapest and most plentiful option, and will therefore always be the main source even though rainfall can be unreliable. Augmenting existing surface water infrastructure will deliver an additional 40–60 ML/day by 2021 or 2022 (City of Cape Town, 2019b; DWS, 2018a). Since there are few viable options for additional dams in the catchment (Brown & Magoba, 2009) further supply augmentation will need to be from nonsurface sources; however, these are costlier than rainfed dams so the City hopes to limit new capacity needs to 300 ML/day (DWS, 2018a). Groundwater was originally thought to be a quick and cheap option, although this has been somewhat revised (Ziervogel, 2019b). The City is currently investigating groundwater sources in the Cape Flats, Atlantis, and Table Mountain, for a total of 100–150ML/day (DWS, 2018a). In the Cape Flats there is also a possibility to use reinjection after heavy downpours to mitigate flood risk (Mauck, 2017). Reuse of treated wastewater could provide about 70 ML/day by 2023 (City of Cape Town, 2019b). Treatment plants already provide water for irrigation, and reduce agricultural water needs while also addressing the problem of polluted waterways (Saldías, Speelman, van Koppen, & van Huylenbroeck, 2016). Desalination is the most expensive option both to construct and operate, but the per liter cost is lower for a larger plant. It is also the only alternative that is unaffected by climate-induced changes in precipitation (City of Cape Town, 2019b; DWS, 2018a).
The risk of relying solely on surface water has been known for years, but the City has had limited mandate to explore other sources; in addition, its demand management program was effective and seemed to allow for supply augmentation to be postponed. Calls for diversification were renewed after the failed 2017 rains, both from international experts and businesses (Mariño, 2017; Pengelly et al., 2017). It reflects a more holistic or cross-sectoral understanding both of which actors can help inform water management, where water supply can be harnessed, and what other issues are linked to water. For instance, Cape Town has joined multiple international city-to-city networks, such as the C40 Climate Leadership Group (www.c40.org) and the 100 Resilient Cities network (www.100resilientcities.org) (Taylor, 2017), which have proven helpful in drafting a Resilience Strategy and provide input through advisory bodies such as the Water Resilience Advisory Committee (2018). Another example is initiatives to clear nonnative vegetation in reservoirs' catchment areas, which in addition potentially saving the City about 55 ML/day also benefits biodiversity conservation, and creates jobs (Brown & Magoba, 2009; City of Cape Town, 2019b). Further, water access is linked to programs to convert informal settlements into regular homes, which requires both additional funding mechanisms and technical innovations for plumbing in low-lying densely populated areas (Cole et al., 2018). These examples show that better integration of cross-sectoral perspectives in economic and regional planning, viewing water resources as both a prerequisite for and directly impacted by current and future economic activities (Pengelly et al., 2017), is an important component of effective water governance.
This also links to another important factor: coordination across scales. Vegetation management is normally the responsibility of the national DWS, whose slow response was seen by some City employees as exacerbating the water crisis (Ziervogel, 2019b). DWS is also the gatekeeper for another nontechnical, cheap source of water: collaboration with and transfer from other users in the existing catchment. This happened to a limited extent during the crisis, but could be used more broadly especially if DWS took on a more active role as coordinator and broker in negotiations, and if raw water purchasing was made legal (DWS, 2018a; Mariño, 2017). DWS might also facilitate better cross-scale water governance between the City and private households, as it is preparing new by-laws around private use of groundwater for adoption at municipal level. Private boreholes were a quick ways for private residents and businesses to adapt to the threat of failed water services, but they existed in a poorly defined legal space and their increased presence posed a threat to underground aquifers (Simpson, 2018; Ziervogel, 2019b). Similar clarifications could also facilitate coordination between municipal agencies and private actors to promote different decentralized solutions such as reusing more treated effluent water in irrigation. This should consider the tendency of already influential actors to promote their own goals over public interest (Saldías et al., 2016), a common caveat in initiatives toward more participatory governance approaches especially in South Africa where inequality in terms of power and knowledge is particularly problematic (Woodhouse & Muller, 2017).
This takes us to the last and perhaps biggest challenge to Cape Town's water governance: ensuring an inclusive approach to promote water justice. Cross-sectoral, cross-scalar coordination in planning and governance only goes so far in a city growing largely through informal settlements; this is visible in the limited progress on flood protection, where integrating climate change adaptation in formal urban planning has limited impact in the areas most exposed to flooding (Jozipovic, 2015; Ziervogel & Parnell, 2014). Importantly, flood-safe adaptation requires both technical solutions as well as partnerships with local residents to address the multiple risks involved (Jordhus-Lier et al., 2018; Jozipovic, 2015; Ziervogel, 2019a). This learning how to nurture and draw on the positive contributions of bottom-up initiatives is a critical challenge also for the City's drought resilience (Ziervogel, 2018). Many of its responses to the drought have been controversial, such as raised tariffs, WMDs, or the use of treated wastewater in the municipal drinking supply. The (often mutual) lack of trust between residents and city authorities—especially considering the long history of intentional neglect of colored and black Capetonians' needs—is a tremendous obstacle to overcome. Platforms and processes for information sharing, dialogue and trust building need to be set up well in advance of serious crises, not during them (Saldías et al., 2016; Vogel & Olivier, 2018). Water governance literature points to the importance of identifying “trusted intermediaries” that can facilitate cross-scale interactions between communities, business, and government (Rouillard & Spray, 2017). By establishing overarching, legal frameworks that can support and harness efforts at local level while steering toward broader societal goals, governance institutions that let “form follow function” can emerge (Rouillard & Spray, 2017; Woodhouse & Muller, 2017). For Cape Town, a key function ought to be creating a system where all Capetonians are recognized as legitimate stakeholders with water rights as well as responsibilities. Determining what these are, and to what extent they should differ between different populations depending on income, historical disadvantages, or other grievances, is likely to be a long, challenging process.
6 CONCLUSION
Cape Town is facing a new normal regarding its relationship with water. Growing population and changing climate mean that the streams that once attracted its founders to this semi-arid corner of the continent no longer provide a reliable supply. Increasingly dense informal settlements leave thousands of the city's most vulnerable residents exposed to seasonal flooding. There are at least three important and interlinked lessons to be learnt for water governance and efforts to promote water justice.
First, governance needs to account for development: of water sources specifically and the city in general. New supply sources as well as regular service provision needs funding that is not preconditioned on wasteful consumption among wealthy residents; a “rainless day fund” (City of Cape Town, 2019b) could help buffer during crises to avoid punishing Capetonians' water saving with higher rates. However, like many cities in Africa and elsewhere, Cape Town has inherited many pressing challenges and limited resources to address them (Mills et al., 2019). Here, water can be viewed as a priority for social and economic development, intimately linked to solutions to poverty alleviation, job creation, food production, and public health. Water governance would benefit from a systems approach with attention to the whole water cycle, including sustainable urban drainage, wastewater treatment and reuse, and diversified sources to accommodate for seasonal and interannual fluctuations in precipitation.
Second, water governance requires coordination across sectors and scales. Cape Town's floods and droughts illustrate links to, for example, housing, ecosystem management, agriculture and tourism, and with important functions being performed from national down to household-level scales. In the peak of the recent drought, a certain sense of solidarity helped tear down some institutional silo walls which facilitated the City's remarkable achievements (Ziervogel, 2019b). However, it is also critical to initiate collaborative processes before crises erupt, especially if large parts of the population are underserved and are reluctant to trust the good will of municipal authorities.
Third, water governance needs to be inclusive. The City's tense relationship with many communities, infected by the mistrust sown by unjust policies of the past and nurtured by failure to redress them in the present, is arguably the most critical area for improvement. This requires more proactive, coordinated, and transparent communication, which Cape Town improved during its crisis management. However, responses also need to better recognize the implications of demographic diversity as well as the systematic neglect of service delivery suffered for decades if not centuries by colored and black communities. The prospect of queuing at public taps was a panic-inducing threat to some Capetonians; to others it has been a lived reality for years. The lesson is that water governance is not merely about keeping taps running through droughts, but about daily sanitation needs and safety from seasonal flooding. Going forward, policy-makers, academics, and practitioners need to build knowledge and skills about how governance processes can be designed to promote trust and public–civic collaboration by acknowledging the context-specific challenges faced by residents from all walks of life.
CONFLICT OF INTEREST
The authors have declared no conflicts of interest for this article.
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