Zoe Wilson
University of KwaZulu-Natal (South Africa)
Debates, Disconnections and Drowning: The politics of services and scarcities in post apartheid South Africa
This paper draws on extensive field research conducted over the last two years as part of a DFID funded project – Second Order Water Scarcity in Southern Africa. It synthesizes the work of the project team who conducted case studies around South Africa in a variety of settings. Results challenge the underlying socio-political and cultural assumptions informing many high profile debates around water services and scarcities in South Africa.
In brief, water institutions and management practices underwent fundamental transformation in the shift to post-apartheid democratic South Africa. Debates over who wins and who loses have been most heated around domestic water and sanitation services. At the national level, these often take on a totalizing tone, yet water and sanitation services take place (or fail) within highly variegated and fragmented political, social, and cultural milieus. Many of the political battling raging at the national level, such as anti-privatization or even Free Basic Water, are crafted in such a way as to speak primarily to the needs and experiences of a minority of largely urban South Africans who are capacitated (through language, network access, education) to project their cultural assumptions and political interests onto the national stage. Who wins and who loses, in this case, often boils down to which actors can seize centre stage, while the complexity of issues and needs – especially those of import to the rural poor - are drowned out.
In this light, the paper looks towards a new synthesis of evidence that can accommodate South Africa’s complex socio-economic and cultural landscapes, as well as its diverse settlement patterns and hydrological features.
Biography
Zoë Wilson holds a Ph.D. in political science from Dalhousie University, Canada, where she studied the relationship between global development aspirations and local implementation in Africa (case studies: Angola, Botswana, Namibia and Tanzania). She is currently completing a post-doctoral specialization in the Politics of Water at the University of KwaZulu Natal. Most recently, Zoë is conducting research into philosophical, religious and environmental attitudes towards potable reuse. Since late 2004, Zoë has also been leading the South Africa research of a DFID funded project on the politics of water scarcity in Southern Africa. She has supervised a team of students in this process and together three major case studies have been produced: Mseleni, Northern KwaZulu Natal and Grabouw, Western Cape, and Durban. Further project details are available at www.waterscarcity.org. Zoë is also completing a World Health Organization project on globalization and water and a key determinant of health (status: responding to peer review comments). Zoë has presented research findings at a number of international conferences, as well as attending a special course on ecosan in Norway August 2006. Zoë's first book: The United Nations and Democracy in Africa was published with Routledge ( Oxford: New York) in October 2006.
Email: wilsonz@ukzn.ac.za