摘要：Southern Africa is a region characterized by extensive socio-economic
underdevelopment. Given water’s key role in social organization, water
allocation, use and management in Southern Africa is embedded in deep historical
and structural processes of regional underdevelopment. Gini coefficients of
income inequality in several states of the region are the most extreme in the
world. Recent data from South Africa shows that Gini coefficients of water
inequality vary directly with income inequality. Recent attempts to improve
water resources management in the region through IWRM have failed to consider
these facts, focusing instead on a mix of institutional, policy and legal
reforms. The results of these reforms have been poor. In this essay, I employ a
modified version of Allan’s (2003) ‘water paradigms’ framework to locate and
assess the positions and interests of actors involved in water resources
management in Southern Africa. The essay shows that Southern Africa’s history of
underdevelopment has created a dense web of powerful political, economic and
social interests linked by a shared technocentric understanding of and approach
to water use: i.e. water for ‘high modern-style’ development, or as labelled by
Allen, ‘the hydraulic mission.’ What is less readily acknowledged is the
wide-spread societal support for this mission. For this reason, ecocentric
approaches to water management most commonly associated with influential
international actors such as the IUCN and World Wide Fund for Nature have
limited local support and are of minor relevance to Southern African
decision-makers. However, actors supportive of an ecocentric perspective
demonstrate considerable ability to inhibit water infrastructure development
across the region. In the face of abiding poverty and inequality, and
vulnerability to water insecurity, widespread societal support for a
technocentric approach to resource use offers a pathway toward broad-based
social benefits through the capture of the region’s water resources. It is up to
those with an ecocentric interest to ensure that these activities do not
reproduce the environmental errors of the past.
关键词：Southern
Africa; Southern African Development Community (SADC); underdevelopment;
Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM); technocentric; ecocentric;
hydraulic mission
