Water Crisis in Cape Town, South Africa: State and Nonstate Interactions

• In Event: Lightning Round: Research in Five: Graduate Students I

Abstract

Water shortages require coordinated social, political, and economic action to manage (Ivey et al. 2004). Current research on the politics of water has explored connections between water scarcity and conflict (Gleditsch 1998), institutional reform (Sehring 2009), and public goods provision (Kruks-Wisner 2018). This research often conceptualizes water politics as involving collective action problems related to common pool resource management; however, we are only beginning to understand how government and civil society actors choose among and implement different strategies for collective action on managing water shortages. In this paper, we examine the processes through which state and nonstate actors attempt to address water shortages in urban settings. We use process tracing methods to investigate the recent water crisis in Cape Town, South Africa, which led to an instance of unprecedented social action in early 2018 when the government threatened to restrict access to water among certain homes and businesses for non-compliance with its conservation efforts (Robins 2019) and civil society actors mobilized to raise awareness about necessary water use restrictions and to encourage cooperation. We employ insights from social movement theory and natural resource governance to investigate the critical role that state and non-state interactions played in successfully managing Cape Town’s water crisis.

Authors

• Shana Scogin, University of Notre Dame

• William Kakenmaster, University of Notre Dame

• Shasta Kaul, University of Notre Dame