Water scarcity, whether in the quality or quantity dimension, afflicts most countries. Decisions on water management and allocation over time, space, and among uses and users involve economic considerations. This Handbook assembles research that represents recent thinking and applications in water economics. The book chapters are written by leading scholars in the field who address issues related to its use, management, and value. The topics cover analytical methods, sectoral and intersectoral water issues, and issues associated with different sources of water.
This book contains 11 papers which cover a range of vital topics in the areas of water, agriculture, food security and ecosystems - the entire spectrum of developing and managing water in agriculture, from fully irrigated to fully rainfed lands. They are about people and society, why they decide to adopt certain practices and not others and, in particular, how water management can help poor people. They are about ecosystems - how agriculture affects ecosystems, the goods and services ecosystems provide for food security and how water can be managed to meet both food and environmental security objectives. This is the eighth book in the series.
One of the early set of reforms that South Africa embarked on after emerging from apartheid was in the water sector, following a remarkable, consultative process. The policy and legal reforms were comprehensive and covered almost all aspects of water management including revolutionary changes in defining and allocating rights to water, radical reforms in water management and supply institutions, the introduction of the protection of environmental flows, and major shifts in charging for water use and in the provision of free basic water. Over ten years of implementation of these policy and legislative changes mean that valuable lessons have already been learned and useful experiences gained in the challenge of effective water resources management and water services provision in a middle income country.
The development of societies is shaped to a large extent by their resources base, notably water resources. Access to and control of water depend primarily on the available technology and engineering feats, such as river-diversion structures, canals, dams and dikes. As growing human pressure on water resources brings actual water use closer to potential ceilings, supply-augmentation options get scarcer, and societies, therefore, usually respond by adopting conservation measures and by reallocating water towards more beneficial uses.
In South Africa, water is a relative scarce resource that is distributed unevenly geographically and saisonally as well as socially. The Middle Olifants sub-basin of South Africa was chosen as study area, because it is characterized as a very water scarce region -it is counted as the third most stressed basin in South Africa -with a poor and predominantly rural population. Households in former-homeland areas are still disadvantaged and lack access to su?cient and reliable water services. Current water use in the basin leads to overuse of the resource at the expense of domestic and environmental water needs. For an e?ective water management that is able to address the South African policy objectives of e?ciency in water use, equity in access and bene?ts as well as long-term sustainability, economic valuation of the di?erent water uses is required. In order to assist policy-makers in reaching these goals, this study contributes to the existing knowledge by providing information on the economic value of water in domestic uses. For this purpose, two separate choice experiments were designed to detect preferences and ‘Willingness to pay’ for di?erent water service levels and water sources. Results of a household survey of 475 households provide a clear picture of the di?erent water sources and service levels received by households in the Middle Olifants. Sampled households using basic water sources such as Public taps, Yard connections or Boreholes consume on aver¬age only 18.68 liter per person per day, while households with private taps inside their houses consume 78 liter per person per day. To analyze preferences for water services at the house¬hold level and to detect households’ ‘Willingness to pay’ for improved service levels, choice experiments were carried out in four villages and one town. Data analysis indicates the pres¬ence of preference heterogeneity and, hence, a latent class model was applied, readily dividing households into homogeneous groups according to their preferences. Several distinct classes of households could be found di?ering signi?cantly in terms of socio-economic characteristics, particularly household income, current water consumption and service levels as well as atti¬tudes towards pricing of water and satisfaction with current water service levels. ‘Willingness to pay’-estimates of single water service characteristics of all groups indicate that households are willing to pay higher prices for a better and more reliable water provision. But the amount of money households are willing to spend di?ers among groups. Price sensitivity was found to be strongly linked to income. With increasing income, price sensitivity of households decreases. This information is helpful for policy-makers to enable the design of water services in the Mid¬dle Olifants according to preferences of local households. The increase in ‘Willingness to pay’ with increasing income shows that subsidies either as income subsidies or lower water tari?s may be useful tools to allow low-income households to pay water bills.
With increasing water scarcity, pressure to re-allocate water from agriculture to other uses mounts, along with a need to put in place institutional arrangements to promote 'higher value' uses of water. Many developing countries are now experimenting with establishing new institutional arrangements for managing water at the river basin level.This book, based on research by IWMI and others, reviews basin management in six developed and developing countries. It describes and applies a functional theory of river basin management, based on the idea that there is a minimum set of functions required to manage basins effectively and a set of basic conditions that enable effective management institutions to emerge. The book examines the experiences of both developed and developing countries in order to see what lessons can be learned and to identify what constitutes the core of a 'theory of river basin management'. It concludes that although it is difficult for developing countries to adopt approaches and institutional designs directly from developed countries, basic principles and lessons are transferable.
Bringing contributions by a variety of authors together in one volume is part of an attempt to show that hydropolitics is a growing discipline in its own right. The prevailing definition of hydropolitics is widened to include the elements of scale and range. This is illustrated through a focus on theoretical and legal issues, case studies from Southern Africa and a proposed research agenda. The book is an important addition to the literature on hydropolitics.
