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Despite vagaries of nature, water security can be achieved through clearly communicated, coherent policy decisions

Anthony Turton
By Anthony Turton
12 Jul 2024
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The alteration of the natural aquatic ecosystem of the Vaal River System has brought great prosperity, but it also contains within it the seeds of self-destruction if nature decides to bite back. The arena in which this will play out is the water lettuce and sewage crisis.

Two events have occurred in my professional life that have led me to believe that the future of humanity lies in our capacity to co-evolve with nature. I was first introduced to this concept during a conference at Oxford University in 1999 when I met Dr Erik Swyngedouw. At that same event was another young South African PhD student named Gina Ziervogel.

Erik Swyngedouw was a rising star in the intellectual world of political ecology. This was a fad in Britain at the time when I was an active member of the School of Oriental and African Studies (Soas) Water Issues Group, under the capable leadership of Professor Tony Allan. 

This was an incredible group of intellectuals working on water as a cross-cutting issue linking economics, politics, engineering, ecology and law. Tony Allan, my mentor, went on to receive the Stockholm Water Prize in 2008. This is equivalent to the Nobel Prize in water.

Erik Swyngedouw was an intensely engaged intellectual, with a profound understanding of Spain as a water-constrained country with a complex political and social history.

At that time, he was working on the co-production of nature as a hybrid between aquatic ecology and socioeconomic endeavours. A Belgian national who spoke many European languages, he was building a theoretical model that explained how the control of rivers translated into political and economic power. He referred to this as the “Spanish hydraulic mission”, which he paralleled with the Egyptian hydraulic mission that Tony Allan was deeply involved with at the time.

I was thrown into this eclectic mix of intense intellectual intercourse and frankly I loved every moment. I could see an exact mirror of the Spanish hydraulic mission in South Africa, which led me to publish my first chapter in a university textbook on political ecology.

Eloquent simplicity


The essence of Swyngedouw’s thinking is eloquently simple. In a water-constrained country, all efforts to create security of supply as a foundation for economic growth and prosperity serve two ultimate purposes.

The first is the monopolisation of power by the ruling political elite, who effectively became gatekeepers over the allocation of privilege in society. The greater their access to control over the resource, the greater their accrual of political capital.

The second is the alteration of aquatic ecosystems as a direct result of the redirection of the flow of water, from any given river, through a defined socioeconomic unit (which Swyngedouw referred to as a hydrosocial territory), ultimately back into the environment as wastewater.

Stated in its simplest form, the process of socioeconomic development based on a managed water resource effectively triggers two parallel processes as aquatic ecosystems are altered by humans, while socioeconomic benefits accrue to the political elite.

Aquatic ecosystems and socioeconomic systems become intimately linked, so we can logically think of water policy as a driver of evolution. We can also imagine two parallel universes – the domain of nature and the domain of humankind – both united in an evolutionary sense.   

This is starkly illustrated in the way we have fundamentally altered the Vaal River. This was driven by the need to sustain the mining-based economy centred on the Witwatersrand goldfields. During the 20th century this was the richest gold deposit on Earth, and the only way to unlock its potential was to launch a phase of heroic engineering that would divert many rivers into the Vaal Dam, and in so doing enable an economic boom that lasted for almost a century.

So sophisticated was the engineering that it would become the foundation of job creation well into the 21st century. Stated simply, our national prosperity became intimately linked to our capacity to push rivers around, always while managing the unintended consequences of our ambitions.

This is now the challenge for Rand Water, because the alteration of the natural aquatic ecosystem has brought great prosperity on the one hand, but it also contains within it the seeds of self-destruction if nature decides to bite back. The arena in which this will play out is the water lettuce (an aquatic weed) and sewage crisis.

Vaal River System a perfect example of Swyngedouw’s ‘hydrosocial territory’   


Which leads me to the second event that has shaped my thinking on our shared future as a species. During 2018 I was invited to participate in a strategic planning exercise for Vic Water. This is the Rand Water equivalent for the state of Victoria in Australia. The background to my invitation was the Day Zero crisis playing out in Cape Town.

The city of Melbourne is supplied by Vic Water, so the executive leadership wanted to learn lessons from Cape Town to develop an appropriate policy response. Melbourne and Cape Town are both in winter rainfall areas, both are of similar size, and both represent an epicentre of economic prosperity surrounded by a semi-desert. For both, water security is key to investor confidence.

Applying Swyngedouw’s thinking to the Vic Water case enabled me to conclude that their policy was entirely appropriate for their circumstances at all levels.

The Vic Water policy is centred on achieving water security for the city of Melbourne by diversifying the mix of source water. This can be thought of as decoupling the future prosperity of the region from the vagaries of nature.

Central to this process was investment into a large seawater desalination capability, which was heavily criticised at the time. Some called it a white elephant and there was a heated public debate about the wisdom of investing into utility scale desalination.

The leadership endured the barrage of criticism and made the decision to proceed, focusing only on the objective of achieving water security as the foundation for all future socioeconomic activity. This resulted in a large desalination capability that triggered two surprising, but unanticipated, consequences.

The first consequence was the creation of a mindset among investors that their capital was safe in the city of Melbourne, because the economy would not fail in the event of a Day Zero challenge. Investors are a logical breed of people. They communicated with each other, and the confidence they shared grew steadily. This meant that the city was awash with money as more investment flowed in over time.

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The core lesson here is that water security is the product of policy decisions that are communicated through credible platforms in a coherent and consistent manner. Communication provides the certainty needed by investors that water resource management is in competent hands.

Therefore, as a direct result of the water security policy, a sustained period of economic prosperity was experienced in the state of Victoria, despite the vagaries of nature.  

The second consequence was even more dramatic. Because the desalination plant was big enough to carry a sizeable portion of the baseflow needed by the city, the rivers weren’t run as hard as before. This meant that nature could bounce back on its own as aquatic ecosystems rebounded. The lesson here is that nature has the capacity to heal itself. All that humans must do is give it a chance.

Erik Swyngedouw was right about the creation of “hydrosocial territory” because human ingenuity can decouple our prosperity from the vagaries of nature. Our future as a species will depend on our ability to push rivers around in a way that causes nature not to bite back. The way that water boards build public consensus will increasingly become a critical success factor for society as a whole. DM

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