A civil society organisation response to water service delivery issues in South Africa drives transformative praxis. Part 1: Emergence and practice

Abstract

South Africa has a progressive constitution and water legislation that align with and are in support of the country becoming a developmental state. Public participation in water governance processes is provided for in South African water law and is an integral component to achieving the National Water Act developmental principles of equity, sustainability and efficiency.Decentralisation of water service delivery to the local sphere of government has stretched the capacity of municipalities to the point of dysfunction. An opportunity subsequently emerged for civil society organisations (CSOs) to play an important collaborative role in transforming water service delivery to more socially and ecologically just situations. We argue that it is important to understand how CSOs emerge and practice in order to develop and support their role in the South African water sector. The research employed qualitative methods to explore the emergence and practice of a civil society organisation, Water for Dignity (WfD), in response to water service delivery challenges in the Makana Local Municipality in the Eastern Cape, South Africa. Communities of practice theory was adopted as a theoretical and analytical lens to explore the stages of development of WfD and the enabling and constraining factors to their practice. Factors that enabled the emergence and practice of WfD included: skilled support from stakeholders of distributed expertise and highly motivated core WfD members. Constraining factors included: poor internal leadership, socio-economic constraints and command and control by powerful stakeholders. The principles distilled in this paper can inform the emergence and function of similar civil society organisations in other local government contexts and forward the developmental goals of South Africa.