Planning for water resilience: Competing agendas among Cape Town’s planners and water managers

Abstract

Facing acute water challenges, the City of Cape Town has to reconcile the goal of building resilience to increasingly pronounced climate change impacts, including drought, with the persistent need to deliver equitable services and to achieve socially and environmentally just outcomes. In so doing, Cape Town is actively leveraging ideas of resilience in dealing with acute water shortages and in planning for new approaches for water management in the future. In light of multiple and discordant approaches to building resilience to water risks, this paper traces the emergence of an unfolding water resilience agenda in Cape Town. Specifically, the paper investigates how different framings of resilience enable planners to consider and prioritize particular solutions, their implications for water planning, and how lessons from Cape Town’s experiences might apply to other contexts. The findings demonstrate the predominance of expert-driven and technocratic approaches in Cape Town’s resilience-building efforts in the water sector, as well as the presence of key tensions and potential synergies emerging from competing perspectives on water resilience.