The governance and management of water in post-apartheid South Africa has been significantly redesigned by national government in the two decades since institutional apartheid formally ended. The redesigning efforts have aspired towards decentralized decision-making, participatory governance and management, and the integration of multiple issues that have social, environmental and technical dimensions. However, the failures in implementation have led to many commentators pointing out the gap between the policy aspirations and the operational realities on the ground. This chapter focuses on the governance and management of municipal water services to motivate the use of a modelling approach that explores the ambiguous ‘muddled middle’ between policy design, implementation and adaptation. The modelling approach involves an ethnographically embedded form of participatory system dynamics modelling, which was applied by the authors in an action research process. The modelling approach is held to be relevant for exploring controversial and complex case studies that offer representative and extreme examples of systemic dysfunction, where policy-level analytical objectives co-exist with action research imperatives of employing tools and methods to understand (and where possible, address) stakeholders’ issues of concern.@en

At the centre of the water law reform process initiated by the first democratic government of the Republic of South Africa (RSA) lay the challenge of transforming away from apartheid water injustices. Reform culminated in the promulgation of new legislation, regarded internationally as ambitious and forward-thinking legislation reflective of the broad aims of integrated water resource management. However, implementation of this legislation has been challenging. This paper analyses institutional dysfunction in water management in the Sundays River Valley Municipality (Eastern Cape Province, RSA). A transdisciplinary approach is taken in addressing the failure of national law and policy to enable the delivery of effective water services in post-apartheid RSA. A case study is used to explore interventions to promote effective water supply, locating these interventions and policies within the legislative structures and frameworks governing the water sector. We suggest that fine-grained institutional analysis together with learning from persistent iterative, adaptive practice, with principled goals intact, offers a pragmatic and achievable alternative to grand-scale policy change.@en