Guidelines: Building South Africa’s water resilience through effective partnering

Practical guidelines and supporting resources to enable adaptive & collaborative water management released by WRC, the EDP & the CST in March 2023

The role of Catchment Management Agencies (CMAs) in building South Africa’s water resilience is becoming increasingly important.  Partnering effectively at catchment level can improve cooperative governance for integrated water resource management. 

By actively working together, water institutions can navigate complex systems and societal issues, ultimately benefiting the end-user.

To this end, Water Research Commission (WRC) and the EDP has been working in collaboration with Stellenbosch University’s Centre of Complex Transitions (CST) on a long term project to improve water governance through collaborative and adaptive management. 

The resulting resources, launched in March 2023, provide practical approaches to enable collaborative and adaptive water management for CMA’s in South Africa.  

• Report: The full PDF report outlines the case for cooperative governance for CMAS and presents step-by-step how a relationship between a CMA and provincial government can be established and maintained
• Toolkit: This slideshow resource distils the step-by-step partnering process and includes templates of partnering tools 
• Case Study: Cooperative governance in water resource management – drawing lessons from the Breede River catchment, published in WRC’s Water Wheel, Nov/Dec 2022 
• Opinion piece: ‘Lessons in collaboration to help strengthen SA’s water governance’, published 9 March in BizCommunity 

These guidelines are grounded in lessons in cooperative governance learned by the Breede Partnering Solution in the Western Cape, which aims to build an integrated environmental and water resource management approach in the Breede River catchment area. 

The partnering principles and framework are scalable for use in other regions and adaptable for a range of partnership configurations. 

For further information, please contact Margo Paterson margo@wcedp.co.za