Accompanying local stakeholders in negotiation processes related to water allocation through simulation models and role-playing games : an experience from South Africa

During the last twenty years, the concept of decision-making on natural resources has been criticized and modified by various research communities within almost all disciplines. In social sciences, for instance, ecological economics (Costanza, 1989; Ramos-Martin, 2003) and neo-institutional economics (Bromley, 1982; Soderbaum, 1992) have addressed issues such as uncertainty and incomplete information that were not explicitly taken into consideration by the conventional mainstream environmental economics (Janssen and Ostrom, 2004). In South Africa, the new national water legislation (1998) introduces a modern framework of integrated resource management in a social context still affected by severe gaps and backlogs inherited by the Apartheid regime that ended in 1994. While there is a political imperative to promote the democratisation of decision making regarding the use of water, local institutions do not yet have the capacity or the tools to take on board these responsibilities. This paper presents and discusses an innovative action-research approach aimed at facilitating negotiation and decision-making capacity on water management at a local scale. The Kat River catchment in the Eastern Cape of South Africa is the study area. The paper is organised as follows: section 2 provides an overview of the recent developments in the South African water sector institutional and legal frameworks and illustrates the Kat river context of multi-stakeholder negotiation around water; section 3 introduces the Companion Modelling approach and describes the negotiation tools that are being developed in the Kat; some elements of discussion are provided in section 4.