A Southern African Perspective on Transboundary Water Resource Management

Southern Africa is characterized by a large number of international river basins, inherent climatic variability, and a natural maldistribution of perennial rivers. The region also has a history of political instability, driven by liberation struggles against the former colonial powers and the Cold War. Southern Africa’s transboundary rivers and their associated ecosystems could become either drivers of peace and economic integration or sources of endemic conflict. Water scarcity has also placed limits on the future economic growth potential of the region’s four most economically developed countries. This situation, combined with the regional development of international and increasingly complex interbasin water transfers, highlights the need to develop appropriate scientific methodologies that can explain and predict future patterns of conflict and cooperation. Driven in part by the need to develop a new security paradigm in the wake of the Cold War’s collapse, many policymakers in the United States and elsewhere have been grappling with the complexities and consequences of environmental security research. These efforts have resulted in a wealth of literature on environmental security, mostly emerging from the developed countries of the North. Developing regions of the South have placed a different emphasis on environmental security issues. In Southern Africa, for example, there has been renewed thinking about the management of transboundary water resources, particularly with respect to sustaining economic growth and avoiding conflict. This article addresses some of the key issues emerging from some Southern research on these topics. These research developments are also relevant to assessing the viability of the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD) and the newly created African Union (AU). These organizations have at their very core issues of economic stability, poverty alleviation, and governance—all of which are central to the way that transboundary river basins are managed. Key Strategic Drivers of Environmental Security in Southern Africa Mainland Southern Africa comprises eleven countries, some of which are among the poorest in the world (e.g., Mozambique, Malawi, Zambia) and many of which have suffered from protracted violence (e.g., Angola, Mozambique, Republic of South Africa, Zimbabwe, and the Democratic Republic of Congo). The region was an important theater of the Cold War: many of its civil wars during that period were localized manifestations of former superpower rivalries (Turton, 2003a). This history has left modern Southern Africa with a complex mosaic of conflict and tension—a legacy exacerbated by environmental scarcities in one form or another. Indeed, Southern Africa is characterized by three environmentally and developmentally distinct features that act as fundamental drivers of potential conflict or cooperation: 1) Climate variability is a key determinant of Southern Africa’s ecological dynamics and environmental security. Drought and flooding are normal events in the region’s hydrological context. A number of natural cycles affect the region’s rivers: for example, the Okavango River Basin has an 18-year cycle of climate variability, while records from the Zambezi Basin show the existence of an 80-year cycle (McCarthy et al., 2000). Flood pulsing—or the variability between periods of high flow and low or even nonflow periods—is also recognized as a key ecological driver (Junk et al., 1989; Davies et al., 1993; Davies & Day, 1998;