After the Drought: State legitimacy, climate change, and the Cape Town Water Crisis

Keywords: water governance, climate change, sustainable development, discourse analysis, social theory, political ecology, food-water-energy nexus, South Africa
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Monday
Session Start / End Time: 2/28/2022 09:40 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/28/2022 11:00 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 17

Abstract

The Cape Town Water Crisis garnered worldwide attention in 2018; the City of Cape Town was on track to become the first major metropolitan area in the world to run out of water. In the years since the City narrowly averted Day Zero, various policies have emerged as a means of redefining the City’s relationship with water in hopes of forging a more sustainable and equitable future.

In order to better understand the implications of these new policies on the state’s role in water governance, I performed a critical discourse analysis of policies related to water access and use in the Western Cape Province, South Africa. Drawing on Habermas’ conception of legitimation crisis along with an array of political ecology work on the neoliberalization of nature, I argue that while climate change poses a serious threat to the advance of capitalist relations on the environment, it has also spurred new governance approaches which counteract this threat and revives capitalism’s global hegemony. The South African state has increasingly made use of neoliberal policy mechanisms to strengthen its grasp on natural resources like water and land. The state has used the water crisis in Cape Town as a platform upon which it can make legitimizing claims for itself through the implementation of new water governance policies. These policies redefine and further entrench the role of the state as a mediator between the public and the environment. Human-environment relations are thus altered as the neoliberal state encounters its most profound legitimation crisis—climate change.