The challenges of rescaling South African water resources management: Catchment Management Agencies and interbasin transfers

Socio-hydrological modelling: a review asking "why, what and how?"

“…Basins and watersheds are seen as "natural" (Blomquist and Schlager, 2005) scales for analysis, since these are the spatial units in which water flows (though there are of course watersheds of different scales and watersheds within basins, and so watershed-scale analysis does not answer the question of spatial scale on its own); however, these often do not match with the scales on which human activities occur, and indeed human intervention has, in some cases, rendered the meaning of a "basin" less relevant due to water transfers (Bourblanc and Blanchon, 2013). The importance of regional and global scales has been recognised, with Falkenmark (2011) stating that "the meso-scale focus on river basins will no longer suffice".…”

IWRM and the Politics of Scale: Rescaling Water Governance in Uzbekistan

“…Molle [3] points out that hydrographic and hydraulic units were the norm for water management in France, Spain and Great Britain at the end of the 19th century, despite the importance that hydraulic engineering gained during the high-modernist period. In their analyses of contemporary water governance, Graefe [16] and Bourblanc and Blanchon [17] demonstrate that the high complexity of the present practices and the infrastructural connectivity of river basins through water transfers shows that hydrographic units are not the scale of actual water management in diverse parts of the world. Nevertheless, the administrative principle has dominated water management throughout most of the 20th century.…”

“…Over the last decades, debates have focused on the suitable spatial scale and the boundaries for water management [3,39,40], the consequences of decentralization and deregulations [25,26], the commodification of water resources [27,41], and socio-political transformations in relation to international development initiatives [8,42]. Recent research by Harrys and Alatout [38] and Bourblanc and Blanchon [17] contributed to the debate by exploring the connections between power geometries and rescaling processes by focusing on the Middle East and South Africa, respectively. Their findings suggest that rescaling processes in water management are state strategies of nation-building and power consolidation by elites.…”

Gérer ou gouverner la ressource en eau ? Modélisation en temps réel et gestion de la pénurie au sein de la rivière Crocodile (Afrique du Sud)

“…Il peut certes s'expliquer par l'intérêt personnel qu'un membre en particulier de l'agence de l'eau lui accorde mais il convient surtout de le comprendre comme un moyen pour l'IUCMA de s'imposer dans un paysage institutionnel où l'agence de l'eau subit de nombreuses concurrences, en premier lieu, de la part du DWA. En effet, si l'IUCMA a hérité en 2012, dans le cadre des politiques de décentralisation de la gestion de la ressource, de prérogatives autrefois dévolues au ministère de l'Eau, le DWA a démontré par le passé toute sa défiance vis-à-vis de ce processus (Bourblanc et Blanchon, 2014). Cela contribue à brouiller la lecture du jeu complexe des acteurs du bassin, dont le fonctionnement n'est toujours pas stabilisé.…”