Politics of Water: A Focus on the African Continent

Previously, I introduced the premise of water contestation in Africa continentally, outlining a mismatch in water needs and distribution exacerbated by climatic and political factors. I now wish to delve into a region whose transboundary tensions, conflict, and mediation over water I find particularly interesting: southern Africa and the Orange-Senqu river basin. A large swathe of inland southern Africa is dominated by the previously mentioned kilometre-high plateau and a narrow coastal belt that is especially mountainous towards South Africa - this creates sharp topographic gradients, which have a marked effect on weather systems' movement, orographic precipitation, and hence noticeable rainfall distribution and vegetation gradients across southern Africa (Reason, 2017) . The Orange-Senqu basin lies in the heart of the region, with its main river straddling four countries: it rises from Lesotho's Maluti Mountains and traverses westwards across South Africa, Botswana, and Namib...

Water is a crucial resource - not just to sustain life but entire nations through supporting industry, agriculture, and trade. Accessing water, however, is in reality far from a simple feat, owing to discrepancies in spatial distributions of water resources, man-made demarcations, and societal demand, rendering water an easily politicised and contested resource. Welcome to my blog, where I explore the theme of water and politics in relation to development. I will examine just how inextricable politics and power relations are to any discussion of water access, focussing specifically on Africa. Few places beyond this continent exemplify the politics of water access more clearly: despite holding abundant freshwater at 9% of global supply  (Gaye and Tindimugaya, 2019) , a combination of colonial legacies and natural environmental landscape factors mean that Africa is today especially vulnerable to water conflict. In this introductory post, I will explore both these factors in a bit mor...