Ruling the Game of Institutional Water Governance - An analysis of water access, power and control in South Africa.

This thesis critically investigates how local people access water and how the involved processes align with their complex social relations with other people’s lives and livelihoods within a South African water governance context. In a comparative cross-case study, I reveal that power asymmetries lie at the heart of the challenges faced by the South African government to implement its formal approach to collaborative, local level water governance institutions. Instead of becoming vehicles for change, my findings reveal that Water User Associations were further entrenching privileged access to water of existing agricultural elites, rather than providing a mechanism for change.