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River rehabilitation projects are framed as water security interventions in South Africa. They aim to address water quality and water quantity issues, as well as to improve socio-ecological relationships. These projects acknowledge the value of capacity building and social learning in enhancing water security. However, they adopt different governance approaches and hence have different knowledge construction and capacity building outcomes. This paper employs a 'governmentality' framework to analyse the capacity development processes within three river rehabilitation projects in Durban, South Africa. The analysis revealed that the three projects, with their different governmentalities, produced different capacity development modalities, which are utilised to sustain 'the object of intervention' in each river rehabilitation project. However, despite these differences, information as the currency of action; the context or site of learning; the importance of building state-citizen relationships; and the need for bridges or intermediaries, emerged as common elements which support capacity building and knowledge sharing across all three projects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A series of pollution control measures have been introduced to protect water quality in the Olifants river basin, the third most water-stressed and most polluted basin in South Africa. This paper employed an environmentally extended computable general equilibrium (CGE) model to analyse the economic and environmental implications of a tax on water pollution in the basin. Implications of increasing the pollution tax rate currently in place for the levels of economic activities and water quality have been simulated under alternative tax revenue recycling schemes. Results of our policy simulations suggest that internalising the cost of water pollution through the tax regime achieves its environmental goals of protecting the aquatic ecosystem, by shifting production away from pollution-intensive sectors. This, however, comes at some cost to the regional economy of the basin. Recycling the tax revenue through income transfers to households or a subsidy to pollution abatement mitigates the adverse economic impacts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Water policy and regulation are of vital importance for unconventional gas mining, which may have large impacts on water availability and water quality. However, various studies indicate that regulators have insufficient knowledge to make informed policy decisions on unconventional gas mining. Based on this observation we conducted a study on the availability of knowledge of unconventional gas mining of attendees at the 4th and 5th Orange River Basin symposiums that are held annually in South Africa. The study focused on knowledge and perceptions of unconventional gas mining over the 2-year period from 2012 to 2013 due to important developments with regard to unconventional gas mining that took place in South Africa over this period, which could affect decision-makers' policy decisions on unconventional gas mining. Our results indicate that knowledge of this mining technique among decision-makers is limited, primarily because fact-based research is not readily available. Reliable facts on unconventional gas mining are required in order to effectively regulate this activity in South Africa. This paper argues for fact-based regulation and adaptive management as the science and technology of shale gas mining evolves. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]