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Many countries in the world, including South Africa, are water-stressed with increasing pressure on their water resources due to population growth, climate change, and inadequate funding. Post-independence in 1994, many policies and programmes were introduced by the government with the aim of promoting water management. While these policies and strategies achieved much in terms of water provision to communities and households, they failed to establish a water-conscious country with sufficient knowledge and expertise in water management. In addition, these policies and programmes are outdated, compartmentalised, complex, and lack robust water governance with resilient stakeholder partnerships that advance the more explicit second phase of the National Development Plan (NDP) to achieve water security under the threat of climate change. Using data collection tools inspired by the traditional method of participatory research, this paper analyses the structural and systematic factors hindering the implementation of comprehensive policies to achievewater security in South Africa. There is, therefore, an urgent need for SouthAfrica to establish an independent water regulator to ensure coordination between different government departments, including the National Treasury, to strengthen weak governance capacity and to make it independent to attract private equity into the sector and to recover fiscal deficits in the water sector. [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]