Dr Suraya Scheba is an ACC research fellow who will be sharing a paper entitled, ‘Overcoming water scarcity for good: querying the adoption of desalination technology in the Knysna Local Municipality of South Africa’.
Abstract
In this paper I aim to query the Ecological Modernisation vision of green growth by focusing on the emblematic case of desalination technology as the solution to the threat of water scarcity. I focus the study on a drought crisis, which resulted in the adoption of desalination in the Eden District Municipality (EDM) of South Africa. Focusing on the towns of Sedgefield and Knysna, in the Knysna Local Municipality (KLM) of the EDM, I ask the questions of ‘what, how, by whom, why and to what end was desalination adopted?’. This interrogation is characterised by two movements, firstly tracing the emergence and form of the crisis – solution consensus; and secondly reading this against an examination of the historical material relations constituting both crisis and solution. The paper is informed by research that was carried out over a period of 11 months, from October 2011 to August 2012, during which I undertook 91 semi-structured interviews, extensive document analysis and participant observation.
The twin analytical movement described above is undertaken in five parts. Firstly, I show that the dominant representation of ‘drought crisis’ insisted upon the indisputability of drought as a threat posed by an externalised nature. Next, in examining the historical materiality of drought I counter this narrative by showing the drought crisis to be a socio-natural assemblage, rather than an externalised threatening nature. This is a vital finding, showing that the support for the adoption of desalination technology as a necessary response to ‘nature’s crisis’, pivoted on the maintenance of an ideological fiction. In the third part of the paper, moving on to an examination of the solution, it emerges that an essential element supporting desalination adoption was the employment of exceptional disaster and environmental legislation, enabling the urgent release of disaster funding to ensure water security for economic growth. This section also argues that the maintenance of the dominant crisis narrative served to produce a market opportunity for the desalination industry. In the remaining two parts of the paper I evaluate the ‘promise’ of the desalination techno-fix. Through focusing on the conditionality placed on disaster funding and its impact on project assembly, I argue that the mechanisms and logic through which the solution consensus emerged had a direct bearing on project assembly and consequent problems and costs emerging out of the desalination solution from the outset. In sum, the paper demonstrates that the adopted E.M. logic was a false promise that served to intensify the penetration of nature by capital, and resulted in a deeper movement into crisis by moving the problems around as opposed to resolving them.
Bio
Suraya completed her PhD in geography at the University of Manchester (UK). Her doctoral work examined the Ecological Modernisation vision of green growth by focusing on the emblematic case of desalination technology as the solution to the threat of water scarcity. The study was focused on a drought crisis, which resulted in the adoption of desalination in the Eden District Municipality (EDM) of South Africa, focusing specifically on the towns of Sedgefield and Knysna, in the Knysna Local Municipality (KLM) of the EDM. Since May 2015 she works as a post-doctoral research fellow at the African Centre for Cities (ACC) at the University of the Cape Town. In this capacity, she forms part of a research team concerned with exploring theories and practices of emancipatory change. At one level, her focus is on leading an in-depth study on Informality, urban poverty and inequality in the low-income community of Delft, Cape Town. This study forms part of a larger multi-sited research project, positioned within a collaborative initiative between a handful of South African Research Chairs working on strategies to overcome poverty and inequality. At another level she will participate in workshops and discussions, drawing on both grounded findings and theoretical debates, to build empirically-informed theory and policy related to questions of transformative change.