2. Water Governance and Management and Climate Change

There is a major difference in the scoring between the two documents. The reason for this is that I did the assessment of the entire Adapting South African Cities and Towns: A Local Government Guide to Climate Change Adaptation Planning and only the executive summary of the Climate Change Vulnerability in South East Queensland: A Spatial and Sectoral Assessment. The length of text one assesses has an impact on the scoring of the text; the more text one assesses, the higher the scores and vice versa.

The MDGs are targets set in 2000 by 191 countries to eradicate poverty and other sources of human deprivation and to promote sustainable development. The target for achieving the MDGs is 2015. The goals are: eradicate extreme poverty and hunger; achieve universal primary education; promote gender equality and empower women; reduce child mortality; improve maternal health; combat HIV/Aids, malaria and other diseases; ensure environmental sustainability and develop a global partnership for development (UNDP 2003; Meissner 2004b).

Water governance is defined by the political, social, economic and administrative systems that are in place, and which directly or indirectly affect the use, development and management of water resources and the delivery of water at different levels of society. Importantly, the water sector is a part of broader social, political and economic developments and is thus also affected by decisions outside of the water sector’ (UNDP and SIWI 2014a, b).

Warner (2005) states that multi-stakeholder platforms have been adopted as a logical companion to integrated water resource management, since integrated water resource management is difficult to model and needs a different decompartmentalised institutional arrangement. Also of interest is that the uptake of multi-stakeholder platforms goes back to the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) World Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, where calls were made for dialogue and co-management of common pool resources (Warner 2005) such as shared water bodies. Together with integrated water resource management, multi-stakeholder platforms are used as ways to deal with increasing degrees of variety and variability. By involving a diversity of perspectives in water management it ‘is hoped to hold the key to more integrated and sustainable outcomes’ (Warner 2005: 2). This promise appears to be used as an a priori knowledge construct that informs the UNDP’s and SIWI’s Shared Waters Partnership strategy. That the UNDP and SIWI use multi-stakeholder platforms in multiple contexts or shared water situations, indicates that the rationale behind multi-stakeholder platforms are regarded as a universal belief based on the experience of others and what is considered a justifiable belief (Bonjour 1999) coming from experts propagating multi-stakeholder platforms in an international organisational structure.

Anarchy means the absence of a central authority over states in the international system (Viotti and Kauppi 1999).