The Institute of Development Studies and Partner Organisations
Browse

From appropriating water to sharing it: water reforms in the Nyachowe catchment area

Download (355.27 kB)
report
posted on 2024-09-06, 06:03 authored by Pieter van der Zaag
Visit a catchment area in Zimbabwe, and you will encounter a situation full of contradictions and compromises. The differences between the worlds in which the commercial farmers and the communal farmers live are simply vast. Yet, they are there in the watershed, living side by side, as if it was self-evident. You will soon ask yourself, how could this situation change for the better? The most obvious answer is making access to resources more equal. Water is probably one of the most crucial, as it is a limiting factor in agricultural production in Zimbabwe. How could such a reform be accomplished? On the basis of a case study of a small catchment area of Nyachowa stream in Mutare district* I suggest that we can do three things with respect to water reform: 1) we need to reform the water act, 2) we need to redress the historically unbalanced distribution of water rights; 3) we need to base these reforms on watershed-specific data, that encompass a variety of disciplines, such as hydrology, law, history and sociology.

A research paper on the contradictions between the commercial farming sector and the smallholder rural farming sector in Zimbabwe during the 1990's and how the water resource needed policies that enabled both sectors to share it.

History

Publisher

Centre for Applied Social Sciences (CASS); University of Zimbabwe (UZ)

Citation

van der Zaag, P. (1997) From appropriating water to sharing it: water reforms in the Nyachowe catchment area. In: Nhira, C. (ed.) Towards reforming the institutional and legal basis of the water of Zimbabwe: current weaknesses, recent initiatives and their operational problems, CASS Occasional Paper - NRM Series ; CPN86 /1997. Harare: CASS, pp. 19-25.

Series

CASS Occasional Paper - NRM Series CPN86 /1997

IDS Item Types

Series paper (non-IDS)

Copyright holder

Uiversity of Zimbabwe's Centre for Applied Social Sciences (CASS)

Country

Zimbabwe.

Language

en

Usage metrics

    University of Zimbabwe Social Sciences Research

    Categories

    No categories selected

    Exports

    RefWorks
    BibTeX
    Ref. manager
    Endnote
    DataCite
    NLM
    DC