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AEGIS European Conference on African Studies
11 - 14 July 2007
African Studies Centre, Leiden, The Netherlands
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shifting risks : resilience, risk reduction and insurance in the South African hydropolitical complex
| Panel |
77. Conceptualizing natural hazards, risks and resilience in Africa
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| Paper ID | 361 |
| Author(s) |
Blanchon, David
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| Paper |
No paper submitted
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| Abstract | South African hydrosystems are, according to B. Davies “predictibly unpredictable”. Traditionnal farmers, either Black or White, built strategies in order to cope with the natural alternance of droughts and floods, using both time and space.
But these strategies were not adapted for the development of the highly technicised South African commercial agriculture during the XXth century.
The modernisation process was based on two strategies : risk reduction on the one hand with the construction of huge dams and interbasins transfers in order to regulated rivers; implementation of an insurance system for White farmers during the Segregation and Apartheid era on the other hand.
The partial failure and limits of these two “modern” strategies (hydrological variability is only partially reduced, and the insurance systems collapsed when its racist base was removed) and combined with the rise of ecological concerns, gave birth from 1994 onwards to new way of coping with risk in South Africa.
This paper will explore the resurgence of the notion of resilience, which is not seen anymore as a local coping strategy, but as a central element of the hydropolitical complex.
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