ABSTRACT
There is a new water architecture emerging in the Southern African Development Community (SADC). It is an architecture that takes its cue from both local conditions and global thinking and practice. It involves national reform processes that seek to rewrite outdated water acts, to articulate far-seeing water policies, and to restructure the management of the resource so that the natural watershed or catchment area becomes the unit of decision making rather than an artificial political boundary. This new architecture changes the institutional scale and stakeholders of water management and shows trends towards the privatization of water resource development. Cash-strapped SADC countries claim it is necessary to involve business in what are called public-private partnerships (PPPs).
