ABSTRACT
The Okavango River Basin in Southern Africa straddles the borders of Angola, Namibia and Botswana. In an otherwise dry and hostile environment, the river and its resources give life to a number of communities and activities along its way from the Angolan highlands to the world famous Delta in Botswana. The sensitivity of policy aspects relating to water management in the Okavango is demonstrated by Wolf et al. (2003, 46), having declared the river basin as being ‘at risk’, suggesting a potential for political stress or conflicting interests in the coming years. This chapter seeks to examine some of the political ramifications of perceived water scarcity by exploring the implications of framing access to and control over water resources in the grammar of security. The Copenhagen School of International Relations, most notably Wæver (1995) and Buzan et al. (1998) have conceptualized the social construction of threats and vulnerabilities through the theory of securitization. ‘Security’ becomes a speech act (Austin 1962; Searle 1980), in which a securitizing actor attempts to take politics beyond the established rules of the game by framing an issue as a special kind of politics or as above politics. Contextualized to the river basin under consideration, it is anticipated that the securitization of water resource management contributes to a state of affairs that creates antagonistic identities of ‘friend and enemy’ (Schmitt 1985 [1934], 1996 [1932]) and that this process unfolds and is best encapsulated through a conceptualization of security as a phenomenon located within, though not confined to, different sectors (Buzan et al. 1998). Wallensteen (1992) avows that differences in user patterns in international
river basins can ignite disputes and conflicts between riparian states, facilitating upstream-downstream dilemmas where each part sees the other part as blocking current and future development projects. A distinction can be made between overexploitation of a given resource for the same purpose, herein competition, and overutilization of resources for one purpose that excludes all other uses, herein monopolization (Wallensteen 1992, 53). How this dynamic plays out is the focal point of analysis in the controversy around the Popa Falls hydropower station.
