*Incentives for Managing Water Demands: Lessons from the Umgeni River Basin, KwaZulu-Natal… DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.106238*

and economic dynamics like population growth (and urbanisation) and of course compromised resource quality, it is increasingly becoming important that water users reduce the amount of water they use by practising water conservation on their properties. One of the ongoing challenges is, however, finding the best approach to encourage water users conserve water and curtail the increasing demands. As was reported previously, a number of studies have been conducted aimed at expanding our knowledge on incentives that can enhance water conservation behaviour among water users. The evidence in this paper agrees with Becker and Gibson [86] who argues that formulating and defining property rights to natural resources is one of the fundamental requirements that is necessary for ensuring that resource users have the incentives to conserve the resources and avoid degradation.

### **5.1 Duration of property rights and water conservation**

The importance of the duration of property rights is highlighted by the fact that water users know the period by which they would continue to benefit from the resource using their right. In accordance with the property rights institutions theory, this would have an impact on the behavioural actions among water users in the catchment [74, 87]. The results from the analysis using SPSS Kruskal Wallis Test are presented in **Table 1** showing the relationship between intention to water conserve water and the duration or tenure of their property right.

From the results of the study, it has been evident that there is a significant direct relationship between duration of the right and water conservation intentions among water users. This result denotes that the duration of the property right can be an incentive to enhance conservation of water among water users in the Umgeni River Basin. Nonetheless, this finding does not in itself clarify the extent to which duration would influence the intentions to conserve water as the results indicated a difference in the influence between five to 10 and 21 to 30 durations and 21 to 30 and 31 to 40 year duration (See **Table 2**).

By looking at the mean scores, the results revealed that water users were more motivated to conserve water with the lower durations and this motivation continued to drop as the duration increased. This finding would suggest that shorter water durations are key if water users are to be more conservative in water use, and this would help in reducing water demands in water stressed basins. According to Adhikari [88], resource users with shorter property rights durations attach more importance to optimising their benefits from the resource within the given period. The implication of this proposition would be two-fold. On the one hand, resource users would expropriate more resources from the source as they have no concerns for


### **Table 1.**

*The relationship between intention to water conserve water and the duration or tenure of their property right.*


### **Table 2.**

*Intention to conserve water vs length of property right.*

longer term availability of the resource thereby leading to degradation of the resource and increased conflicts among water users due to increased demands. The resource users may, nevertheless, be conservative with the available resource supply if they have a shorter duration so as to maximise their benefits from the supply. However, other studies indicate that the ability to conserve and sustainably use the resource with respect to the duration of the property rights depends more on the certainty of whether they can easily renew their licence after the expiry of the current allocation [27, 89]. Further than that, although Nikouei, Zibaei [90] argues that resource users are believed to be conservative if they are certain that they will continue benefiting from the resource, Hasan [36] reports in her study that some resource users will reduce their commitment to preserve the integrity of the resource in the long run.
