**5.6.7 Evaluation of "Integration" programmes**

Each of the above efforts has been an important attempt at integrating the land and water allocation reform processes more closely. It is imperative for the different government competencies to work more closely together, and also to find ways of adjusting the current land and water allocation reform models to try and address some of the shortcomings of past attempts at effective water and land reform. Initiatives such as leasing out land until farmers can show that they are able to be productive with sufficient government support in terms of infrastructure and cooperation with strategic partners are potentially very valuable.

Unfortunately, however, to date none of the programmes seems to have been functioning ideally. The problem has been that attempts at integration between the water allocation and land reform processes have been fraught with difficulties, often linked to the design of the different programmes as well as the organisational weaknesses at the governmental level.

Such difficulties include budgets for water allocation and land reform programmes being housed in different departments and funding not being coordinated, underfunding for certain programmes, a lack of monitoring capacity by government departments to establish how well the programmes are being implemented and whether they are successful, a lack of awareness among emerging farmers about which funding options are available to them, a "quick fix" approach with not sufficient attention being paid to quality programmes and quality implementation, an overreliance by the government and emerging farmers on strategic partners.

In addition, different government departments generally do not communicate effectively with each other, do not know who they need to be speaking to in their sister departments and have no clear idea of what activities other government departments are engaging in. In addition to challenges of inter-departmental cooperation and coordination, there is also a problem with intra-departmental communication as decisions that are made at ministerial

Integration Challenges of Water and Land Reform – A Critical Review of South Africa 101

to prevent themselves from being overwhelmed by too many inputs all at once as this could

Secondly, different government structures need to stop working in silos and need to start

Thirdly, there needs to be an acknowledgement that increased levels of integration and communication can take a long time, which necessitates patience, endurance and a long

Other countries can also benefit from this analysis by taking note of some of the impacts of non-integration of water and land management related programmes and the challenges to successfully implementing integrated reform programmes. The impacts of non-integration include governments having to deal with the effects of failed programmes and stakeholder collaboration, and the simultaneous manifestation of a disjuncture between policy and practice. Another impact is that failed integration efforts cause promising paradigms such as IWRM to lose credibility, both at the national and international level. It seems so difficult to implement integration focused water and land management programmes because of the bureaucratic culture of managing projects and programmes in silos. Implementation is furthermore impeded by government structures traditionally being hierarchical and compartmentalised and making it difficult for information to flow freely and easily between different units within government. Therefore there is a need in South Africa and elsewhere, when promoting greater levels of integration between water and land management related programmes, to try to ensure that different government structures work together both horizontally across sectors, and hierarchically from the national to the local level. In addition, a multi-stakeholder and multi-sectoral effort is required at all levels, from the local

The authors would like to thank the South African Water Research Commission (WRC) for the role they have played in soliciting and funding a research project on which this paper is loosely based. The case study and contextual background study is based on work conducted in this project, "An Investigation of Water Conservation in Food Value Chains by Beneficiaries of Water Allocation Reform and Land Reform Programmes in South Africa" (K5/1958/4). More information on these and similar projects can be found at the WRC's

Adger, N. W., Benjaminsen, T. A., Brown, K. and Svarstad, H. (2001). Advancing a political

Aliber, M. and Mokoena, R. (2000). *The land redistribution programme and the land market*.

Anderson, K., Kurzweil, M., Martin, W., Sandri, D., Valenzuela, E. (2008). Measuring

Department of Land Affairs, Unpublished paper, Pretoria.

Working Paper 4612, April 2008, Washington.

ecology of global environmental discourses. *Development and Change* Vol. 32 No. 4,

distortions to agricultural incentives, revisited. World Bank Policy Research

cooperating in terms of budget allocation and promoting integration.

term vision on behalf of those who are seeking to improve integration.

to national if integration is to be operational and implementable.

be counter-productive.

**7. Acknowledgment** 

**8. References** 

website: http://www.wrc.org.za/

pp. (687-715), ISSN 0012-155X.

level, specifically in this instance those regarding cooperation with other departments, do not filter down to the lower levels of government. The top-down ways in which decisions are made therefore impact negatively on cooperation between operational managers in different government departments. Conversely, if government officials at the operational level wish to collaborate more closely, it becomes difficult for them to obtain the approval for such cooperation from their superiors, given the substantial amount of bureaucratic red tape that South African government departments are characterised by.
