The Treaty on the Lesotho Highlands Water Project and the principle of "equitable and reasonable utilisation"

The principle of "equitable and reasonable utilisation" has been proposed as a tool to resolve a conflict of uses since it advocates for fair and sustainable utilisation of shared water resources. This paper examines this proposition with a specific focus on the Treaty on the Lesotho Highlands Water Project, which regulates the use of the Orange River. To this end, it is my view that the principle of "vital human needs" as an incidence of the principle of "equitable and reasonable utilisation", proffers the most effective tool to resolve the anticipated conflict of uses in the Orange River basin.

Hydropolitics versus Human Security: Implications of South Africa's Appropriation of Lesotho's Highlands Water

The Lesotho Highlands Water Project, which exports water to South Africa, has enhanced the unequal structural relationship that exists between both states. Lesotho, one of the few countries in the world that exports water, has transformed from one of the largest sources of labor for South Africa to a water reservoir for South Africa. Though the project provides mutual strategic economic and political benefits to both riparian states, its construction has negatively affected environmental and human security in Lesotho. Due to hydropolitics, environmental threats in Lesotho caused by the project's construction are overlooked. These threats, which have devastating effects on resettled communities and the country's ecosystem, also constitute a threat to domestic and international security. The desire to prevent interstate conflict and maintain cooperation between the two riparian states further enhances the lopsided interstate relationship.

Lesotho's white gold: the political ecology of temporality and the economy of anticipation in resource extraction and large dam infrastructural projects

The construction phases of large dam and infrastructural projects often extend over long periods of time, creating social, environmental, cultural, political, and economic consequences in the proximate communities and landscapes. The temporality of the phases of the project – from planning to construction to post-construction – reveal more layered and wide-ranging consequences from the social and environmental changes that result, sharpened by greater attention to how these changes unfold across multiple timescales and sites of the project. Using the case study of the Lesotho Highlands Water Project (LHWP), I draw on a political ecology approach that uses longitudinal data, including interviews, document analysis, and ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Lesotho since 1997, to illustrate how active project narratives draw from and promulgate an affective economy of anticipation in ways that aim to both sustain the hope of people affected by the project and contain their criticism of the project amidst a continued investment by the state in the expansion of the LHWP. As people directly affected experience disjunctures between the promises and the realities of the project over time, subsequent phases of the project are simultaneously renewed and recast through a logic of improvement that emphasizes changes in the implementation of the project while continuing to invest in the future imaginary of development that requires going forward with project plans. A logic of continuity and improvement structures this continued commitment to the capital intensive LHWP through the strategic mobilization of phases that scaffold both the material and physical dimensions of the project, but also the affective and anticipatory hopes of prosperity that the project represents. In this case, it also reveals how project authorities weave these dimensions – the material and the aspirational – into specific planned changes and improvements to address previous and ongoing concerns as projects progress over time. This longitudinal approach demonstrates the importance of temporal and affective dimensions to our understanding of the complex, multi-faceted consequences of resource extractive mega-dam projects such as the LHWP, particularly as they further rationalize the resource extractive approach to economic development in the region.Keywords: development, dams, infrastructure, political ecology, temporality, affect, resource extraction, economy of anticipation, displacement, construction, Lesotho, Southern Africa

Environmental change, risk and vulnerability: poverty, food insecurity and HIV/AIDS amid infrastructural development and climate change in Southern Africa

The Lesotho Highlands Water Project (LHWP) is a transnational multi-dam infrastructural development project to sell water from Lesotho to South Africa. Based on field and secondary research in Lesotho, I demonstrate how infrastructural projects such as the LHWP shape a geography of risk and become a medium through which riskscapes are created or exacerbated in both South Africa and Lesotho. Project-induced changes interacted with and intensified co-occurring vulnerabilities for communities directly and indirectly affected by the LHWP over time. I focus specifically on risks to livelihood, food insecurity and health, within the context of increased climatic shocks in the region.