Managing mobilisation?: participatory processes and dam building in South Africa, the Berg River project

This paper examines the participatory processes which led to the building of the Berg River Dam in South Africa’s western Cape province.

The paper examines how local groupings strengthen, or are strengthened by, the national environmental movement, and to what extent activism on water resource management in local contexts feeds into national and global social movement dynamics. It does this by focusing on participation around water scarcity management in the Western Cape, in particular processes leading up to the building of the Berg Water Project (BWP) which includes the Berg River Dam.

The author finds that the government-led formal participatory processes initiated by government stand in contrast to the mobilisation of environmental activists against the building of the dam. The case study illustrates that in this case the creation of formal participatory spaces both subverted and neutralised resistance to the building of the dam on the part of the environmental movement as well as civil society.