Media framing of collaborative governance in the Cape Town water crisis
Abstract
In 2018, the city of Cape Town, South Africa came within 100 days of running out of water. This water crisis attracted global media attention, as cities evaluated their own vulnerability and water management approaches. The impacts of the water crisis could have ripple effects on the related sectors of food and energy; with the strong interconnections within the food-energy-water (FEW) nexus, stress on the resources of one sector can impact the other two. Collaborative governance across all three FEW nexus sectors provides for holistic understanding of the system and can lead towards greater resilience and sustainability in future resource management. Understanding the framing of the water crisis is important because media framing influences what society, and thus decision-makers, deem important and can be indicative of how decision-makers may respond to a crisis. This research thus explores the framing of news articles to examine the impact of the water crisis on the urban FEW nexus and the role of collaboration in the response to the crisis. To explore this research objective, I conducted a search of news articles (n=438) from local, national, and international news outlets through LexisNexis. I then conducted content analysis of codes for collective action framing and for collaborative governance. Finally, I analyzed the quantitative distribution of the codes over time and the qualitative characteristics of the codes. The results of this study include three sections. First, I present the collective action frames of the articles to discuss how the media framing changed over the duration of the water crisis. Second, I present the role that collaboration played in responding to the crisis. Third, I discuss the impacts of the crisis on the food and energy sectors and how collaboration can reduce unintended consequences in the nexus. As a high-profile water crisis, Cape Town provides an exemplar of how collaborative governance can occur in response to scarcity and demonstrates how a crisis in one resource area can impact the related nexus sectors. This study provides a useful archetype for managers and planners facing increasing urban water stress to consider resource interlinkages and opportunities for collaboration within their decision-making process.
- Publication:
-
AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2020
- Bibcode:
- 2020AGUFMH139.0011J
- Keywords:
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- 1630 Impacts of global change;
- GLOBAL CHANGE;
- 1803 Anthropogenic effects;
- HYDROLOGY;
- 1880 Water management;
- HYDROLOGY;
- 4303 Hydrological;
- NATURAL HAZARDS