Contributions of an ethically-grounded and value based approach to water governance – the case of two contrasting catchments

From the purview of water resource governance, ethics is essential because it provides the means to uncover the values that underpin the claims advanced by different societal groupings in relation to access to water resources. Using the lower Sundays River and upper Vaal River catchments as case studies, a project funded by the WRC sought to bring ethics and value-based analysis to the domain of water governance. This was done by drawing on theories of ethics to reflect on and reason about values from the perspective of consequentialism, deontology, virtue ethics, Ubuntu moral theory and systemic-relational approaches.