A critical look at South Africa's Green Drop Programme

A critical look at South Africa’s Green Drop Programme Cebile Ntombela1, Nikki Funke1*, Richard Meissner1,2, Maronel Steyn1 and Winile Masangane1 Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), P.O. Box 395, Pretoria, 0001, South Africa Centre for Water Resources Research, University of KwaZulu-Natal, Private Bag X01, Scottsville, 3209, South Africa 1 2 ABSTRACT In this paper we briefly reflect on the different legislation and types of regulatory mechanisms that South Africa’s Department of Water and Sanitation (DWS) has in place to try to improve the performance and compliance of water services authorities (WSAs) in the controversial wastewater services sector. In particular, we focus on DWS’s incentive-based mechanism, the National Green Drop Certification Programme (Green Drop Programme), and evaluate the achievements and challenges associated with its implementation to date. While there has been considerable improvement in performance in all areas of the programme since its inception in 2009, much still needs to be done in order to address the dire situation the country’s wastewater services sector finds itself in. Challenges facing the Green Drop Programme and the municipalities implementing the programme include: lack of human resource capacity to prepare effective corrective action plans and/or wastewater risk abatement plans; lack of finances for mainstreaming of wastewater treatment in municipal decision-making; lack of forward planning; problematic bureaucratic processes; complex relationship between some municipalities and DWS; theft, vandalism and misuse of wastewater treatment infrastructure and not enough transparency. Based on this discussion, we make some concluding remarks about possible areas of improvement that could potentially strengthen the functioning and success of this programme, and thereby help to improve the levels of performance and compliance of the country’s WSAs. Keywords: wastewater treatment, regulation, Green Drop Programme, incentive-based mechanism, command-and-control mechanism INTRODUCTION In South Africa water services authorities (WSAs) are responsible for providing potable water and sanitation services to all customers in their respective areas of jurisdiction (RSA, 1997). These services include, amongst other responsibilities, the management of domestic wastewater treatment works (WWTW) and sewage disposal systems. Wastewater treatment is the process of removing organic and inorganic matter from the waste stream and making it suitable for releasing back into the environment. This technology can often be very expensive and requires high levels of technical knowledge, specialist plant operators and specific equipment (DWA, 2011a). In South Africa, wastewater services are currently provided by a total of 152 WSAs via a vast network of 824 wastewater collector and treatment facilities (DWA, 2013). More than 70% of the country’s WWTW are micro-, small- and medium-sized (DWA, 2012). The country’s WWTW have a collective hydraulic design capacity of 6 509. ML/day and 78.8% of this capacity is accounted for by the current operational flows of 5 128.8 ML/day (DWA, 2013). These numbers imply that, theoretically, the country currently has a surplus of 22.2% of ‘available’ capacity to accommodate future demand. However, many individual WWTW have no surplus and run at full capacity (DWA, 2013). Poor and insufficient wastewater treatment has often been referred to as one of South Africa’s main water pollution problems. This problem also manifests itself in the increasing incidents of non-compliance with national water resources legislation, policies, norms and standards aimed at the protection of South Africa’s water resources (Van der Merwe-Botha, 2009; Herold, 2009; CSIR, 2010). Most sewage from the country’s urban areas, particularly small towns and densely populated areas, is improperly treated before discharge as a result of incomplete or non-functional WWTW or because these works are overloaded and mismanaged (Oberholster, 2010). There is currently also a lack of trained operators at many WWTW and these often operate with limited budgets for infrastructure maintenance and upgrades (Van Rooyen and Versfeld, 2010). Other challenges include inadequate capital and operating funds for wastewater treatment, lack of planning to provide for increased levels of urbanisation, inadequate human resource capacity and technical skills and a lack of co-operative governance between stakeholders in municipalities (Ntombela et al., 2013). In light of the above-mentioned challenges, the need for improved regulation and performance of wastewater services has become a prominent issue on the national water agenda. In this paper we briefly reflect on the different legislation and types of regulatory mechanisms that the Department of Water and Sanitation (DWS) has in place to improve the performance and compliance of WSAs. In particular, we focus on DWS’s incentive-based mechanism, the National Green Drop Certification Programme (Green Drop Programme), and evaluate the achievements and challenges associated with its implementation to date. Based on this discussion, we make some concluding remarks about possible areas of improvement that could potentially strengthen the functioning and success of this programme, and thereby help to improve the levels of performance and compliance of the country’s WSAs. METHODOLOGY * To whom all correspondence should be addressed. ☎ 012 841 2024; e-mail: Received 16 October 2015; accepted in revised form 11 October 2016 We combined a literature review with semi-structured interviews in order to obtain the necessary data to write this paper. The primary sources of information for the literature review component included relevant national policy and legislation, regulations and norms and standards, as listed in the references section. http://dx.doi.org/10.4314/wsa.v42i4.21 Available on website http://www.wrc.org.za ISSN 1816-7950 (Online) = Water SA Vol. 42 No. 4 October 2016 Published under a Creative Commons Attribution Licence 703 We made use of journal articles and other relevant material, including available Green Drop reports, as secondary sources of information. In addition, we conducted a series of semi-structured interviews with two national DWS managers, one regional DWS manager, seven managers from two large metropolitan municipalities, two managers from a rural district municipality, and representatives from a consulting company. These interviews were held in order to gauge how officials implementing the Green Drop Programme view the successes and shortcomings of the programme. The interviews were held with respondents from the following provinces: Gauteng, Limpopo, KwaZulu-Natal and the Western Cape. The interview data were analysed by applying a cross-sectional code and retrieve method. This method involves identifying key themes, concepts or categories in the mass of data that has been collect (...truncated)