Platforms without borders: Envisioning a multistakeholder platform for the whole Incomati Basin

The waterways of the Incomati Basin start in the highlands of South Africa and Eswatini, and ultimately flow to Mozambique’s Maputo Bay. Along the way, they run through a basin that is home to 2.3 million people and a wide variety of stakeholders. With the 2021 establishment of the Incomati and Maputo Watercourse Commission (INMACOM), the transboundary basin finally has cross-border leadership.

“That has been the key development in the basin and helped to get cooperation moving – and as part of that, NEXUS Gains has moved in to support,” said Jonathan Lautze from the International Water Management Institute (IWMI), opening the webinar ‘How to design a transboundary multistakeholder platform (MSP): The Incomati experience in Southern Africa’. The CGIAR Initiative on NEXUS Gains has been working to connect stakeholder input to INMACOM’s decision making, and fortunately there is much inspiration to draw on. “A key thrust of what we tried to do when we co-designed this work in the Incomati was to learn from other experiences in MSPs [Multistakeholder Platforms] in shared waters and,” Lautze said. He described how NEXUS Gains “stumbled into quite a gap” in the comparative assessment of MSPs in shared waters.

An alternative channel to the basin level

The webinar intended to jump that gap and review experiences that can contribute to the design of the Incomati’s MSP. Ryan Nehring of the International Food Policy Research Institute summarized three different types of approaches: the state-based MSP in the Mekong Basin; the semi-autonomous, donor-funded Nile Basin Discourse; and the MSPs hosted by the Zambezi Watercourse Commission (ZAMCOM).

Nehring has found that, “among other things, MSPs are particularly important in the transboundary context because they serve a unique role relative to that of the formal organizations,” which are river basin organizations (RBOs) like ZAMCOM and the new INMACOM in the Incomati Basin.

“It provides an alternative channel for stakeholders to then provide their voices or their perspectives at the RBO. And this is really key, because you could think of many scenarios in which stakeholders within a country might have different interests, yet a national government is responsible for representing them. Or there could be similar situations where stakeholders in different countries have similar interests.”

A design for the Incomati

Dominic Joaquim from Eduardo Mondlane University laid out the plans for the Incomati Basin MSP, starting with the question of who the stakeholders are. “From the work done in Eswatini and Mozambique – it’s still under course in South Africa – we saw that agriculture is the primary development sector,” he said, “but we as well have to look into reservoir storage dams – some are being built and they will change how water is allocated or distributed. Industries – we have economic zones in South Africa and we have big sugarcane plantations in Mozambique. And we have as well the domestic water supply – you cannot forget that people need water to drink, and in Maputo City in particular water supply is dependent on Incomati waters.”

“We want our stakeholders to go to a place and meet, discuss, deliberate,” Joaquim continued. That place, and the directorship, will rotate among the countries every two years to ensure that “no one is a protagonist for a long time.” Funding from a new Global Environment Facility project will enable the face-to-face meetings, and the MSP will conduct stakeholder engagement and assessment reports in each two-year cycle.

Breathing space and creativity needed

The webinar then moved to a panel discussion that included two of the organizations giving inspiration to the Incomati – ZAMCOM and the Nile Basin Discourse.

Eng. Sylvester Matemu from the semi-autonomous Nile Basin Discourse emphasized the need for any platform’s independence. “The intergovernmental approach with the bureaucratic processes sometimes gives no breathing space for the stakeholders, in particular the grassroots level,” he said. “You cannot have divergent kinds of ideas out of what has been prepared by the national government. So you need whistleblowers, independent stakeholders that really may come and say, ‘you plan this way but I think the priority for us is this one’.”

Leonissah Munjoma from ZAMCOM joined what became an in-depth discussion on the tricky issue of financing for MSPs. “There’s need to be creative, you know, when it comes to funding these MSPs to ensure that they are sustained,” she said. ZAMCOM has pieced together stakeholder meeting funds from its own workplan budget, partner co-financing, and stakeholder consultation funds incorporated into projects wherever possible. “So we have a budget, which has reduced over the years as the countries are also institutionalizing the stakeholder coordination committees,” she concluded.

MSP expert Loreen Katiyo from Global Water Platform Southern Africa emphasized the possibility of building semi-autonomous models that can seek other funding streams. “When you cannot find resources within programs and from the member states, for whatever prevailing reasons which may be global, regional, or national, that semi-autonomy aspect becomes very useful,” she said. “Some of it is just still theoretical, like frameworks in terms of engaging the private sector and having them contribute meaningfully in the long-term sustainability of this platform. But it’s an opportunity, I think, if that perspective of thinking from a hybrid, semi-autonomous [MSP] is opened up and integrated.”

INMACOM’s own Buyani Fakudze provided the final remarks, reflecting not only on the webinar but on the story of what set INMACOM on this path. “We have had a budget for stakeholder engagement, and we felt as an RBO, we should tie it to creating awareness about the existence of INMACOM,” he recollected. “So we attend trade shows, symposiums, and things like that – but now, as we engage with multi users in those platforms, a lot of direct issues that affect them come up. For example, the issue of sand mining has affected the flows from South Africa into Mozambique, and the farmers in Mozambique are getting less and less water. And INMACOM with a stakeholder platform would be ideal to address such issues.”

These concrete issues are what make multistakeholder approaches worthwhile, and successful examples valuable. “It’s just to appreciate all these learning experiences,” Fakudze said. “These engagements have to continue as we try to solidify the work of setting up our MSP.”

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Learn more about all the webinars in the series on the NEXUS Gains Talks landing page and subscribe to the NEXUS Gains newsletter to be the first to hear about upcoming webinars.

This work was carried out under the CGIAR Initiative on NEXUS Gains, which is grateful for the support of CGIAR Trust Fund contributors: www.cgiar.org/funders

Header image: Incomati River in the Moamba area, Mozambique, 2009. Photo by John Hogg/World Bank.