Republic of South Africa (1998). National Water Act, Act 36 of 1998. Pretoria: Government of South Africa.
South Africa’s post-apartheid water statute, and one of the most structurally advanced pieces of national water legislation drafted anywhere. The Act places all surface and groundwater in national trust under the custodianship of the Minister of Water Affairs and reserves first-priority allocation for two protected quantities: the Basic Human Needs Reserve, sufficient for basic human consumption, and the Ecological Reserve, the quantity and quality of water required to protect aquatic ecosystems and secure ecologically sustainable development and use of the water resource.
The Reserve is legally binding and takes precedence over all other allocations. Every water use in South Africa is licensed, and licensing operates within the residual after the Reserve has been provided for. Few national water regimes carry a comparable legally-binding ecological allocation.
The Act supplies the +I-form framing beneath both the Greater Cape Town Water Fund and the Cape Water Performance-Based Bond. It is what makes catchment restoration legible to state institutions as a Reserve-adjacent public good, and it is what enables performance-based instruments to settle against verified ecological outcomes without triggering constitutional conflict over private appropriation of a public trust asset.