Public survey

Public enquiry was accommodated by means of a survey that determined public preference with regard to the two development paths, as mentioned in Table 14, for the expanded decision-making context (see Figure 15). A conjoint-analysis based approach was followed (Alvarez-Farizo and Hanley, 2002:107-116; Belton and Stewart, 2002). This method collects and analyses individual preferences for goods and services (in this case it was a public good - bulk-water supply). The method assumes that each scheme may be described in terms of its characteristics or attributes to society and the natural environment and the extent to which respondents value the good or service (water scheme-services) depends on their valuation of the attributes of the good or service.

Survey questions may be asked in pairs or in the full-profile method. This study settled for a one-page full-profile presentation because of the obvious limitation of respondents to absorb a large volume of information. Just enough information was provided to enable respondents to display their preferences. This was done to keep the response rate as high as possible. The information

84 presented was, for the aforesaid reason, focused to indicate differences between the two development paths and not all strong and weak points of each development path.

Presenting a legitimate and objective view of a complex situation, in simple language, on one page, proved challenging. It was anticipated that the public would use the provided information to merely guide their preferences, as responses will be a function of the information provided and own personal perceptions and contexts. Once again, the transparency of the questionnaire development process became important with the key stakeholders and local government participating in the development of the questionnaires. It became clear that building public support for resource management policies without manipulating the public in a specific direction requires raising public awareness of resource problems and developing an understanding of the consequences of different management options (i.e. an educational challenge, particularly in environmental educational sciences).

A small pilot study was done in the towns of Stellenbosch and Paarl (see Figure 15) to verify that the questionnaire was easy to understand. Minor adjustments were subsequently made.

Budget limitations allowed for a stratified random sample of approximately 7000 postal questionnaires. Raw data (a database containing 607292 rows of information in respect of all registered water users in the CCT) for the urban areas was obtained from the CCT city engineers (Mostert, 2004; Muller, 2005). Since this was a postal survey, the rows were sorted by postal address, and all records without a postal address were deleted. The database was then sorted according to land-use, from where all non-residential uses, including schools, government buildings and industries were deleted. This was done because non-residential users do not pay according to a block tariff system and the voting power does not lie with them. The data was then sorted according to land value. All records comprising municipal property values lower than R50 000 were deleted because of the risk of the non-payment problem associated with such properties. All properties with municipal valuations above R3 000 0000 were also deleted because the assumption was made that these water users will probably pay their municipal accounts via debit order and will never question their water bill each month. Approximately 195630 data entries in 60 suburbs were left in the database after checking for duplicate records. Each suburb was extracted into a separate spreadsheet and was again sorted according to land value. A random number ranging between zero and the number of the particular suburb was allocated to each property. Each suburb was then sorted according to the random numbers in ascending order.

85 The rural areas in the expanded decision-making context (Figure 15) were handled in much the same way. Parts of the following district municipalities were included along with the CCT (see Table 15):

• West Coast

• Boland

• Overberg

However, not the whole of the above-mentioned district municipalities were included in the sample since not the whole of each area shares water resources with the CCT. Much effort went into matching the district municipal database with the secondary catchments in rural areas sharing with the CCT. Each local municipality (as indicated in Table 15) was approached to obtain their address lists. The initial database was significantly smaller with 79382 entries remaining after the data was cleaned and ordered in the same way as was the CCT data.

The budget limitation of approximately 7000 questionnaires allowed a 2.55 percent stratified sample of the 275012 data entries. Samples equal to the representative size of each suburb/region were drawn. A total of 7029 questionnaires went out to respondents in January 2005. The timing in terms of response rate of the survey was favourable because of a newly announced 20 percent water restriction in October 2004 in almost the whole BWMA. The media also played an important role in increasing public awareness regarding water scarcity in the region.

Each participant in the public survey received the following:

• A covering letter introducing the reason and aim of the survey;

• Background information and questionnaire on a single page;

• A return envelope to increase the response rate (see Annexure 2).

The postal survey did not test the ability of the public to provide suggestions for long-term water management but merely asked the public’s opinion regarding two legitimate long-term water resource management strategies for the BWMA (being the two development paths -see Table 14).

The public was confronted with key expected impacts/outcomes of the two developments paths broadly structured in terms of the same criteria as used in the expert survey (see Figure 16).

Respondents were merely asked to indicate their relative preference for each development path via a scoring system. The outcome of this survey was used to obtain an indication of the relative preferences of the public regarding long-term water management as well to compare the outcome of

86 the survey with expert estimations regarding public preferences. For results on the public survey, refer to Section 5.2.