Drawing on three years of interviews and work with a small-scale farming-activist group in Cape Town, South Africa, this book provides a close look at how working-class activism affected equality of water access during the 2017 – 2019 drought, and in turn sheds new light on efforts across the Global South to advance food sovereignty through agroecology.

This side of the story is completely lacking from other accounts of the drought, which rely too heavily on an administrative or technical perspective. Here Matthew Wingfield shows how a group of environmental activists used the drought to highlight their concerns over unequal access to water and the misuses of water for large companies and commercial farms. In so doing, he provides new, granular insights into the intersecting issues of land access, water access, and other kinds of natural resource use, and thus suggests some new directions applicable throughout the Global South for how working-class activism and small-scale farming can reorganize the connection between water and land in a country characterised by historical dispossession.

Matthew Wingfield is a research fellow at Stellenbosch University, South Africa. He has published in both peer-reviewed journals and public outlets on environmental justice, environmental activism, and political ecology.