Rethinking collaborative governance to enhance legitimacy co-production: a multipurpose rural–urban water transfer in Nepal

ABSTRACT

This study examines the Sundarijal Water Supply System in Nepal, which involves over a century of experience on a multipurpose water supply project. Research findings suggest that the liberal idea of justice as fairness in the distribution of risks and benefits fails to appreciate the political nature of state interventions to transfer rural water for urban municipal use. The research rejects the neoliberal idea of procedural justice as creating non-argumentative spaces for decision-making common in collaborative governance in favour of the political ecological approach to developing argumentative spaces to facilitate contested co-production of legitimacy.

KEYWORDS:

• Legitimacy co-production
• social justice
• contestation
• water policy
• Kathmandu
• Nepal

Acknowledgements

The authors thank two anonymous reviews and the editor for their constructive and insightful comments. They are grateful to the research participants in Nepal. They also thank the Institute for Social and Environmental Transition in Nepal (ISET-Nepal) and HELVATAS Swiss Intercooperation Nepal (HELVATAS Nepal) for their support during the fieldwork.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.1080/07900627.2023.2218492.

Additional information

Funding

The empirical data presented in this article are based on the first author’s doctoral dissertation research funded by the International Development Research Centre [IDRC Doctoral Research Award No. 107759-99906075-007].