Rules, Norms, and Injustice: A Cross-Cultural Study of Perceptions of Justice in Water Institutions

Abstract

Access to water is often inequitable, and perceived as unjust by stakeholders. Based on qualitative analysis of 135 ethnographic interviews in Bolivia, Fiji, Arizona, and New Zealand, we conduct a cross-cultural analysis to test for shared notions of justice in water institutions (i.e., rules, norms). A key finding is that institutional rules are a common concern in evaluations of justice, but institutional norms were prominent in justice evaluations only in the Bolivia site (where water access problems are most acute). Similarly, while concerns related to distributive and procedural justice were widely shared across community sites, interactional justice was only a salient concern in Bolivia. We propose that the study of water and other natural resource institutions will benefit from an expanded concept of environmental justice that includes interactional injustices and also a more explicit analytic focus on institutional norms, particularly for communities that face resource scarcity and less-developed economic conditions.

Keywords:

• Bolivia
• cross-cultural
• fairness
• Fiji
• institutions
• justice
• New Zealand
• norms
• United States
• water

Acknowledgments

We thank the in-country research directors, student researchers, and study participants who contributed their time to this research. The U.S. site research was funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) grant SES-0345945, Decision Center for a Desert City (DCDC), and NSF grant DEB-0423704, Central Arizona–Phoenix Long-Term Ecological Research. We received funding supporting the international research from the Arizona State University Late Lessons from Early History program. Any opinions, findings and conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the funding agencies.