Re-politicising water governance: exploring water re-allocations in terms of justice

† Author names are in alphabetical order. The authors have equally contributed to this paper.

Abstract

Contemporary socio-economic transformations in South Asia are creating increasingly serious water problems (scarcity, flooding, pollution) and conflicts. Conflicts over water distribution, water-derived benefits, and risks often play out along axes of social differentiation like caste, wealth, and gender. Those with least power, rights, and voice suffer lack of access, exclusion, dispossession, and further marginalisation, resulting in livelihood insecurity or increased vulnerability to risks. In this paper we propose analysing these problems as problems of justice – problems of distribution, recognition, and political participation. Drawing on wider environmental justice approaches, a specific water justice focus needs to include both the specific characteristics of water as a resource and the access, rights, and equity dimensions of its control. We argue that recognising water problems as problems of justice requires a re-politicisation of water, as mainstream approaches to water resources, water governance, and legislation tend to normalise or naturalise their – basically political – distributional assumptions and implications. An interdisciplinary approach that sees water as simultaneously natural (material) and social is important here. We illustrate these conceptual and theoretical suggestions with evidence from India.

Keywords:

• water rights
• right to water
• justice
• environmental justice
• water justice
• water policy
• India

Notes

† Author names are in alphabetical order. The authors have equally contributed to this paper.

1. Shah (2003) speaks of “historically disadvantaged”.

2. The Indian water discourse uses “the right to water” rather than “water rights” (which is associated with tradability). As explained below, we see this as a very context-specific issue in terms of how rights are embedded and are expressed, how they interact and “work” (determining people's access to water, water security, and rights) in real life – both within specific localities (e.g. rural; urban) and across scales (e.g. urban/peri-urban; urban/rural).

3. For details, see Maharashtra Water Resources Regulatory Authority (2013).

4. For a detailed critique of the Maharashtra reforms, see Joy and Kulkarni (2010).

5. In this way entitlements and water rights are defined in the MWRRA Act 2010.

6. The participants of two national workshops organised by the Forum for Policy Dialogue in 2009 and 2010 agreed to this viewpoint.

7. For a further discussion, see Boelens and Zwarteveen (2005), Roth et al. (2005).

8. Water is often problematically categorised as, for instance, a “commons” or a “common resource”. First, actually these are often normative statements about the property status water should have in the eyes of the user of the term; second, such statements are restricted to the broad categorical level of its property status, and not related to actual social relationships, conditions, and practices of water use and control.

9. See also Mouffe's (1993) criticism of Rawls’ theory of justice. Mouffe notes that the focus in Rawls’ theory of justice on individual rights over the common good leads to a theory in which rights are defined prior to the common good. Mouffe, on the contrary, stresses that rights and justice can only be defined through political participation in a community, which creates a sense of rights and a conception of justice. Hence questions of justice can only be posed by starting from specific communities and their histories, traditions, social relationships, and meanings (Mouffe 1993).

10. Williams and Mawdsley also stress the importance, for an analysis of environmental justice in relation to processes of governance in India, of “a close examination of differences in the context in which struggles for environmental justice are located” (2006, p. 669).

11. A crucial difference between liberal theorists like Rawls and Miller on one hand, and Young and Fraser on the other is that the former, in their liberal search for perfect justice, assume and subsume recognition “within the distributive or procedural spheres of justice” (Schlosberg 2004, p. 520).

12. Micro-watershed is a hydro-geographical area form which the water drains out from a common exit point. It is usually of the size of 500–1000 ha. For a detailed discussion on watershed-based development programmes in India, see Joy and Paranjape (2004).

13. For a detailed discussion of the asymmetries in watershed and other ecosystem processes, see Lélé (2004) and Kerr et al. (2002).

14. See, for example, Joy et al. (2008).

15. Sneddon and Fox (2008a) show that this fear of the emergence of myriads of local and particularistic struggles is not always justified. The authors show for anti-dam struggles in Thailand and Mozambique that such “scale-making projects” transcend local and particularistic agendas.