Water rights politics

With growing needs and decreasing supply of timely available, good-quality freshwater resources, water rights and water access have become a source of increasing conflict in many places of the world. In these water rights disputes conflicting water interest groups often have objectives that extend far beyond getting access to liquid water and water-based economic goods and products. And state administrations, in the same way, have other concerns than just ‘equity, sustainability and efficiency’ when intervening and allocating water to local user collectives. For instance, besides economic interests in either gaining control over the surplus produced by local communities or reshuffling water allocation to third parties, a fundamental interest that state agencies and other powerful water agents may have is political control over, and obedience by, local water user collectives, peasant communities and indigenous territories. ‘Rationalization of water control’ by standardizing local water management rules, rights, and rituals often is a basic strategy to achieve this objective. It is common to find, across the globe, that local water control rules and

management arrangements, as they exist in farmer-controlled irrigation systems, indigenous territories or local village drinking water supply systems, are ignored by international policy plans, national legislation, and locally intervening companies or development projects. Even though normative diversity sets the stage and cultural plurality is the background-particularly but not exclusively in developing, formerly colonized countries-the modernist legal and policy models that are applied usually fail to address particularity and diversity. These positivist water models also fail to conceptualize water as a politi-

cally contested resource, and water control as being constituted by water rights arenas in which diverse actors with unequal clout confront and negotiate. In their approaches to bring about ‘democracy’, ‘sustainability’ and ‘justice’ the emphasis tends to be on ‘water rationality’ and ‘efficiency’, but this neglects the profound consideration of issues of power, context, veritable grassroots representation, local fairness perceptions and how genuinely to accommodate plural rights repertoires. Despite the last decade’s shift toward (neoliberal) downsizing of state water

bureaucracy, the formal governance institutes and policies-sustained by liberal discourses on user participation, management decentralization and the downscaling of water management to the lowest ‘appropriate level’—commonly

aim to strengthen, not weaken, their control over local water management. As I have shown elsewhere, water users’ inclusion in new, ‘rational forms of water management’, guided by ‘expert knowledge’, ‘modern water control techniques’ and ‘demand-driven hydro-policy models’ is fundamental to this control project (Boelens 2008a; cf. Bakker 2010; Zwarteveen 2006). At the same time, we can witness many occasions in which water user collectives and federations, rather than relying on new participatory slogans and decentralization policies, feel that they need to mobilize and confront such dominant water discourses and power structures if they are to be taken seriously in co-designing and monitoring practices of water control and distributive justice. Water rights politics can be studied in many ways, at different hydro-social

and political scales, considering different water use and management sectors, through diverse conceptual lenses and approaches, and with divergent standpoints and interests. In this chapter I will outline some key aspects of water rights politics and struggles, concentrating in particular on the divide and friction between modernist, official water law and policy regimes and contextbased, local water rights repertoires. Irrigation water rights and management will be the core focus. Though this particular water rights politics arena concentrates on the local-national scale interactions, the actual field of contention is much broader, involving multi-scalar interests and alliances. In the below section I detail the concepts of local water rights and legal

complexity. The third section illustrates some fundamental frictions among local, community rights-based rationalities and official, water market-oriented rights policies as they have been applied in the Andean Region. The fourth section elaborates on a conceptual framework to study water rights conflicts, and presents cases from diverse countries to illustrate the concepts used. Water rights struggles involve disputes over access to water resources as much as over the definition of water rules, the legitimacy of rule-making authority, and the discourses to naturalize particular water political and socionatural orders. Section five examines the ambivalence of efforts to bridge the gap between official and local water rights repertoires through policies of recognition, and the problematic politics of identity and disciplinary normalization that these entail. Water distributive and recognition policies generate and naturalize new subjects, rights categories, distributive rules and forms of legitimacy to which many user collectives fiercely object. As section six elaborates, their multiscalar resistance includes opposing current distributive inequalities and undemocratic forms of representation, challenging the rules of play and the very politics of truth and identity themselves. In the final section I reflect on how water rights, in terms of claims and definitions, become arms in a struggle for both recognition of diversity and redistributive justice.