ABSTRACT
Water governance goes back some fi ve thousand years in history (Dellapenna and Gupta 2009). Water meets the fundamental human needs for drinking water and hygiene; and indirectly has contributed to human welfare through providing opportunities for settled agriculture and navigation. Hence, through history, societies have made their own rules to deal with water. The early civilizations that developed along the Indus, Nile, and the Tigris and Euphrates (Kornfeld 2009) developed systems of water management. Although the histories, geographies and politics in each river basin and water system are different, there have been many unifying forces that have led to common water laws in different parts of the world. These unifying forces include (a) the rise of civilizations (Kornfeld 2009); (b) the process by which religion spreads to different parts of the world (Naff 2009; Laster et al. 2009); (c) the role of conquests and colonizations (Cullet and Gupta 2009; Farias 2009; Kidd 2009; McCay and Marsden 2009; Van der Zaag 2009); (d) the process of legal codifi cation by the International Law Association; (e) the rise of epistemic communities; (f) and the spread of ideologies such as communism, environmentalism, capitalism etc. (Dellapenna and Gupta 2009).
