ABSTRACT
While social participation may not be new rhetoric, it has resulted in a profusion of regulations and been associated with a wide variety of organizations in recent years. The water domain has been particularly drawn in, from user associations to international forums including river basin organizations, river contracts and rural and urban water conservation programmes. At the same time, water has long been the domain of conflicts ranging in scale from neighbourhood to international disputes, with increasing territorial, regional and river basin concerns. Given that society involves the co-existence of antagonistic interests, social participation, as shown in this book, is not only an institution-driven arena, but also includes many struggles to (re)organize society or, at least, to allow oneself to be heard. Consequently, two concepts can be distinguished: participation stricto sensu, meaning formal dialogue generally framed by regulation or policy, and participation sensu lato, meaning the embeddedness of participatory stages within political struggles.
