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1 1 bbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbb Since the s, water problems have been high on national and international policy agendas. Climate change, population growth, urbanization, industrialization , and intensification of agriculture are putting increasing pressures on the resource (see Gleick et al. ; Gupta ; Petrella ). Growing scarcity, overexploitation, and pollution coincide with an ever-increasing demand, leading to competition for resource control between people, sectors, and countries. Unavoidably, these trends have generated sociopolitical tensions and conflicts between users at various levels. They also prompt the call for new approaches to water governance and management that are adapted to the changing use conditions of the resource in a rapidly changing world. Especially during the last decade, water policy discourse has become truly global (see Brans et al. ; Cosgrove and Rijsberman ). Problems increasingly tend to be framed and phrased in global terms, and standardized solutions are promoted that are assumed to have general and global applicability. In the field of irrigation, for instance, a global discourse of irrigation sector reforms characterized by “model” and “tool-box” approaches has become hegemonic.1 In water management in a more general sense, characterized by competition between multiple uses and users, the common wisdom treats as givens the river basin as a “natural” management unit and the treatment of water as an economic good. It is assumed that the formulation and enforcement of national legal frameworks will facilitate a uniform implementation of such policy principles , and thus provide backing to the water reform process. Yet these standardized approaches face a fundamental criticism: complex problems require a more contextualized understanding (Donahue and Johnston ; Wester and Warner ). Rights-based approaches to problems of water scarcity attempt to construct water rights as a (globally defined) human right, but fail to provide Legal Complexity in the Analysis of Water Rights and Water Resources Management RUTGERD BOELENS MARGREET ZWARTEVEEN DIK ROTH 1 2 BOELENS, ZWARTEVEEN, AND ROTH an answer to more context-specific questions: what are the contents and meaning of a water right? For which uses and users, and under which circumstances, should such a right be defined? How can such rights be exerted and operationalized in specific societal contexts in which other, local definitions of water rights exist? (see F. and K. von Benda-Beckmann ). An important starting point of this book is that issues such as water scarcity and competition are not standard problems for which universally valid solutions can be formulated. Although partly attributable to the same causes, and although increasingly urgent in many places of the world, water problems are inherently local and context-specific in their manifestations. They are not simply reducible to natural and physical processes of water extraction and storage and do not follow universal economics or natural laws. Water control problems are both physical-ecological and human-made, the locally specific outcome of social and political histories and processes. In order to be effective at all, solutions to water-related problems framed in an increasingly global water policy discourse will have to be accepted and adopted in local settings of water use and water rights definitions. It is precisely in this field of tension between various levels of governance and management that water-related policy measures and interventions are contested, reinterpreted , and transformed under the influence of locally specific sociocultural normative systems and relations of power and control. This highlights the need for the contextualized study and analysis of water problems and for the formulation of context-specific solutions. These should pay attention to power relations , culturally defined meanings and patterns of resource use, and definitions of water rights (see Donahue and Johnston ). Law is one potentially important tool in regulating water allocation. The role of law in processes of water resources regulation has remained underexposed . In the fields of development studies and natural resource management, law tends to be treated rather one-dimensionally as an instrument of regulation that belongs exclusively to the state. In such views, state-made legal and institutional arrangements simply do their job: they generate the kind of societal changes they were designed for. More often than not, the crucial role of law and normative points of departure of policy making and water regulation remain hidden behind apparently neutral terms like “appropriate practices” or “efficient use.” Water rights and the legal dimensions of water use have long been treated either within the paradigm of state-defined and centralized water control , or within a market-focused neoliberal paradigm. A third, nowadays popular , current emphasizes the need for decentralized platform structures for negotiating local...

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