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254 1 bbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbb 12 One important reason to embark upon the effort to compile this book was to bridge the felt gap between the analysis of water rights and the assumptions and practices of intervention. On the one hand, academic anthropologists criticize water professionals for overly simplifying the water world and for not recognizing its socioeconomic, cultural, and legal diversity. On the other, more intervention -oriented water professionals find detailed analyses of the existence of plural legal situations of little direct use for designing water management systems and policies. All chapters in this book combine, to a greater or lesser extent, academic curiosity with a commitment to change, thus providing testimony that legal pluralism is no longer a mere hobbyhorse of legal anthropologists . Even if not all the contributing authors explicitly engage with questions of change, all of them somehow relate to wider policy debates. Some chapters are clearly written from a wider concern with a law-related social or developmental problem, and engage in a critical analysis of the existence of plural legal conditions , without searching for ready-made solutions. Thus, the analyses by Bhushan Udas and Zwarteveen (chapter ), Getches (chapter ), and Roth (chapter ) contribute to deepening the understanding of the role of law and lawmaking in different settings. In contrast, van Koppen and Jha (chapter ), Bruns (chapter ), and Meinzen-Dick and Pradhan (chapter ) more directly address those who are in a position to implement or devise policies and laws. Van Koppen and Jha describe legally plural conditions in South Africa in the context of governmental efforts to create and implement socially more equitable water distribution policies and laws. Bruns’s chapter can be read as an attempt by a concerned social scientist to come to terms with the gaps and tensions between neoinstitutionalist and sociolegal approaches to water problems by using the concept of transaction costs. In a similar manner, Meinzen-Dick and Pradhan Water Rights and Legal Pluralism Beyond Analysis and Recognition MARGREET ZWARTEVEEN DIK ROTH RUTGERD BOELENS WATER RIGHTS AND LEGAL PLURALISM 255 embed their social concerns about equitable and just water allocation mechanisms in clear water policy terms and contexts. In this concluding chapter on legal pluralism and water control, we want to further address the question of the implications of insights about legal pluralism for water policy making and interventions. As we noted in the first chapter, translating academic insights about the coexistence of various legal and normative water frameworks into neat policy recipes carries with it the risk that legal pluralism may become yet another tool in support of basically centralist social engineering. This risk of simplification is intrinsic to the tension between scientific analysis for the sake of improving understanding and research work with an interventionist focus. Analyses belonging to the first group increasingly acknowledge complexity and contingency, and have come to accept the limits of manageability as a fact of life and as a basic starting point of further analysis. Such acceptance becomes more difficult for policymakers and higher-level water managers, whose legitimacy depends on their own and others’ trust in their regulating and managing powers, and in getting their plans to bring about progress and systematic improvements accepted. To make policies and laws, a degree of simplification is unavoidable. How simplifications come about, however , is not a given. Many chapters illustrate how specific legal and policy abstractions work to render specific interests or groups more visible than others, how the scope for planned change is often exaggerated, and how routes to alternative solutions are banned from (and at the same time also by) public and professional discourse. Acknowledgment of the existence of plural legal and normative conditions entails making sense of complex interactions between various normative and legal frameworks that are not easily amenable to forms of technical, social, and legal regulation. Roth (chapter ), for instance, shows how the norms, rules, and practices associated with the subak are difficult to marry with those associated with state-initiated WUAs. Indeed, the process of gaining acceptance and legitimacy for centrally devised rules and rights is likely to be full of tensions, often pitting the different parties against each other in long-winded negotiations and struggles. These take place within and through wider power differences that may either work against or in favor of legal intentions. Getches (chapter ) provides clear examples of the limited value of formal legal recognition and protection of the water security of Indians in the United States, if these are not backed up with political and economic power...

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