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Re-politicising water governance:exploring water re-allocations in termsof justiceK.J. Joya, Seema Kulkarnia, Dik Rothb & Margreet Zwarteveenc

a Society for Promot ion Part icipat ive Ecosystem Management(SOPPECOM), Pune, Indiab Sociology of Development and Change Group, WageningenUniversity, Wageningen, The Netherlandsc Water Resources Management Group, Wageningen University,Wageningen, The NetherlandsPublished online: 06 Feb 2014.

To cite this article: K.J. Joy, Seema Kulkarni, Dik Roth & Margreet Zwarteveen , LocalEnvironment (2014): Re-polit icising water governance: exploring water re-allocat ions in termsof j ust ice, Local Environment : The Internat ional Journal of Just ice and Sustainabilit y, DOI:10.1080/ 13549839.2013.870542

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Re-politicising water governance: exploring water re-allocations

in terms of justice†

K.J. Joya, Seema Kulkarnia, Dik Rothb∗

and Margreet Zwarteveenc

aSociety for Promotion Participative Ecosystem Management (SOPPECOM), Pune, India;bSociology of Development and Change Group, Wageningen University, Wageningen, TheNetherlands; cWater Resources Management Group, Wageningen University, Wageningen,The Netherlands

(Received 17 December 2012; accepted 20 November 2013)

Contemporary socio-economic transformations in South Asia are creating increasinglyserious water problems (scarcity, flooding, pollution) and conflicts. Conflicts over waterdistribution, water-derived benefits, and risks often play out along axes of socialdifferentiation like caste, wealth, and gender. Those with least power, rights, andvoice suffer lack of access, exclusion, dispossession, and further marginalisation,resulting in livelihood insecurity or increased vulnerability to risks. In this paper wepropose analysing these problems as problems of justice – problems of distribution,recognition, and political participation. Drawing on wider environmental justiceapproaches, a specific water justice focus needs to include both the specificcharacteristics of water as a resource and the access, rights, and equity dimensions ofits control. We argue that recognising water problems as problems of justice requiresa re-politicisation of water, as mainstream approaches to water resources, watergovernance, and legislation tend to normalise or naturalise their – basically political– distributional assumptions and implications. An interdisciplinary approach that seeswater as simultaneously natural (material) and social is important here. We illustratethese conceptual and theoretical suggestions with evidence from India.

Keywords: water rights; right to water; justice; environmental justice; water justice;water policy; India

Introduction

Recent years have seen the emergence of a host of scientific research programmes, activist

initiatives, seminars, and publications focusing on “water justice”. Some are very specific

about its meaning. Davidson-Harden et al. (2007, p. 6), for instance, use water justice pri-

marily as a label for global movements in which citizens and NGOs join forces against the

water agendas of capitalist states and transnational corporations. We want to suggest a

different approach. Though we are supportive of most objectives of such social movements,

we propose using the term in a broader meaning, as a tool to analyse and understand the

implications of water (re-)allocations – often based on specific (re-)definitions of water

rights – provoked by a variety of processes of socio-environmental change, water

# 2014 Taylor & Francis

†Author names are in alphabetical order. The authors have equally contributed to this paper.∗Corresponding author. Email: dik.roth@wur.nl

Local Environment, 2014

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governance, and policies. This is necessary for a number of reasons: first, as we further

explain below, even if not explicitly phrased in terms of “water justice”, conceptions of

water rights and (in-)justice exist and develop wherever use of the resource is in some

way difficult and contested. Universal approaches of water justice will always find them-

selves in problematic interaction with such local conceptions. Second and related to the

first point, in policy discussions about water governance the distributional and allocational

assumptions and consequences of water development, knowledge, policies, and legislation

often remain implicit or are taken for granted, and are therefore seldom discussed. Water

problems tend to be approached as natural problems affecting all of us, whereas solutions

are “rendered technical” (Li 2007) or left to anonymous markets. The special issue of which

this paper is part therefore makes an informed plea for an explicit focus on how water and

the rights to it are distributed, showing how such distributions are differently justified by

different actors at different scales, with important consequences for access, rights, and

equity. Thus it makes a case for treating water problems as problems of justice.

The theme of water justice is extremely important. Although it is widely acknowledged

that competition over water is increasing, in the wider field of studies on water resources

there is little explicit scholarly attention to how this plays out in practice. Hence, relatively

little is known about the precise socio-political and legal processes or mechanisms that

shape how specific (groups of) people gain, maintain, or lose access to water or control

of its allocation, and how vulnerabilities to water-related risks are distributed across differ-

ent (groups of) people. In India, such issues tend to play out along historically embedded

inequalities1 and the resultant power relations in terms of class, caste, and patriarchy.

Water interventions (e.g. involving reforms, technologies, markets) are socio-environ-

mental processes that, by changing existing water flows, create new patterns and mechan-

isms of access, establish new rights, forms of marginalisation and in-/exclusion, and thus

new constellations of winners and losers (Swyngedouw and Heynen 2003). Contestation

and conflict are inextricably related to these processes. These may concern direct physical

control of the resource (water); the rules and laws that govern its allocation, use and man-

agement; the authority and power to define, decide upon, and enforce such rules; or the dis-

courses used to make sense of water rights, policies, and interventions (Boelens and

Zwarteveen 2005, Zwarteveen et al. 2005).

Using examples from India, and especially from Odisha and Maharashtra, we suggest

that many of today’s water reallocations can be understood as part of broader processes of

capitalist transformation that occur in a context of globalisation and neoliberalism. Without

wanting to suggest that there are no non- or pre-capitalist water injustices, this suggestion

reflects our concern that neo-liberalist economic language and logic have become so domi-

nant in talking and thinking about water that it has become difficult to see and recognise it

for what it is: an ideology or belief rather than a (natural or economic) law or a necessity

(see Boelens and Zwarteveen 2005, Ahlers and Zwarteveen 2009, Achterhuis et al.

2010). As we explain in the following section, in India the rapid pace of economic

growth happens partly through an equally rapid capitalisation of nature, increasingly prior-

itising allocation of water resources to industries and private companies, at the expense of,

for instance, rural agricultural users. This process is actively supported and facilitated by the

state, among others, through its attempts to uniformise and privatise water rights. This trend

towards uniformity in a domain characterised by local and regional diversity can also be

seen in water law reforms (Cullet et al. 2010a). After sketching this Indian context of

water re-allocations and injustices, we propose some useful conceptual tools for disentan-

gling and understanding water re-allocations in terms of (in)justice, not only in processes of

privatisation but also in other cases where water revaluations, reforms, reallocations, and

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changes in water governance are taking place. Approaching water from a broad framework

of control, distribution, rights,2 and access, we first argue for the need to “repoliticise” water

debates as a necessary first step towards a more explicit discussion of water in terms of

justice (third section). We continue by proposing a specific conceptualisation of water

justice, drawing on a particular ontology of water and on insights from more general

justice and environmental justice approaches. A central theme in these is how to reconcile

(recognition of) the intrinsic localness of all definitions of justice with the desire for more

universal and overarching normative frameworks. We end this paper with a short

conclusion.

Water re-allocations in India as forms of accumulation by dispossession

Water inequalities, inequities, and injustices in India have always existed, with huge

extremes between the water-rich and the water-poor across class, caste, and gender,

across regions and between cities and rural areas. Indeed, access to water in India is impor-

tantly shaped by the social group one belongs to. Class, caste, gender, tribe, and ethnicity

form the basis of power relations that co-determine access to water and other resources.

These socio-historical inequities are mapped onto the spatial and locational inequalities

that relate to the biophysical characteristics of water and the spatial units around which

water is harvested, stored, used, and managed.

For irrigation, inequities show in how irrigation facilities (often constructed with public

funds) are regionally concentrated, with vast areas remaining without access to irrigation. It

is striking that in the 170 most backward districts of the country, rain-fed agriculture is prac-

tised (Government of India 2008). Making water available for agriculture – and therefore

the creation of wealth – is thus often limited to areas that are favoured because of a con-

tingent combination of environmental and political factors. Even in cases where partici-

pation, empowerment, and considerations of procedural and distributive justice seem to

be well-anchored in water resources guidelines, policies, and programmes, the reality of

interventions is often quite different. As Venot and Clement (2013) show for watershed

development interventions in India, such concerns tend to play second fiddle to exploita-

tion- and production-oriented biases with limited downward accountability and a high sus-

ceptibility to elite capture. Such interventions are primarily framed as apolitical and

technical, and characterised by a primarily “managerial” drive; such at the expense of

justice concerns (Venot and Clement 2013).

In drinking water there are also huge inequities: more and more rural villages are

running out of water, implying that women have to travel ever longer distances in search

of it (Joy and Paranjape 2005). However, although by no means new, there is reason to

fear that existing inequities are worsening and new ones emerging. This can be attributed

to what many concerned with water in India call a water crisis. This crisis is largely the

result of growing demands, but also provoked by unsustainable water use and irrigation

practices – leading to the depletion of groundwater, salinisation, arsenic poisoning, and

increases in fluoride levels – which causes reductions in available supplies. Growing

demands and unsustainable practices are themselves part of the larger socio-economic

transformations that India is currently experiencing, which among others lead to massive

re-allocations of water from agriculture to cities and industries.

Current questions of water (in-)justice can therefore not be dissociated from these wider

changes. In India, the preoccupation with growth rates of 10–11% annually, in combination

with economic reforms (liberalisation, privatisation, globalisation) from the 1990s onwards,

have resulted in a developmental pathway of increasing industrialisation and urbanisation.

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The resulting rapid economic growth goes accompanied with a booming middle class, sky-

rocketing the demand for food, consumer products, and services. Impressive growth in

some regions and sectors is connected to, and happens simultaneously with, stagnancy in

other regions and sectors. Agriculture, once the backbone of the economy, now only con-

tributes 25% to the national GDP, while 75% of the population depends on it. Official

accounts of decreases in poverty and overall improvements in wealth are increasingly coun-

tered by statistics that break down the averages to show that there are large and growing

categories of the Indian population, especially in rural areas, who do not benefit from econ-

omic growth (Aiyer 2007).

That growth does not benefit everyone equally is importantly manifested in how water

resources are exploited. Water (re)allocations from agriculture to industry and cities leave

some with less water, which is why the number of water-related conflicts in India has

increased in the last decade (Joy et al. 2008). Almost every dam and reservoir originally

built for irrigation is now used to also meet urban-industrial demands. In Odisha, the

Hirakud dam is now in the centre of such a conflict. Faced with a shrinking water

supply, farmers are opposing water diversion from the dam to industry (Choudhury et al.

2012). The Hetawane dam in Maharashtra is another site of such farmers’ resistance.

Rather than accepting reallocations as an ultimately beneficial by-effect of an evolutionary

and inevitable process of demographic and economic growth, we think they – and the

model of growth that justifies them – need to be questioned.

Theories about the capitalisation of nature (O’Connor 1994) and accumulation by dis-

possession (Harvey 2003 see also Glassman 2006) are useful here. Accumulation by dis-

possession consists of the commodification of goods that were not seen as part of the

market before, because of the needs of capital to find new avenues for investment, to

keep reproducing and therefore growing (and accumulating) (Harvey 2003). Once goods

are integrated into the capitalist system, or released into the market, they are capitalised,

can be traded, and generate benefits to those who own or accumulate them and speculate

in them. Water is one such good, which thus becomes capitalised or appropriated for capi-

talist production, a process which happens at material as well as discursive levels

(O’Connor 1994, Ahlers 2009). Water, however, also resists capitalisation and commodifi-

cation because of its peculiarities as a natural resource (see below). In Harvey’s terms,

current reallocations of resources can be seen as a new round of enclosure of the

commons, referring to processes of dispossession of resources that release labour, land,

and water at very low cost.

Though current water reforms and re-allocations in India are blurred, messy, and full of

contradictions, the concentration of land and water rights in the hands of ever fewer owners

does suggest that forms of dispossession that result in releasing cheap land, water, and

labour to private entrepreneurs and investors are happening. This shows, for instance, in

a much faster expansion of irrigated area on larger-sized farms than on small and marginal

farms (Vaidyanathan 2007), and in a concentration of water use in ever smaller areas. A

recent study in Maharashtra shows this for two locations: Waghad and Kukdi. It indicates

that only 10–20% of the original command area is irrigated while the per-hectare use

exceeds the entitlements worked out by the Maharashtra Water Resources Regulatory Auth-

ority (MWRRA).3 Other recent research in Maharashtra shows that the High Power Com-

mittee of Ministers set up by the government in 2003 has transferred 1500 million m3 of

irrigation water to industrial and urban uses. This is equivalent to denying irrigation

water to about 300,000 hectares of land and denying livelihoods to thousands of people

who are dependent on this land for their livelihoods (Prayas 2010). How these disposses-

sions are feeding new forms of capitalist accumulation remains a question, but it is clear

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that they are predicated upon conceiving water as a commodity that needs to be inserted into

“rational calculus of production and exchange” (Baudrillard 1981, p. 188, cited in

O’Connor 1994).

The state plays a crucial role in backing and facilitating these processes, as it is respon-

sible for modifying regulations or legal frames and institutions, favouring, privileging, and

even promoting such forms of capitalist accumulation as forms of economic growth, pro-

gress, and development. The state for instance actively steps in to appropriate land- and

water resources for the benefit of cities and industry. For land this is more directly

visible than for water, but every time an allocation is made that transfers water from

rural areas and farmers to urban areas and industry, dispossession is taking place. Indeed,

these reallocations can even be understood as forms of water grabbing, supported by

new powerful coalitions of interests (Wagle et al. 2012).

State-supported forms of dispossession also happen through changes in the prioritisa-

tion of water uses. Until about the year 2000 national and state-level policies gave first pri-

ority to drinking and domestic uses, followed by agriculture and industry in that order. The

Maharashtra State Water Policy of 2003 for the first time reversed this order, giving industry

second and agriculture third priority. This reversal is in support of the increasing diversions

of irrigation water to industries and urban uses. However, because of recent civil society

action, the Government of Maharashtra was forced to restore the second priority to agricul-

ture. Wagle et al. (2012) even suggest that a degree of confusion and obscurity in water allo-

cation policies might well be intentional and functional in facilitating water reallocations

and “grabs”, serving new coalitions of powerful interest in Maharashtra.

What perhaps makes it difficult to recognise these water re-allocations as forms of dis-

possession is that they do not happen through brute coercion or the use of extra-economic

force and methods. As noted, the modern Indian state justifies water re-allocations by using

some notion of public good or by presenting them as the only desirable road to development

and well-being for all. Reform agendas that support processes of neoliberalisation provide

an important source of inspiration here. As Cullet et al. (2010b) conclude, the prominent

role of international financial institutions in the water sector has deeply influenced Indian

priorities in water reforms: cost recovery and efficiency, water rights, reduction of the

role of the state, and increase of the costs of provision (Cullet et al. 2010b). Indeed,

recent and current water policy reforms – most notably the National Water Policy of

2002 – clearly reflect a wider move to considering water an economic good: the emphasis

shifts from investments in public infrastructure to institutions and pricing, and the state

hands over many management responsibilities to local and private bodies. Attempts at con-

sensus-building through consultations and engagement with civil society are also central to

the state’s attempts to legitimise its policies. This explains the new-found popularity of par-

ticipatory or stakeholder processes around water policy and law-making.

Maharashtra seems to be leading the pack in ushering such reforms. Recent policy

initiatives inspired by the neoliberal water doctrine include the Maharashtra State Water

Policy (2003), the Maharashtra Management of Irrigation Systems by Farmers Act

(MMISF) (2005), and the MWRRA Act (2005). Interestingly and not coincidentally, the

birth of these policies and laws has coincided with a World Bank loan to Maharashtra as

part of its irrigation sector reforms: US$ 325 million for implementation of the Maharashtra

Water Sector Improvement Project. The loan is clearly intended to help launch Maharashtra

into the new neoliberal and globalised era. No wonder the World Bank has hailed these

reforms, especially its attempts at fixing entitlements and appointing independent water-

regulatory authorities (Briscoe and Malik 2006).4

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Indeed, the transferability and marketability of water form an important ingredient of

these neoliberal water reforms, hence their promotion of uniform and private water rights

(Rosegrant and Binswanger 1994, Briscoe 1996, World Bank 1996, Perry et al. 1997).

Though the Indian reform process does not advocate fully tradable water rights, re-defining

the system of rights and entitlements towards greater transferability is a central part. There

is mention of partial tradability of water rights, either within a particular use or across differ-

ent uses. The new policies only allow for entitlements or water rights to productive uses of

water, thereby denying domestic water uses and users some form of legal water security.

Also, reforms favour granting entitlements and water rights to landowning farmers – in pro-

portion to the land they own – in the service area of irrigation systems, thus excluding land-

less people.5 Similarly, the MMISFAct of 2005 states that, if part of the service area under a

Water Users’ Association (WUA) is taken up for contract farming, water entitlements

associated with that land also go to the people (mainly companies) who do the contract

farming. Thus, these reforms actively stimulate the concentration of entitlements and

water rights in the hands of those considered productive and economically efficient, dispos-

sessing those who do not meet these criteria of modernity (see Cullet et al. 2010a).

Water reforms, and the development model that informs them, do not go uncontested. In

addition to the conflicts around re-allocations from dams, civil society observers and acti-

vists in India are also developing a more general critique to the idea of making water allo-

cation (just) subject to market forces, or determining it on the basis of criteria of

productivity and efficiency, arguing instead that it should be based on needs. According

to these critics, water is not (just) a productive resource and commodity, but (also) a

public good. A plea for treating the right to water as a human right alongside other

human rights (e.g. food, housing) is an important part of their counter-proposal, based

on the argument that it is a state responsibility to provide a social minimum to all, irrespec-

tive of property rights.

Activists and civil society groups also argue for a re-conceptualisation of water prior-

itisation from the current proportional system to a sequential one. This would mean that,

unless a higher-order priority is met, water does not move to a lower-order priority. In

this way, water uses for drinking, cooking, washing, hygiene, sanitation, livestock, ecosys-

tem needs, and basic livelihoods could be prioritised sequentially. Other needs (e.g. hydro-

power, industrial, commercial, recreational) could be prioritised proportionally. The order

of prioritisation for the latter could be left to the respective basins or sub-basins.6

There are many more sites of contestation against water reforms, and creative engage-

ments with alternatives: struggles against dams (displacement, submergence); mass mobil-

isations for equitable distribution; innovative experiences in participatory irrigation

management that address concerns of equity, sustainability, and democratisation; struggles

against privatisation and water reallocations; stakeholder processes and conflict resolution

around water pollution; and innovative watershed development experiences. All of these

reflect the widespread plea for a more explicit commitment to equity, justice, and sustain-

able use in water entitlements and rights. Efforts to address and understand water justice

should creatively engage with these experiences to find pathways for restructuring the

water sector along more equitable, socially just, environmentally sustainable, and demo-

cratic lines.

Depoliticising and repoliticising water

Explicit discussion of water rights, equity, and justice is not easy in the water sector. Many

water studies and approaches to solving water problems are narrowly system- or

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intervention-oriented and supply-focused (Molden 2007, Lahiri-Dutt and Wasson 2008),

prioritising questions of efficiency over equity. This lack of attention to rights and justice

is also due to the disciplinary engineering and natural science tradition to which much

water resources expertise belongs and that is institutionally reproduced through educational

institutions, policies, and engineering practices. The positivist epistemic culture that charac-

terises this disciplinary tradition tends to hide the conscious decisions, agency, positionality,

and responsibility of professionals behind veils of objectivity, nurturing the belief in the

possibility of a transcendental access to reality. This culture also positively distinguishes

water professionalism from indigenous, layman’s, or traditional beliefs and knowledges.

Denying the connections between power and knowledge, it conceals that water interven-

tions imply choices and priorities about how water, water-related incomes, costs, and

risks should be allocated. Much water expertise, then, effectively works to provide scientific

justification for far-reaching water redistributions and reallocations, making these appear as

natural, inevitable, and as scientifically and technologically rational (cf. Donahue and John-

ston 1998).

In South Asia and elsewhere, the neoliberal language combines well with this positivist

one in abstracting water problems from their specific socio-political context. Thus, deeply

political choices related to distributional questions come to seem neutral or technical. This

happens through combined mechanisms of technification (rendering technical), naturalis-

ation, and universalisation. Below, we further explain each of these terms and processes.

By rendering technical (Li 2007, see Bakker 2010), complex and wicked problems

come to be framed as clearly bounded and researchable bits of a knowable and controllable

world, and thus become problems that can be solved by mobilising the right knowledge and

expertise. The intervention and engineering orientation of water expertise favours such an

approach, which is institutionally reproduced in water bureaucracies dedicated to a strong

hydraulic mission (see Molle et al. 2009). Hence, Li’s (2007, p. 8) observation that “ques-

tions that are rendered technical are simultaneously rendered non-political” clearly applies

to water, often leading to ignoring the centrality of allocation in water management pro-

cesses (Allan 2006, p. 41). “Rendering technical” effectively works to make water govern-

ance and management appear as uncontested, neutral, and natural processes isolated from

societal or political priorities, biases, and choices. An example in India (and elsewhere) is a

supply-side response to water scarcity issues, leading to “water resources development”

approaches, in which water is seen as a commodity that can be unproblematically exploited

by technical means (Iyer 2007). Moreover, the dominant economistic focus on efficiency of

allocation and distribution makes political issues like participation and recognition, which

receive increasing attention in the theorisation of (environmental) justice (Schlosberg 2004,

Fraser 2008, see Islar 2012, see also below), appear of marginal importance.

A second mechanism of depoliticisation is naturalisation, a well-known and much used

strategy to place contentious questions of distribution outside the domain of public delib-

eration and debate. To avoid critical questions or push certain agendas, water scarcity is

often presented as a natural problem rather than one of distribution or social relations of

power. Mehta (2007), for instance, has shown for the Kutch region in arid western India

how water scarcity became something naturalised and decontextualised from human

experience, thus serving as a meta-narrative to legitimise a politically contested large

dam project (the Sardar Sarovar Narmada project). Water scarcity obviously may have

absolute biophysical properties but is always also deeply mediated by humans and co-deter-

mined by power relationships that construct scarcity far beyond just the wickedness of

nature. Calls for using river basins as the natural unit for water management can likewise

be seen as a way to depoliticise water management through naturalisation. Such units

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tend to cut across the boundaries of a variety of political-administrative units, jurisdictions,

and other forms of socio-political organisation at various scale levels and with different

degrees of political clout to influence institutional processes at the river basin level.

However, the “natural” character of the latter provides it with a strong legitimacy, effec-

tively working to depoliticise issues of scale and power difference (Warner et al. 2008,

see Bakker 1999, Wester 2008).

A third mechanism of depoliticisation by abstracting water problems from specific con-

texts is by excessively framing them as global or universal. Referring to global water scar-

city depoliticises because it makes local social-ecological contexts and histories seem

unimportant (Donahue and Johnston 1998, Lahiri-Dutt and Wasson 2008). It creates the

impression that water problems are universal problems, affecting all of us equally. Simi-

larly, global water governance agendas or global debates about the right to water create

the impression that the water crisis is a global one. Thus Pahl-Wostl et al. (2008) stress

the need for “global water governance” for the “global water system”. This same mechan-

ism of universalisation occurs when universal solutions to water problems are proposed,

also with a depoliticising effect. As Molle (2008) argues, the use of “nirvana concepts”

like Integrated Water Resources Management simplifies complex problems into manage-

able bits, focusing on the consensual (e.g. multi-stakeholder approaches) and favouring

the role of specific forms of water expertise and interventions at the expense of others.

Important ingredients of global solutions that are currently popular include private property

rights and decentralised decision-making. The first, calling for universalisation and regis-

tration of water titles and the establishment of a universal right to water, discursively con-

structs all water users as equal. This renders invisible existing differences between water

users in terms of powers, authorities, identities, and cultures. It also erases sometimes

violent histories of appropriation and dispossession from official water memories and

records. The artificial uniformity that the universalisation of water rights creates may in

fact increase tenure insecurity for some by marginalising and excluding the non-equals

and turning water into a transferable commodity (Ahlers and Zwarteveen 2009). More gen-

erally, globalisation in the domain of law and the juridification of socio-political issues also

lead to a proliferation of new forms of law and governance, which may be less effective than

is often assumed, threaten the delineation and location of responsibilities and accountabil-

ities, and veil the fact that water governance is – and needs to be – socially and politically

negotiated at various levels of governance (see also von Benda-Beckmann et al. 2009).

On the face of it, decentralisation seems a more sympathetic and less controversial uni-

versal ingredient of global solutions to water problems. The reasons for wanting it,

however, vary widely. Farmer groups may want decentralisation to redress their historical

exclusion from decisions about water allocation. They demand a fair representation in water

policy-making processes, hoping to secure their own water rights. International lending

institutions and national governments often see decentralisation and privatisation of

water management as a means to reduce government spending and increase water use effi-

ciency. State agencies hope to increase tax revenues and improve jurisdiction. Commercial

water companies hope to be allowed to profitably exploit existing and new water infrastruc-

tures. These different reasons for wanting decentralisation show that it is not just neutral

administrative procedure, but that it is about power and interests. Differently positioned

actors who have different interests may struggle to shape the nature and direction of pro-

cesses of decentralisation to their favour (Boelens and Zwarteveen 2005), dilute, or even

block them (Ribot et al. 2006).

An important step towards effectively addressing questions of justice and equity in

water, therefore, is repoliticisation. With this, we do not advocate for water to become

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the object and instrument of political calculation even more than it is now already, also in

India (Iyer 2007). Instead, we propose bringing back into focus the basically political char-

acter of water management and control, a proposal we share with many political ecologists

(see Mollinga 2003, Mosse 2003, Loftus 2009) and, at the more general level of debates

about political processes in relation to democracy and justice, with political theorists

(e.g. Mouffe 1993). Repoliticising water implies understanding the complex social-

environmental processes and socio-political relationships that constitute and surround it.

It thus requires interdisciplinary approaches, which recognise that pressures on water

resources and resulting scarcities are the outcome of specific histories and practices of

water resource exploitation or development. It also requires critical awareness that water

problems are – at heart – problems of allocation. This also means that water rights and

the multiple ways in which rights are claimed, negotiated, defined, and contested are

central to an understanding of water justice (see Roth et al. 2005, Boelens et al. 2010).

Water resources: dynamic, contested, and fluid

Water, socionatures, and places

Water is crucial for life, the environment, livelihoods, and development. It differs from

other resources in that it is a fluid resource (Sneddon et al. 2002, Baviskar 2007). Its

use, control, and management usually require technology, institutions, and forms of

social and political organisation (Mosse 2003, Roth and Vincent 2012). Water thus uniquely

connects, and depends on, a variety of domains of life (Orlove and Caton 2010). Water

flows not only shape society, but also justify the emergence and existence of social and pol-

itical institutions involved in its control (Mosse 2003, Lahiri-Dutt and Wasson 2008), inex-

orably relating water to socio-political processes and to relationships of power and control.

The ways in which water is valued, used, controlled, and given meaning are related to

specific ecological, climatic, and geo-hydrological conditions which intertwine in complex

ways with socio-historical processes to coproduce “waterscapes” (see Baviskar 2007). This

term allows recognising how natural and social environments always co-constitute each

other, and is therefore useful “to explore the ways in which flows of water, power and

capital converge to produce uneven socio-ecological arrangements over space and time”

(Budds and Hinojosa 2012). Because of its flow characteristics, water transcends bound-

aries of political, jurisdictional, administrative, and other orders, and links spatial (and tem-

poral) scales to create “places” where it is valued, used, and given meaning in specific

contextualised ways, and where it relates to specific sources of social power (Sneddon

et al. 2002, Lahiri-Dutt and Wasson 2008) and cosmologies (Baviskar 2007). This not

only makes any generalisation about water as a form of property difficult, but it also

explains why water requires a localised and contextualised analysis and understanding of

how it is locally embedded (Mosse 2003, Boelens et al. 2010, Roth and Vincent 2012).

Rather than reducing water to either its economic properties as a scarce natural resource

or to its chemical or physical characteristics, understanding water as a problem of justice

requires a broad and interdisciplinary social-environmental understanding that recognises

both its materiality and its socio-political and cultural dimensions, as well as the relation-

ships between these (see Fontein 2008).

Conceiving water and society as co-constituted draws upon Science and Technology

Studies where vocabularies of hybridity are proposed by ANT (Actor Network Theory)

scholars (see Law and Hassard 1999), feminist science studies (Haraway 1991), and

approaches from political ecology and political geography. In addition to the already

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mentioned notion of waterscape, the concept of “socionatures” (Swyngedouw 1999, Bavis-

kar 2007, see Castree and Braun 2001) also captures this idea that human activity and the

biophysical interact to shape environments (or indeed places) that are dynamic and continu-

ously contested in a process that is constituted by, and simultaneously constitutes, the pol-

itical economy of access and control over resources (Haraway 1991, Harvey 1996,

Swyngedouw 1999, 2003).

Watershed development programmes in India provide one clear illustration of how the

social and the natural interact to co-create specific (re-)distributions of water. The water

these programmes create through upstream water conservation interventions mostly

benefits downstream people, those with land in the valley. In contrast, people who own

land in the upper reaches lose land because of water harvesting and conservation works,

and bans on open grazing. These asymmetries tend to map onto historical inequities,

often accentuating rather than attenuating these. There are two reasons for this: first, land

in the upper reaches is owned more by the poor, in the lower reaches by rich and upper-

caste people. Second, the water created by watershed development often becomes available

and is accessed as groundwater, which currently is private property and can be tapped much

better by the rich and the landed than by the rural poor, while the landless have no access at

all. These differences between downstream areas and upstream areas have been aptly

expressed as a relationship between “command areas” and “obey areas” (see e.g.

Thukral 1992).

Conceptualising water allocation and water rights: recognising plurality and context

As noted, recognising the justice dimensions of water management requires recognising

that it is largely about allocation. Sneddon and Fox usefully define water allocation in

river basins as “the contestations and collaborations among different actors seeking to

articulate, define, and advance – through discourses, policies, coercion, and other means

– a particular relationship between . . . human livelihood and economic activities and . . .

river basin processes involving hydrological and ecological dynamics” (2008b, p. 72).

Allocation is about how water (rights) is/are (to be) distributed, and therefore it tends to

be socially and politically contested. Policies and interventions always entail (re-)allo-

cations, thus raising important questions about issues of rights, access, equity, legitimacy,

and justice (see Sikor and Lund 2009).

In different parts of the world and various domains of use, water is valued, used,

managed, and controlled under a variety of institutional arrangements, which may be

expressed in both state- and non-state legal systems. Colonial and post-colonial state expan-

sion, development, globalisation, and commoditisation have established (new) state-defined

rights for strategic resources like water, putting increasing pressure on, or even replacing,

prior water rights. The resulting diversity and complexity of water rights is called legal plur-

alism (von Benda-Beckmann et al. 1997, Roth et al. 2005, Boelens et al. 2010). Contesta-

tions and conflicts related to water use and control are often caused by the fact that various

groups in society claim or define water rights in different, contradictory, and conflicting

ways. These entail different constructions of water as a resource to which rights can be

claimed and obligations are attached, different definitions of bundles of such rights and

obligations, as well as of social groups holding them (von Benda-Beckmann et al.

2006).7 Debates about, for instance, privatisation, public–private partnerships, or the

human right to water show the importance of attention to how water is turned into property

to which specific rights are attached, and what this means in terms of access and exclusion

by specific groups in society, especially where existing uses, rights, and forms of control are

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subject to changes (see Bakker 2010; for India, see Sangameshwaran 2007). Approaching

water use and control from this perspective has the advantage of showing how closely the

act of defining water as property is related to issues of legality and legitimacy, political auth-

ority and power (Sikor and Lund 2009).

For understanding the justice dimensions of water allocation, we prefer not to start from

universalising and normative conceptions of what water rights should be and how they

should be related to water policies and governance.8 Instead, we suggest there is merit in

taking the empirical diversity, complexity, and embeddedness of rights as the point of

departure for analysing the relationships between the multiple definitions of rights and gov-

ernance frameworks produced at various levels. Especially the growing importance of

global governance discourses (see above) and globally defined rights discourses (human

rights; indigenous rights; Castree 2004, von Benda-Beckmann et al. 2009) make it necess-

ary to also pay due attention to how local (or place-based) rights systems articulate with

other places and localities, producing specific distributional effects at different scales for

various (groups of) people.

The emergence of a global human right to water (Gleick 2007), for instance, pluralises

definitions of water rights, adding yet another normative-legal framework that increasingly

influences national policies, politics, and on-the-ground practices of water allocation and

provision. The specific distributional outcomes of articulations of local rights’ systems

with such global trends, discourses, and policies are difficult to predict. Referring to univer-

sal rights may help strengthen claims to water for those whose rights tend to go unheard. It

may provide marginalised groups with an additional tool to question unfair water allo-

cations, and demand their fair share (Athukorala and Rajepakse 2012). Many activist and

civil society groups in India and elsewhere struggle to have water recognised as a human

right and treated as a basic service to fulfil basic livelihood needs. They expect it to

provide legal protection and to help define a minimum water assurance that must be deliv-

ered at reasonable cost and dependability. Even without immediate enforcement, many

critical groups in India and elsewhere think that the sheer existence of such a right may

put pressure on governments to recognise their responsibilities for turning the right into tan-

gible benefits.

Yet, there are also dangers to this increasing reliance on universal and global rights’ fra-

meworks for justifying one’s claims. For one, these may strengthen unwarranted beliefs in

formalised legal solutions – a “fetishisation of law” (von Benda-Beckmann et al. 2009). At

the end of the day, who guarantees that the formulation of such a right will lead to improved

access for poor, disconnected people, and not take place at the expense of existing types of

water rights in, for instance, rural areas? New, universal definitions may also freeze

dynamic and flexible local and place-based principles by straitjacketing them into legal

formats and procedures, and thus (again) depoliticise water rights conflicts by bringing

them into the domain of expertise of legal engineers and water professionals. Finally, uni-

versal water rights frameworks tend to be operationalised in terms of per capita entitlements

to a specific quantity (and quality) of water rather than as socially embedded bundles of

rights and obligations (see von Benda-Beckmann and von Benda-Beckmann 2003). This

makes water again dangerously compatible with neoliberal agendas of privatisation and

commoditisation. This is why D’Souza (2008, p. 3) states that “this promise is informed

theoretically by liberalism and is conceptually problematic.”

Although pleas for the human right to water have now become mainstream (Bakker

2010), their possible consequences for place-based contents and definitions of water

rights remain understudied and under-theorised (see e.g. Khadka 2010), except in

approaches explicitly taking into account the diversity, complexity, and embeddedness of

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water rights (see von Benda-Beckmann and von Benda-Beckmann 2003). Moreover, as

with human rights more generally, how to locally translate or “vernacularise” (Merry

2006) such universal definitions of rights to make them socially acceptable and meaningful

in a diversity of real-life societies remains an open question. Suspicious of human rights

discourses as cultural practices that involve “technologies for fixing truth in universal

and legalistic forms” (Merry 2006, p. 229), Merry stresses the need for approaches that

are seen as legitimate locally as well as by audiences at other scale levels, that allow for

the recognition of specificity, diversity, and difference, but also enable the emergence of

a shared language of justice.

Justice, environmental justice, and water justice

Justice

The tension between locally specific and place-based definitions, and universal approaches

also characterises more general thinking about (environmental) justice (see McLean 2007).

Many theories of justice represent universalising transcendent approaches, disembedded

from human experiences of (in-)justices (Schlosberg 2004, Sen 2009). Based in and

shaped by a long history of liberal and utilitarian philosophies, such approaches are

marked by specific notions of freedom and choice, and by attempts to theorise on the

basis of an imagined “perfectly just” society (Mouffe 1993, Lauderdale 1998, Olson and

Sayer 2009, Sen 2009; see Walby 2011). Indeed, “most dominant theories focus on what

justice should be” (Lauderdale 1998, p. 5), rather than on understanding how diverse

people experience and define justice within a specific context, history, and time, or on

the effects of particular definitions on the distribution of wealth and authority in a society.

For developing our conceptualisation of water justice, we draw on Sen’s theory of

justice. In contrast to approaches that take individual notions of rights derived from univer-

sal principles of justice as their point of departure (e.g. Rawls’ theory of justice), Sen

emphasises the basically contextual character of justice, arguing that justice should not

be approached in a universalising and normative way, but with an open eye for human

situatedness, capabilities, and behaviour in real-life conditions.9 Sen stresses that con-

ceptions of (in-)justice can have plural grounds, and be based on different reasonings.

We underscore Sen’s plea for the need to shift away from abstract notions of justice

towards the more pragmatic question of how to reduce injustice and advance justice (see

also Schlosberg 2004). Concurring with Sen, we take the complexity and diversity of

water resources, their societal embeddedness, and the plural ways in which rights are

defined in various systems of water control as point of departure. This means moving

away from theories and universalistic notions of “should-be” justice to the realities of injus-

tice as experienced by the politically oppressed, the culturally discriminated, and the econ-

omically exploited, and relating them to local perceptions of equity and to more universal

and hegemonic discourses, constructs, and procedures of formal justice.

However, as Walby (2011) notes, the danger of the pragmatism of Sen’s work is its com-

patibility with a variety of agendas and purposes, including (neo-)liberal ones. Especially

his use of concepts of choice, capabilities, and functionings matches well with the liberal

tradition (Walby 2011). This tradition emphasises the connection between individual

freedom (vis-a-vis state control) and private property rights (or entitlements) and posits

these as key universal principles of humanity and human society. The freedom individuals

must have to pursue maximisation of their own interests is thus central. We think this is pro-

blematic, as it makes justice compatible with large economic and distribution inequalities

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and risks reducing it to a matter of individual merit. It also betrays an implicit liberal

humanism that we do not share: the assumption that all humans, at their core, are equal

and share a common capacity to reason. This position de-socialises society by negating his-

toric inequities and contemporary social struggles by maintaining that all people, given the

same chances and capabilities, can and do compete on a level playing field. We are more

sympathetic to a relational or contextual conceptualisation of personhood that suggests

that what the person is is always relative to the constructed relations in which he or she

exists and behaves. Such a relational conceptualisation is also more compatible with a

lived approach to justice, one that allows for plurality and embeddedness. Moreover, it is

one that allows for a political conception of justice, which acknowledges that public interest

is basically contested, and that there can never be a neutral and rationally derived, undis-

puted “final” conception of justice. Justice, according to Mouffe (1993, p. 53), is an “unre-

solved question” with which political communities have to cope in such a way as to

maintain their coherence. Rather than depoliticising such questions, societies should articu-

late them through forms of political association and collective participation in the public

sphere.

Environmental justice and water justice

Research and social action related to environmental justice originated in the 1980s in the

USA (Holifield 2001, Holifield et al. 2009). This early work was mainly concerned with

the distribution of the environmental burdens of problems like toxic waste disposal, with

race as the primary focus of analysis (Holifield et al. 2009, Walker 2009b). It was often

limited to seeking statistical substantiation of the linkages between space (in terms of proxi-

mity), inequality, and the politics of siting – assumed to be intentionally discriminatory

(Schroeder et al. 2008, Walker 2009b). These approaches tended to reduce issues of

environmental justice to reaching equitable, non-discriminatory distributions of such

environmental “bads”. With this bias towards the distributive side of environmental

justice, other dimensions – primarily procedural issues like recognition and participation

– remained neglected or poorly theorised (Schlosberg 2004, see Islar 2012).

As the concept travelled to other regions and times, it was given new meanings, in new

contexts and related to new issues, gradually resulting in more plural understandings of

environmental justice, based on forms of analysis that move back and forth between

social practices and theory (Walker 2009a, see Olson and Sayer 2009).10 Holifield

(2001), for instance, argues for more contextual understandings of environmental justice,

allowing for time and place-specific definitions by different actors experiencing (in-)justices

in various ways. The complex “geography of burdens/benefits” (Schroeder et al. 2008,

p. 551) thus became gradually better understood, with more attention not only to the

“bads” but also to the “goods” involved (see Holifield 2001). The larger questions of

“who gains, who loses?” gained a central place in environmental justice debates; questions

that also guide recent work on water resources by political ecologists and political

geographers.

For developing a conceptualisation of water justice, we draw on these more encompass-

ing distributional approaches which look at how processes of environmental change work

to re-allocate incomes, resources, and power. Schlosberg (2004, p. 518), following authors

like Fraser (2000, 2005), regards issues of distribution as “essential but incomplete” and

proposes a “trivalent conception of justice” (Schlosberg 2004, p. 521)11which also includes

dimensions of recognition (e.g. of specific cultural identities, rights, and practices) and par-

ticipation (in decision-making). According to Schlosberg (2004, p. 528), justice “requires

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not just an understanding of unjust distribution and a lack of recognition, but, importantly,

the way the two are tied together in political and social processes” (p. 528). Like Schlos-

berg, we think it is important to add dimensions of (cultural) recognition and procedural

democracy to this focus on (re-)distribution.

A last important insight is the realisation that environmental justice always has spatial,

scalar, and place dimensions. This is particularly relevant for water, primarily because of its

biophysical characteristics and the spatial boundaries that shape how water is harvested,

stored, used, and managed. Examples are the micro-watershed12 or the service area

(“command”; see also above) of an irrigation system. In both, location often determines

access to water. Spatiality and scale are also an issue between upstream and downstream

watersheds and communities, and within an entire river basin. As the relationship

between upstream and downstream is fundamentally asymmetric, the question of what con-

stitutes fair or unfair behaviour by upstream communities crops up immediately at all

scales: within the micro-watershed, across watersheds, and across the entire basin.13 Con-

flicts and contestations around access to water therefore need to be understood along the

spatial continuum of a river basin and beyond,14 where the manipulation of spaces and

scales may itself be an important political mechanism of creating (re-)distributions, and

therefore also of struggles for justice.

Moving from “the one-dimensional and simple distributional geography of proximity”

of first-generation approaches to environmental justice, later approaches gained a more

complete understanding of these spatial-scalar issues, like the politics, spatialities, and geo-

graphies of responsibility, (mis-)recognition, and participation (Walker 2009b, see Fraser

2008). Recognition of these dimensions of environmental justice usefully allows linking

them to wider social and political struggles about resources, places, and identities

(Walker 2009b, see Castree 2004, Schlosberg 2004). Walker concludes that forms and

scales of space are a strategic resource and that “just as ‘different groups will resort to differ-

ent conceptions of justice to bolster their position’ (Harvey 1996, p. 398), so will different

groups work with different understandings of the spatiality of the issues at hand (2009b,

p. 630)”.

As in debates about justice, for environmental justice there is also a tension between

localised and contextualised approaches, and more universalistic ones. Schlosberg (2004,

p. 518) pleads for a “locally grounded, theoretically broad, and plural” approach. Walker

also stresses the necessarily plural ways of understanding environmental justice, varying

between concerns and contexts, and depending on the significance of spatial relations,

and the nature of justice claims put forward (2009b). While we are wholeheartedly in

favour of a relative, situated, and scaled understanding of environmental justice, we also

think it is important to find common core issues that are able to transcend such localised

understandings (Walker 2009b, see Harvey 1996). Indeed, a plurality of localised “militant

particularisms” might contribute little to the emergence of broader forms of engagement for

social justice across the boundaries of such local struggles (Harvey 1996, Schlosberg 2004,

see Castree 2004, Sneddon and Fox 2008a).15 While plurality is a basic political condition

upon which rights can be debated and socially negotiated at all (Mouffe 1993), basic com-

monalities in the language of justice (Merry 2006) that respect plurality, difference, and

contestation might give justice movements more political clout.

Underscoring the ontological and theoretical necessity of recognising the multiplicity of

conceptualisations and understandings of (environmental) justice should not be read as a

sanctioning or even romanticising of local or traditional ways of life or “community”, of

organising livelihoods, and of managing natural resources and environments. Vigilance

is needed to how particular (interpretations of) localised definitions are or can be used

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for specific strategic or populist purposes, also to the detriment of others (Holifield 2001).

We agree here with Walker, who argues that an analysis of environmental justice should

make clear in what ways socio-environmental inequality actually matters for specific

groups and how injustice is produced. Also, acknowledging the importance of contextua-

lised and situated understandings does not imply that specific situated views of rights

and justice can be presumed to be clear-cut, uncontested, and fixed (see Williams and

Mawdsley 2006, Olson and Sayer 2009). As Olson and Sayer rightly note, radical norma-

tive positions often lack any justification beyond a political agenda, describe contested

values without systematically evaluating their normative content, or endorse specific nor-

mative positions “with little explicit engagement of internal contradictions or exclusionary

tendencies” (Olson and Sayer 2009, p. 183).

Conclusion

Taking India as an example, we have outlined an approach to water justice that takes as its

point of departure both the specific resource characteristics of water and the access and

rights dimensions of water control. The Indian examples suggest and illustrate that the

dynamics of current water re-allocations transcend state and national boundaries, in more

than one way. For one, they form an intrinsic and important dimension of globalising

markets for industrial products, food, and biofuels, with reliable and cheap access to

water playing an important role in decisions about where to produce and invest. This is

underpinned by an actively promoted international water governance agenda, which

preaches the allocation of water to where its marginal returns are highest and thus

favours “marketable” and “priceable” uses of water over those of which the benefits may

be less easily quantifiable in market terms. In India, this manifests itself most clearly in

the re-allocation of water that was used for producing food crops or for domestic uses to

industries and agro-export companies. Water expertise and policies tend to assess and

justify such re-allocations on grounds of efficiency, effectiveness, or productivity, rather

than on the basis of (anticipated) implications for social equity or justice. This is worrisome,

as the Indian examples of re-allocations and the intensification of conflicts suggest that

access to and control of water become increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few pri-

vileged actors – often those with the capacity to invest in technological means to access it,

to the detriment of many others. Exposing the water justice dimensions of current policies

and expertise requires, first of all, a re-politicisation of the water domain. Processes of natu-

ralisation, technification, and universalisaton all work to obscure the political nature of ana-

lyses of, and solutions to, water problems. Underlying valuations of water resources and

priorities for allocation become implicit, while the processes and mechanisms of water

appropriation and allocation appear as inevitable. Often the question how these processes

influence patterns of access and exclusion along axes of power difference and social differ-

entiation is not asked. Moreover, the policy emphasis on consensual solutions hides the fact

that water management and control are intrinsically contested processes that increasingly

involve conflicts about access and rights.

Our approach to water justice more specifically is based on an interdisciplinary analysis

of water as co-produced by societal and natural processes, something that can for instance

be expressed with the term “waterscapes”. We have argued that assessing whether water

(re-)allocations are just or not cannot be done from any neutral position, but requires identi-

fications and engagements that need to be made explicit. An example is the Forum for

Policy Dialogue on Water Conflicts in India (see Forum for Policy Dialogue on Water

Conflicts in India 2012), which develops a collective knowledge base grounded in actual

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conflicts and identifies with those who feel they are treated unjustly, to arrive at locally

specific approaches to bring about water justice. However, even though we are cautious

about globally defined and universal rights’ doctrines and discourses such as the recog-

nition of water as a global human right, we acknowledge that these may lend useful and

much-needed support to localised water struggles. In addition, the very existence of such

globalised proclamations of water rights requires attention to how they influence place-

based definitions and practices.

The plurality of definitions and conceptions of water rights, and of experiences of

(in-)justice, forms a useful and pragmatic starting point for place-based appreciations and

discussions about what water justice is or should be about. As argued by theorisations of

justice (e.g. Fraser 2000, 2005) and environmental justice (e.g. Schlosberg 2004, Walker

2009b) such discussions are not just about issues of distribution, but also about political

participation and recognition. Taking the existence of plurality as a starting point does

not mean, as Walker (2009a, 2009b) and Olson and Sayer (2009) have convincingly

argued, that local definitions of justice need to be celebrated, but it implies that these

provide the context against which to search for common ground at higher levels to trans-

cend Harvey’s “militant particularisms”. Seeing water control issues as basically political

is, in our opinion, a precondition for making the justice dimensions of distributions, partici-

pation, and recognition stand out.

Assessments of water justice are always scale- and place-sensitive, with justice at one

scale sometimes implying injustice at another. The Indian cases clearly show this: more

justice within cities, for instance, may be achieved by taking water from rural areas.

More economic revenues earned partly through allowing industries to intensively use

water may be achieved at the cost of food insecurity and hunger. The manipulations of

scales and spaces may itself be an important domain of justice struggles. This is also

why we caution against overly individualistic approaches to water justice, which link it

to individual freedoms or capabilities or risk, reducing it to questions of merit. Instead,

we suggest that justice is always deeply relational; it is about reaching agreement about

how (the costs and benefits of accessing) water is or should be shared between different

actors, or between people and the environment.

Notes

1. Shah (2003) speaks of “historically disadvantaged”.2. The Indian water discourse uses “the right to water” rather than “water rights” (which is associ-

ated with tradability). As explained below, we see this as a very context-specific issue in termsof how rights are embedded and are expressed, how they interact and “work” (determiningpeople’s access to water, water security, and rights) in real life – both within specific localities(e.g. rural; urban) and across scales (e.g. urban/peri-urban; urban/rural).

3. For details, see Maharashtra Water Resources Regulatory Authority (2013).4. For a detailed critique of the Maharashtra reforms, see Joy and Kulkarni (2010).5. In this way entitlements and water rights are defined in the MWRRA Act 2010.6. The participants of two national workshops organised by the Forum for Policy Dialogue in 2009

and 2010 agreed to this viewpoint.7. For a further discussion, see Boelens and Zwarteveen (2005), Roth et al. (2005).8. Water is often problematically categorised as, for instance, a “commons” or a “common

resource”. First, actually these are often normative statements about the property status watershould have in the eyes of the user of the term; second, such statements are restricted to thebroad categorical level of its property status, and not related to actual social relationships, con-ditions, and practices of water use and control.

9. See also Mouffe’s (1993) criticism of Rawls’ theory of justice. Mouffe notes that the focus inRawls’ theory of justice on individual rights over the common good leads to a theory in

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which rights are defined prior to the common good. Mouffe, on the contrary, stresses that rightsand justice can only be defined through political participation in a community, which creates asense of rights and a conception of justice. Hence questions of justice can only be posed by start-ing from specific communities and their histories, traditions, social relationships, and meanings(Mouffe 1993).

10. Williams and Mawdsley also stress the importance, for an analysis of environmental justice inrelation to processes of governance in India, of “a close examination of differences in the contextin which struggles for environmental justice are located” (2006, p. 669).

11. A crucial difference between liberal theorists like Rawls and Miller on one hand, and Young andFraser on the other is that the former, in their liberal search for perfect justice, assume andsubsume recognition “within the distributive or procedural spheres of justice” (Schlosberg2004, p. 520).

12. Micro-watershed is a hydro-geographical area form which the water drains out from a commonexit point. It is usually of the size of 500–1000 ha. For a detailed discussion on watershed-baseddevelopment programmes in India, see Joy and Paranjape (2004).

13. For a detailed discussion of the asymmetries in watershed and other ecosystem processes, seeLele (2004) and Kerr et al. (2002).

14. See, for example, Joy et al. (2008).15. Sneddon and Fox (2008a) show that this fear of the emergence of myriads of local and particu-

laristic struggles is not always justified. The authors show for anti-dam struggles in Thailandand Mozambique that such “scale-making projects” transcend local and particularistic agendas.

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