The lack of sufficient access to clean water is a common problem faced by communities, efforts to alleviate poverty and gender inequality and improve economic growth in developing countries. While reforms have been implemented to manage water resources, these have taken little notice of how people use and manage their water and have had limited effect at the ground level. On the other hand, regulations developed within communities are livelihood-oriented and provide incentives for collective action but they can also be hierarchal, enforcing power and gender inequalities. This book shows how bringing together the strengths of community-based laws rooted in user participation and the formalized legal systems of the public sector, water management regimes will be more able to reach their goals.
Water policy makers, managers, researchers and field implementers.
1. Community-Based Water Law and Water Resources Management Reform in Developing Countries: Rationale, Contents and Key Messages
2. Understanding Legal Pluralism in Water and Land Rights: Lessons from Africa and Asia
3. Community Priorities for Water Rights: Some Conjectures on Assumptions, Principles and Programmes
4. Dispossession at the Interface of Community-Based Water Law and Permit Systems
5. Issues in Reforming Informal Water Economies of Low-Income Countries: Examples from India and Elsewhere
6. Legal Pluralism and the Politics of Inclusion, Recognition and Contestation of Local Water Rights in the Andes
7. Water Rights and Rules, and Management in Spate Irrigation Systems in Eritrea, Yemen and Pakistan
8. Local Institutions for Wetland Management in Ethiopia: Sustainability and State Intervention
9. Indigenous Systems of Conflict Resolution in Oromia, Ethiopia
10. Kenya's New Water Law: An Analysis of the Implications of Kenya's Water Act, 2002 for the Rural Poor
11. Coping with History and Hydrology: How Kenya's Settlement and Land Tenure Patterns Shape Contemporary Water Rights and Gender Relations in Water
12. Irrigation Management and Poverty Dynamics: Case Study of the Nyando Basin in Western Kenya
13. If Government Failed, How Are We to Succeed? The Importance of History and Context in Present-Day Irrigation Reform in Malawi
14. A Legal-Infrastructural Framework for Catchment Apportionment
15. Intersections of Law, Human Rights and Water Management in Zimbabwe: Implications for Rural Livelihoods
"...an important document that can serve as a blueprint and guide for national policymakers in developing countires, for concerned international agricultural development agencies, and for agricultural researchers, particularly those involved in water resources management and use."
Mabrouk A El-Skaway, Journal of Environmental Quality. Vo,l 37 Sept-Oct 2008