Water is becoming a scarce resource in many places. As access is threatened, communities seek to protect their rights to water. Water rights are negotiated within communities. However, they can also be negotiated between communities and others sharing water in river basins.

As competition for water rises, communities of water users become involved in negotiating access to water. Obtaining improvements to water supplies is an important motivator for many communities, particularly in rural areas. Another, perhaps stronger, motivation is the need to defend their rights to water against competing users.

Participatory and community-based approaches to the management of water and other natural resources are receiving increasing support in national and international policies. Involving communities offers many advantages, especially for the management of water in river basins and sub-basins containing many different user groups. In organising water management together, communities can make use of:

• local knowledge
• mutual trust
• everyday observation
• informal sanctions
• familiar ways of cooperating with each other and resolving conflicts.

Farmer-managed irrigation systems, community-built water supplies and many other local activities to develop and manage water and other natural resources have demonstrated the potential for local management. However, cooperation across wider areas, involving multiple communities and user groups who are often strangers to each other, create additional challenges. Furthermore, there is a danger that participatory and community-based approaches may romanticise and oversimplify the complexity of communities.

New research highlights the need for more realistic assumptions. Community-based approaches must address diversity and conflict within communities, large differences in knowledge and power, cross-cutting social and economic ties to the wider world and the need for institutional improvisation. Researchers studying the management of common property resources (such as irrigation systems, forests and fisheries) have synthesised useful principles for designing sustainable institutions. However, these principles may be misleading, unless adapted to the specific context of each different community and river basin.

Outsiders, such as non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and government agencies, can provide useful assistance to help communities defend their rights to water, for example through legal empowerment, participatory planning and technical advice.

From a community perspective, such assistance will be most effective if it responds to community priorities for:

• accommodating local practices and resource rights, for example through laws and policies that recognise and secure local rights, without forcing formal registration
• representation in key decisions, for example inclusion in decisions about drought response and planning of new projects such as urban water supply expansion
• expanding access to technical and legal information, for example through training for community members to act as ‘paralegals’, funding for legal aid and improved availability of hydrological information and expert support
• communicating and forming networks with allies, for example coalitions of groups to fight for protection of rivers and watersheds within specific problem regions, or to advocate their interests in national debates about legislation that threatens local rights to water
• obtaining meaningful solutions for infringement of rights, for example through improving the capacity of local officials to mediate disputes
• forming effective forums for conflict resolution at the sub-basin and basin level.

Source(s):
‘Community-Based Principles for Negotiating Water Rights: Some Conjectures on Assumptions and Priorities’, Paper read at the International workshop on African Water Laws: Plural Legislative Frameworks for Rural Water Management in Africa, at Gauteng, South Africa, 26 -28 January 2005 Full document.
A revised version of this paper will be published as ‘Community priorities for water rights: Conjectures on assumptions, principles, and programs’ in ‘Community-Based Water Law and Water Resource Management Reform in Developing Countries.’ (forthcoming 2006, CABI) and will be available from: Full document.

Funded by: Self funded

id21 Research Highlight: 23 November 2005

Further Information:
Bryan Bruns
PO Box 4614
Santa Rosa Beach
Florida, 32459
USA

Contact the contributor: BryanBruns@BryanBruns.com

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