Water: Conflicts and Accommodation

This is a collection of case-studies on the sharing or allocation of water in certain areas or systems, the conflicts that arose, the kinds of accommodation that were arrived at and the manner in which (and the instrumentalities through which) these were arrived at. The cases are drawn from a number of different countries. The introductory chapter that precedes the case-study chapters and the concluding chapter that follows them go into theoretical issues about the relationship between formal, statutory law and customary law, ‘legal pluralism’, and so on, and also draw some practical conclusions from the experiences presented in the various cases. Theoretical discussions are also woven into some of the case narrations. While a detailed account of the different cases presented in chapters 2 to 13 cannot be given here, a broad overview may be in order.

The first case by Douglas Vermillion deals with two irrigation systems built by farmers in the 1970s in Northern Sulawesi (Indonesia), and shows how, starting from an area-related water allocation and proceeding through a process of trial and error, the two communities evolved a pattern of sharing and accommodation, based on some underlying considerations (“a justifying theory” to use the author’s term). In the Burkina Faso case, Barbara von Koppen gives an account of how a project for the improvement of productivity vested land and water rights exclusively in men ignoring the existing practices relating to rice cultivation and the role played by women; and how this was later modified to bring in women and their traditional role, “with better outcomes for productivity as well as equity”.