Country Water Action: Asia
Irrigation Water Rights:
Options for Pro-Poor Reform
This paper was presented by Bryan Bruns at the Regional Workshop and Policy Roundable Discussion on Pro-Poor Intervention Strategies in Irrigated Agriculture in Asia1.
INTRODUCTION
- A farmer walking along an irrigation canal discovers it has been blocked by a small earthen checkdam, preventing water from reaching her fields downstream.
- Villagers find that the shallow wells on which they rely for drinking water have been dried up by mechanized tubewells that draw from deeper in the aquifer.
- Water users agree to take over management responsibilities, but later do not receive the supply that is supposed to be available at their intake.
- A new bottled water plant obtains a permit to abstract water, without any advance notice to the irrigators who depend on the same source to water their crops.
- Hydropower operators adjust reservoir releases to suit electricity demand, ignoring formal plans and regulatory requirements to provide stable flows.
- Basin water allocations are revised to favor urban needs, without consultation or compensation to irrigators.
All these situations can be looked at in terms of water rights, broadly defined as socially accepted and enforceable claims to water.
A simple question to ask is, if someone feels their rights to water have been denied, how can they seek justice? In too many cases, the answer is that there is no recourse. There, then, is a need to develop institutions where those who feel that their rights have been impaired can defend their access to water and resolve conflicts over water allocation.
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THE CHALLENGES
Local institutions for water allocation are often unsupported by national law. Customary rights may lack legal standing. Regulations on water rights are often incomplete, contradictory, and unenforced. Water users may have little knowledge of the laws and regulations that define formal water rights. Courts are often distant, distrusted, and take years or even decades to deliver verdicts that seem more linked to the ability of litigants to pay than to jurisprudence. Technical measurements of water flows may be nonexistent, secret, or so inaccurate as to be useless.
Deprivation of water in the tail-end reaches irrigation canals is a classic symptom used to diagnose the lack of effective institutions for resolving conflicts over water allocation. Pumping "races to the bottom" of groundwater aquifers further show how the poor may lose out if effective rates cannot be developed for sharing access to water resources.
Whether or not water rights are accepted as human rights only makes a difference if it affects how water users and governments regulate access to water. Issuing formal water licenses on paper matters little, unless licensees can defend their rights against infringement.
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WATER RIGHTS AND THE POOR
Water rights may offer a way for poor irrigators to protect their water from being stealthily stolen away by expanding cities. However, formalization of water rights may also expand opportunities for those who are wealthier, more powerful, and better connected to manipulate registration to serve their interests. In theory, and sometimes in practice, transferable water rights create opportunities for win-win transactions to voluntarily reallocate water to more productive uses. However, initiatives to introduce water markets are frequently challenged by critics concerned that poor farmers may be exploited and that water may be monopolized by corporations.
Water rights reform is no panacea. It may open a Pandora's box of potential problems. However, without changes in water allocation institutions, the even more likely outcome is that poor people may be further impoverished by losing out in competition over water.
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READ MORE
Fortunately, the Asian experience reveals a range of opportunities for pro-poor interventions to strengthen water rights. Read more.
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- Held on 25-27 August 2004; Colombo, Sri Lanka.
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