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Increasing scarcity, conflict, and environmental damage are critical features of the global water crisis. As governments, international organizations, NGOs, and corporations have tried to respond, Chilean water law has seemed an attractive alternative to older legislative and regulatory approaches. Boldly introduced in 1981, the Chilean model is the worlds leading example of a free market approach to water law, water rights, and water resource management. Despite more than a decade of international debate, however, a comprehensive, balanced account of the Chilean experience has been unavailable. Siren Song is an interdisciplinary analysis combining law, political economy, and geography. Carl Bauer places the Chilean model of water law in international context by reviewing the contemporary debate about water economics and policy reform. He follows with an account of the Chilean experience, drawing on primary and secondary sources in Spanish and English, including interviews with key people in Chile. He presents the debate about reforming the law after Chile‘s 1990 return to democratic government, as well as emerging views about how water markets have worked in practice. The resulting book provides insights about law, economics, and public policy within Chile and lessons for the countries around the world that are wrestling with the challenges of water policy reform.
"Water is not only a source of life and culture. It is also a source of power, conflicting interests and identity battles. Rights to materially access, culturally organize and politically control water resources are poorly understood by mainstream scientific approaches and hardly addressed by current normative frameworks. These issues become even more challenging when law and policy-makers and dominant power groups try to grasp, contain and handle them in multicultural societies. The struggles over the uses, meanings and appropriation of water are especially well-illustrated in Andean communities and local water systems of Peru, Chile, Ecuador, and Bolivia, as well as in Native American communities in south-western USA. The problem is that throughout history, these nation-states have attempted to 'civilize' and bring into the mainstream the different cultures and peoples within their borders instead of understanding 'context' and harnessing the strengths and potentials of diversity. This book examines the multi-scale struggles for cultural justice and socio-economic re-distribution that arise as Latin American communities and user federations seek access to water resources and decision-making power regarding their control and management. It is set in the dynamic context of unequal, globalizing power relations, politics of scale and identity, environmental encroachment and the increasing presence of extractive industries that are creating additional pressures on local livelihoods. While much of the focus of the book is on the Andean Region, a number of comparative chapters are also included. These address issues such as water rights and defence strategies in neighbouring countries and those of Native American people in the southern USA, as well as state reform and multi-culturalism across Latin and Native America and the use of international standards in struggles for indigenous water rights. This book shows that, against all odds, people are actively contesting neoliberal globalization and water power plays. In doing so, they construct new, hybrid water rights systems, livelihoods, cultures and hydro-political networks, and dynamically challenge the mainstream powers and politics."--Publisher's description.
Effective water governance capacity is the foundation of efficient management of water resources. Water governance reform processes must work towards building capacity in a cohesive and articulated approach that links national policies, laws and institutions, within an enabling environment that allows for their implementation. This guide shows how national water reform processes can deliver good water governance, by focussing on the principles and practice of reform. RULE guides managers and decision makers on a journey which provides an overview of what makes good law, policy and institutions, and the steps needed to build a coherent and fully operational water governance structure.
This book offers a detailed examination of the main sources of Chile’s water, its principle consumers, the gap between supply and demand, hydrological droughts, and future projected impacts of climate change. It describes, analyzes and evaluates the performance of water policies, laws and institutions, identifies the main challenges that Chile needs to face and derives lessons learnt from Chile’s reform experience. Expert contributors discuss such topics as Chile’s water policy, and the reasoning which explains its policy reform. The book presents and evaluates the performance of the legal and institutional framework of water resources. It also describes efforts to meet actual demands for water by augmenting supplies with groundwater management, waste water re-use and desalination and improve the state of water ecosystems. The last chapter presents the editor’s assessment and conclusions. The case of Chile is illustrative of a transition from command and control to market based management policies, where economic incentives play a significant role in water management.
"Rights to water are increasingly crucial and increasingly contested across theglobe. Urbanization, industrialization, environmental degradation, agriculturalintensification, rising per capita water use, increasing population, andother social, political, and economic transformations contribute to growing scarcity and demand for better management of water resources. In responding to these challenges, the world can draw on a rich heritage of institutions for regulating rights to water and resolving disputes, and a diversity of institutional arrangements that demonstrate great ingenuity in designing solutions to fit the conditions and priorities of various river basins. However, policy discussion in water management has often been impoverished by narrow polarization around a few idealized models of centrally integrated management or water commoditization, even though these comprise only a small and very incomplete subset of the institutional options available for effective management. The authors in this book expand the range of reflection and analysis of water rights reforms, offering insights aimed especially at those seeking practical pathways to improve equity, efficiency, and sustainability in access to water."
This volume is an analytical summary and a critical synthesis of research at the International Water Management Institute over the past decade under its evolving research paradigm known popularly as 'more crop per drop'. The research synthesized here covers the full range of issues falling in the larger canvas of water-food-health-environment interface. Besides its immediate role in sharing knowledge with the research, donor, and policy communities, this volume also has a larger purpose of promoting a new way of looking at the water issues within the broader development context of food, livelihood, health and environmental challenges. More crop per drop: Revisiting a research paradigm contrasts the acquired wisdom and fresh thinking on some of the most challenging water issues of our times. It describes new tools, approaches, and methodologies and also illustrates them with practical application both from a global perspective and within the local and regional contexts of Asia and Africa. Since this volume brings together all major research works of IWMI, including an almost exhaustive list of citations, in one single set of pages, it is very valuable not only as a reference material for researchers and students but also as a policy tool for decision-makers and development agencies.
In 2017 four rivers in Aotearoa New Zealand, India, and Colombia were given the status of legal persons, and there was a recent attempt to extend these rights to the Colorado River in the USA. Understanding the implications of creating legal rights for rivers is an urgent challenge for both water resource management and environmental law. Giving rivers legal rights means the law can see rivers as legal persons, thus creating new legal rights which can then be enforced. When rivers are legally people, does that encourage collaboration and partnership between humans and rivers, or establish rivers as another competitor for scarce resources? To assess what it means to give rivers legal rights and legal personality, this book examines the form and function of environmental water managers (EWMs). These organisations have legal personality, and have been active in water resource management for over two decades. EWMs operate by acquiring water rights from irrigators in rivers where there is insufficient water to maintain ecological health. EWMs can compete with farmers for access to water, but they can also strengthen collaboration between traditionally divergent users of the aquatic environment, such as environmentalists, recreational fishers, hunters, farmers, and hydropower. This book explores how EWMs use the opportunities created by giving nature legal rights, such as the ability to participate in markets, enter contracts, hold property, and enforce those rights in court. However, examination of the EWMs unearths a crucial and unexpected paradox: giving legal rights to nature may increase its legal power, but in doing so it can weaken community support for protecting the environment in the first place. The book develops a new conceptual framework to identify the multiple constructions of the environment in law, and how these constructions can interact to generate these unexpected outcomes. It explores EWMs in the USA and Australia as examples, and assesses the implications of creating legal rights for rivers for water governance. Lessons from the EWMs, as well as early lessons from the new ‘river persons,’ show how to use the law to improve river protection and how to begin to mitigate the problems of the paradox.