Water Rights Reform: Lessons for Institutional Design

"Rights to water are increasingly crucial and increasingly contested across the globe. Urbanization, industrialization, environmental degradation, agricultural intensification, rising per capita water use, increasing population, and other 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."