Is Water Policy the New Water Law? Rethinking the Place of Law in Water Sector Reforms

Abstract

Water law and policy are in principle clearly distinct at the national and international levels. Theformer is binding while the latter is not. Yet, over the past two decades, the respective space of water lawand water policy has evolved to the point where the distinction between the two is sometimes sidelined.At the international level, the increasing pre-eminence of water policy is due in part to the absence ofbinding legal frameworks in various key areas of the water sector. This has led international watergovernance to be significantly different from other sectors. At the national level, reforms in the watersector over the past 20 years have often been heavily influenced by the non-binding international waterpolicy instruments. This article explores the trajectory of water law and water policy at the internationallevel and in India over the past two decades. It highlights the specificities of the water sector in this regardand some of the problems that arise when policy ends up either replacing law or as a frameworksuperseding law, thereby throwing out of gear most of the basic principles around which democratic legalorders are based.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 10 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.