Economic and Legal Pluralistic Approaches to Water Rights: Perspectives From Agricultural Drainage and Irrigation Systems in the United States and India

Property rights in natural resources and how they affect cooperation and collective action toward sustainable management of natural resources has been a key thread of scholarly inquiry for decades. However, a key knowledge gap is a comparison of different conceptual or theoretical approaches to the analysis of property rights. To fill this knowledge gap, we compare and contrast economic and legal pluralistic approaches to property rights to present a comparative review of studies on water rights in drainage and irrigation systems. In particular, we review studies on water rights in relation to managing agricultural drainage systems in the Western Lake Erie Basin (WLEB) region of Ohio, United States and water rights in relation to the warabandi irrigation system prevalent in North–West India. Our comparative review demonstrates that economic approaches to the analysis of property rights recognize the role of incentives in motivating or hindering collective action behaviors pertaining to natural resource management. In contrast, legal pluralistic approaches to property rights recognize their different bases of legitimacy. Overall, we find that whereas economic approaches focus on the relationship between property rights structures, incentives, behaviors and outcomes, legal pluralistic approaches focus on the co-existence of different systems of property rights with different bases of legitimacy and their relationship with each other. We conclude our review by presenting the implications of our findings for research and practice, including how our findings contribute to the theorization of collective action. This article is categorized under: Human Water > Rights to Water Human Water > Water Governance.