Agency in Regime Changes Dams, Development and Movements for Water Justice

Between activism and academic scholarship Structure-agency relations Theory-practice relations Social action and structural transformations

Regime changes Lower level of abstraction Involves institutions, relations between institutions and positions of social actors within institutions Institutions as complexes of laws  states and markets are complexes of laws  Regime changes and changes in legal infrastructures  Social actors and discourses about the law

Explorations ‘Law and ‘development’ discourses about water: Understanding agency in regime changes’ in Ramanathan, U, Philippe Cullet and Jessy Thomas: "Water Law at the Crossroads In India : National and International”: New Delhi: International Environmental Law Centre and Sage Publications: (forthcoming) (2009). “Liberal Theory, Human Rights and Water-Justice: Back to Square One?” which appears in LGD: Law, Social Justice and Global Development [2008 (1) Law, Social Justice & Global Development Journal (LGD). “The Prison Houses of Knowledge: Activist Scholarship And Revolution in the Era of “Globalisation” [McGill Journal of Education, forthcoming, 2009] “The ‘Rights’ Conundrum: Poverty of Philosophy amidst Poverty” ??

Five themes The importance of convergences in regimes and social structures  the common conceptual grounds that contestants share The moment of transformative change  Significance for the type of social transformation Importance of concepts and ideas of social agents in regime changes  Philosophies, world views The capacity of social agents to envision social the social whole  Understanding social institutions The socio-temporal lag between structure and agency, theory and practice  the moment of transcendence from understanding to action.

Neo liberal regime change in water sector Understanding two events in 1997  World Commission on large dams  UN International Convention on Transboundary Watercourses The transformative moment  WTO mandate to restructure institutional relationships The convergences  State vs market regulation binary  From being ‘citizen’ to becoming ‘stakeholders’

Neo-liberal change and social movements for water-justice Opposing liberalism in theory  Fukuyama and the critique of ‘liberal triumphalism’ Supporting liberalism in practice  The demands for human rights to water by water justice movements The convergence on human rights The transformative moment  UN Summit on Social Development in Copenhagen in 1995 – restructuring citizen-state relations ‘Fix it’ not ‘nix it’

Transcendence and human action: agenda for research  Recognising the limitations of institutional sites of knowledge production Who speaks for the subaltern?  The spatio-temporal lag Sites for transcendence?  Limitations of philosophical dualism Emancipation v social change