Abstract
This edition brings together issues of natural resources, social dynamics and complex policy challenges. The specific issues and the ways in which they are being addressed vary greatly around the world. While water law varies in response to the unique legal, social and ecological challnges of each jurisdiction, there are over-arching challenges to the effective use of the law. Water governance and legal scholarship can provide new insights into ways to address these universal challenges.
Highlights
There are many excellent journals that deal with legal doctrine and practice, policy and institutions, and with themes relevant to rural people and the rural context
Rural people encounter many of the same law and policy issues that challenge their urban counterparts: crime, the struggle for social justice, property and commercial transactions, and the pursuit of sustainability
Volatility in seasons and the sometimes-inexorable diminishment of the productivity of natural resources, and the impacts of the economic dynamics of commodity cycles are important underpinnings of the welfare of rural communities. Out of such features arise many law and policy issues that are vital to rural people but which may be of marginal interest to the majority population clustered in cities or close to cities
Summary
We have selected the topic ‘Water Law: Through the Lens of Conflict’ for the first journal edition because it brings together issues of natural resources, social dynamics and complex policy challenges: and because the specific issues and the ways in which they are being addressed vary so greatly around the world. The concept of Integrated Water Resource Management (IWRM) has increasingly informed the way in which water is managed Along with this has come a strong emphasis upon hydrology and economics as essential lenses through which to view water management issues and to propose water law reforms. Often this has come with an emphasis upon optimising or balancing economic and ecological interests, and in some cases with a predisposition to the use of the market as a principle tool of management These approaches offer many benefits but, as this the papers in this special edition, suggest, they are far from a panacea; they offer an incomplete and somewhat distorted view of the complexity of the issues.
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