Abstract
This paper contributes to the collection on institutional form versus function by looking at the opposite side of the conceptual equation: clear and formal property rights coupled to low credibility. Since colonial times the formal property rights of the means of agricultural production are clear in South Asian large-scale canal irrigation. However, legal entitlements to water are routinely violated, while canal irrigation exhibits a series of ‘performance problems’. Legally clearly and securely defined entitlements to water co-exist with unequal distribution in the Tungabhadra Left Bank Canal irrigation system in south India. Neither the formal institutions nor their insecurity or lack of clarity can explain the existing dynamics and functions of canal irrigation. This lack of analytical purchase derives both from the limitations of property-focused theory and from the inherent characteristics of canal irrigation. Critiques of reductionist approaches have provided a richer conceptual vocabulary, which emphasises the plurality of rights/entitlements as well as that of the causalities at work. Such critiques and the elaboration of alternative frameworks for analysis remain relevant as discourses and practices of ‘marketisation’ of water may be gaining relevance for canal irrigation (reform) in India.
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