This study is basically a desk-top review of the rights discourse in the context of water, based on academic and popular literature on rights and civil society initiatives as well as government documents regarding water and related subjects. The study has two broad motivations. Firstly, engagement with the idea of rights (and the right to water) helps to bring questions of social justice and equity to the forefront. Secondly, a study linking rights and water provides a bridge between different discourses (economics, legal pluralism, development studies, human rights, natural resource management) and different groups of actors (lawyers and activists dealing with human rights, social scientists dealing with the question of ‘development’), thereby opening up possibilities of synergies between them.

There are four parts to the study. The first part reviews the different rights-based concepts which are relevant to water: human rights, right to water, water rights, right to development, rights-based approach to development, and entitlements. This helps to clarify the distinctions between these different concepts and to understand what is at stake in each of them – for instance, for the role of the state, as well as for different dimensions of a right to water. Further, the debates that are found in different versions of rights, be it human rights or rights-based approaches or the right to development (the relative importance of legal versus non-legal aspects, the role of the state, the implications of power inequalities at various levels) are relevant to issues of water too. Rights could also be a useful strategic instrument, especially in negotiations with governments and donors. However, one must bear in mind the pitfalls of using over-simplified versions of rights. Finally, the discussion of rights, entitlements, and endowments gives a theoretical foundation for linking a rights-based framework to equity.