The growing attention to water rights inrecent years reflects the increasingscarcity and competition for this vitalresource. Because rights are at the heartof any water allocation system, they arealso critical for any reallocation. Notonly efficiency, but also fundamentalissues of equity are at stake. Tounderstand water rights requires goingbeyond formal statutory law (which may ormay not be followed), to look at the manybases for claiming water. Because of thevital nature of this resource, state law,religious law, customary law and localnorms all have something to say in definingwater rights. Delineating water rights isfurther complicated when we take intoconsideration multiple uses (irrigation,domestic, fishing, livestock, industries,etc.) as well as multiple users (differentvillages, groups of farmers in the head andtail, fishermen, cattle owners, etc.) ofthe resource. These overlapping uses bringin different government agencies, as wellas different sets of norms and rulesrelated to water. This paper provides a framework forexamining the statutory and customary waterrights of multiple users of water andapplies it in the Kirindi Oya irrigationsystem in Sri Lanka, based on amultidisciplinary study conducted in1997–1998. It demonstrates that thestakeholders of an irrigation system go farbeyond the owners and cultivators ofirrigated fields. These groups are notonly claimants on the ongoing management ofwater resource systems, but also need to beincluded in any considerations oftransferring water from irrigation to otheruses.
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Ruth Meinzen‐Dick (2001) studied this question.