Regulating Water Scarcity : A Socio-Legal Perspective

This book will appeal to students, researchers, and others in the field of environmental regulation and water resources. It develops a distinct conceptual approach, anchored in interesting interview data, to understand evidence based legal regulation of water scarcity and drought. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.

Regulating water scarcity engages with a core challenge posed by a changing climate: how can we use legal rules to alleviate water scarcity and drought? Based on interview data, this book examines how managers of water resources – in water companies and environmental regulatory agencies in England and Wales – draw on distinct ideas of evidence when applying legal rules. The book develops its account of evidence as organization in the context of a critical analysis of academic literature about regulatory spaces, the co-production of law with science, Foucaultian ideas about information resources, and the 'rules of the game' that inform how organizations take actions. The book's approach to 'water law in action' includes a comparative perspective that introduces selected features of regulating water scarcity and drought in Australia, China, California and the Colorado river system, Germany and Spain. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.