On the problem of the justification of river rights

Abstract

This article aims to work out the social conditions that determine whether the communication of river rights finds success in society. Employing the context of hydropower development in the Mekong region, the article finds that an essentialist strategy which claims that river rights have unlimited ‘moral’ validity regardless of any of the decision consequences is unlikely to succeed. Instead, it is proposed that moral conflicts over river rights may ultimately only be resolvable ‘unmorally’, that is, by procedural legitimacy – and this is best captured by employing a methodological framework composed of thematic, social and temporal dimensions.