Elevating water rights to human rights: Has it strengthened marginalized peoples´ claim for water?

Did the creation of a standalone international human right to clean, affordable, accessible drinking water and sanitation (HRtWS) by the UN in 2010 make a difference for marginalized peoples’ ability to realize their right to water? Access to clean drinking water is crucial since water is essential for all aspects of human life. Yet, access to clean affordable water remains a huge problem in many countries, especially for marginalized people in the Global South. More than 750 million people lack access to clean water, while 2.5 billion lack adequate sanitation, resulting in millions of avoidable deaths. The project has investigated the impact of the right on states' willingness to improve their provision and access to clean water focusing on five countries: Brazil, Costa Rica, India, Peru, and South Africa. It has also examined strategies of social mobilization and legal battles for water, and evaluated how human rights language and frameworks were harnessed, and to what effect. It created a comparative body of knowledge on how the HRtWS can be animated (or not) depending on contextual factors such as regime type, national political dynamics, and legal opportunity structures, and developed a framework for understanding how newly created human rights are utilized in different political and legal contexts. Through the use of interdisciplinary and mixed-methods approaches, it has both conceptually and empirically contributed to the field of water rights, and human rights more generally through its focus on the relationship between law, politics, and development levels. Findings suggest that the creation of global human rights involves a wide range of actors and takes place in various spaces. Rather than being cohesive and universally effective (or ineffective) structures, global rights that emerge from a decentralized process of adopting and implementing the language of rights in various political conflicts, as activists seek different ways to express their needs and demands. The language of human rights used for rhetorical and political purposes intersects with formal legal rights, influencing and informing each other. This results in a diverse process of creating norms that have different meanings and effects in different places and for different actors. We demonstrate how social actors often pursue a version of the HRtWS that directly contradicts the definition of the right as interpreted by judges or legal scholars. Expansive interpretations and novel expressions of the right are particularly likely to appear when existing legal frameworks do not meet the needs of those making rights claims, with activists shaping the right to fit their claim, rather than altering their claim to fit the right. For example, in the U.S. although the HRtWS is not recognized, and therefore not amenable to use in litigation, language using the human right to water is frequently utilized by marginalized peoples demanding access to clean, drinkable water. The binding force of a human rights claim is also politically constructed. Rights are binding when the relevant decision makers - elected officials, bureaucrats, economic actors - cannot ignore the demands made. Our research reveals that much compliance results from political and social pressures, but occasionally emerges spontaneously from a background norm held by the decision makers. Our analyses suggest organizations and individuals pursuing water rights do not necessarily use the HRtWS itself in their claims, although they aware of the right they may prefer other strategies. The language of the human right to water is frequently used in protests across our case studies, but these same organizations tend to use different arguments when litigating in court, including prior informed consent, environmental rights, housing rights, or health rights. We use global quantitative databases to analyze the effect of countries’ inclusion of a constitutional right to water, finding that constitutional inclusion is insufficient to advance access to clean drinking water. This is supported by a study of South Africa, which recognized a constitutional right to water even before the UN’s recognition. The HRtWS is found to have little impact on water rights mobilization, policies, norms or in rulings and official documents. Not even the existence of an explicit and well-established right to water in the national framework has led to the use of water rights discourse to mobilize around water, even less so for cases on sanitation as a human right. The findings suggest that the 2010 HRtWS’s definition (daily required human intake of drinking water) may be too narrow to influence battles over water resources where there is a more comprehensive understanding of access to water. For instance, in claims by indigenous peoples it fails to cover the substantive issues related to how different cultures relate to water.

Outcomes of the project include include: - capacity building for team members who have gained extensive experience from interdisciplinary collaboration (accross political science and law) and from working in highly international al teams. - the project has also contributed to capacity-building for stakeholders, including judges, water rights activists, and policymakers, who were invited to seminars, project workshops, and the Bergen Exchanges, helping to inform policy discussions on water rights, as well as the role of human rights frameworks more generally in improving the lives of marginalized people. - the project has also focused on providing easily accessible information for the public through webinars, op-eds in national newspapers, TV interviews as well as accessible blog postings - our quantitative and qualitative research publications and outreach on the human right to water contribute to the ongoing debates in socio-legal studies The actual and potential societal impact is multidimensional: project experts have made extensive contributions to our understanding of legal, constitutional, and policy-reform across the globe, especially in Costa Rica where findings of the project’s 2022 edited book was discussed on national television, radio, and in national newspapers. I

Water is essential for all aspect of human life. It is vital for public health, an essential component of national and local economies and a main a source of employment, Yet, water scarcity remains a huge and increasing problem in many countries. Demands for water from big industries (often central to government's development strategies) compete with the water needs of a growing population - and with climate change exacerbating the problem. Globally, 750 million people do not have access to clean water and 2.5 billion lack adequate sanitation causing millions of deaths every year. The United Nations General Assembly in 2010 issued a landmark resolution declaring water as an independent human right under international law, thereby completing the process (starting in 2002) of creating an internationally binding mechanism to pursue the right to water. This is seen as an important tool for improving access to water for the poor and marginalized. The project aims to provide evidence of the effects of elevating water to an independent human right. More precisely, it aims to determine whether states have become more accountable to their populations in providing access to clean water. Building on prior and ongoing research, this interdisciplinary project will conduct five carefully selected case studies from three regions (Brazil, Costa Rica, India, Peru and South Africa) to i) illustrate variations in strategies employed in legal struggles for water access ii) assess the impact of water dispute victories based on the human right to water ; iii) construct an open-access database of water rights-related cases handled by domestic constitutional or superior courts, and international courts and tribunals since 2000; and iv) organize events, meetings with judges, activists, academicians and policy makers. Together, this knowledge will contribute to the current debates on the field of socio-legal studies, as well as to on-going policy debates.