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Realizing the Human Right to Water in Local Communities: An Actor-Oriented Analysis

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The Human Right to Water

Abstract

The human right to water is ultimately to be enjoyed by people as right-holders – men, women, and children – who live in local communities. Action for implementing the right for the people is undertaken by the agencies as duty-bearers. However, neither do the duty-bearers implement the actions in an impersonal and neutral manner, nor do the right-holders passively accept these actions and their outcomes as they come. The actors on both sides are influenced by factors located within their local contexts, the interactions of which at the interface lead to dynamic results. This chapter aims to present these realities at the lowest level of action as a practical framework of norm-triads which can be used to assess the situation in any community-level context and design improvements to promote realization of the right.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    This has been done through adoption of General Comment No. 15 (CESCR 2002).

  2. 2.

    A social group is dominant when it preponderates numerically over the others and when it also wields preponderant economic and political power. Besides, higher position in the local social hierarchy, access to Western education, and external occupation also support the phenomenon of dominance (modified from Srinivas 1959).

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Singh, N. (2016). Realizing the Human Right to Water in Local Communities: An Actor-Oriented Analysis. In: Singh, N. (eds) The Human Right to Water. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-40286-4_2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-40286-4_2

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