Contemporary socio-economic transformations in South Asia are creating increasingly serious water problems (scarcity, flooding, pollution) and conflicts. Conflicts over water distribution, water-derived benefits, and risks often play out along axes of social differentiation like caste, wealth, and gender. Those with least power, rights, and voice suffer lack of access, exclusion, dispossession, and further marginalisation, resulting in livelihood insecurity or increased vulnerability to risks. In this paper we propose analysing these problems as problems of justice -problems of distribution, recognition, and political participation. Drawing on wider environmental justice approaches, a specific water justice focus needs to include both the specific characteristics of water as a resource and the access, rights, and equity dimensions of its control. We argue that recognising water problems as problems of justice requires a re-politicisation of water, as mainstream approaches to water resources, water governance, and legislation tend to normalise or naturalise their -basically political -distributional assumptions and implications. An interdisciplinary approach that sees water as simultaneously natural (material) and social is important here. We illustrate these conceptual and theoretical suggestions with evidence from India.

Mega-damming, pollution and depletion endanger rivers worldwide. Meanwhile, modernist imaginaries of ordering ‘unruly waters and humans’ have become cornerstones of hydraulic-bureaucratic and capitalist development. They separate hydro/social worlds, sideline river-commons cultures, and deepen socio-environmental injustices. But myriad new water justice movements (NWJMs) proliferate: rooted, disruptive, transdisciplinary, multi-scalar coalitions that deploy alternative river–society ontologies, bridge South–North divides, and translate river-enlivening practices from local to global and vice-versa. This paper's framework conceptualizes ‘riverhood’ to engage with NWJMs and river commoning initiatives. We suggest four interrelated ontologies, situating river socionatures as arenas of material, social and symbolic co-production: ‘river-as-ecosociety’, ‘river-as-territory’, ‘river-as-subject’, and ‘river-as-movement’.

This paper assesses the implementation of four selected IWRM principles in four very different river basins in Europe and Asia. The four principles relate to all the different aspects of sustainable development-environmental, social, economic and institutional-as well as the factor that is particularly crucial in many countries of the South: implementation capacity. The paper is based on the work performed in the EC-funded STRIVER project, "Strategy and methodology for improved IWRM-An integrated interdisciplinary assessment in four twinning river basins". The four basins-Tungabhadra and Sesan (in Asia), and Tagus and Glomma (in Europe) exemplify very different problems and challenges with regard to IWRM: different levels of socio-economic development and very varying problems with regard to water quality and availability. The paper shows that the implementation of IWRM is at a fairly early stage in all the four STRIVER basins; and that successful implementation of water resources is dependent not only on the existence of relevant policies, but also the degree to which laws and policies are in fact implemented.

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