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Conference Agenda

Overview and details of the sessions of this conference. Please select a date or location to show only sessions at that day or location. Please select a single session for detailed view (with abstracts and downloads if available).

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Agenda Overview

Session

Special Session 6: Sectoral water conflicts and water justice in South Asia – Multi-scalar aspects

Time:

Thursday, 25/June/2026:

4:40pm - 6:10pm

Session Chair: Philippe Cullet

Location: Gamle Festsal

1st floor Domus Academica building, Faculty of Law, Univesity of Oslo Karl Johans gt. 47, 0162 Oslo

Birsha Ohdedar, Lovleen Bhullar and Nate Palmer

Presentations

Sectoral water conflicts and water justice in South Asia – Multi-scalar aspects

Chair(s): Philippe Cullet (SOAS University of London, United Kingdom)

Formal legal frameworks often address water conflicts in terms of cooperation and dispute resolution around water. Yet, most water conflicts arise at local levels where they may either not fall within the context of formal rules or straddle multiple areas of law. Further, such conflicts cannot be understood or satisfactorily resolved only at the specific local level at which they arise. This may be the case of a dispute over access to drinking water among neighbours that is intrinsically related to water availability in a different region where a dam is built to provide water to different regions for different uses. Increasingly, such local conflicts also need to be understood in relation to the climate crisis and related changing rainfall patterns, which affect actual access to water.

Sectoral water conflicts within one category of use or across different uses is one of the crucial issues in the water sector. However, it has received insufficient attention from a water law perspective. These conflicts are increasingly important in the context of the climate crisis making water availability (both in terms of quantity and quality) increasingly less assured to specific users or in specific locations. Further, water conflicts are linked to growing uses of a finite natural resource, highlighting the broader limits of water law centred around allocating uses rather than prioritising protection of this resource.

This session will offer new perspectives on the legal dimensions of intra- and inter-sectoral water conflicts that are often not sufficiently considered. This may be because the legal frameworks do not have the tools to address such conflicts or because they do not address the multi-sectoral aspects of these conflicts. In a context of increasing water scarcity and the adverse impacts of climate change on the hydrological cycle, such sectoral water conflicts are likely to be increasingly frequent in the future. It is crucial to better understand the legal tools that exist to address them and to plan for ways to prevent and solve them in the future.

This session will consider several examples of sectoral conflicts in their multi-scalar aspects arising from work undertaken by panel members in the context of the ERC project Addressing the Multi-scalar Dimensions of Sectoral Water Conflicts Through the Lens of Water Security: Lessons from South Asia (www.watcon.org). It will be organised as a roundtable discussion framed through entry level questions that panel members will ask each other.

Presentations of the Symposium

Water Justice in South Asia – Need to address Sectoral Water Conflicts

Philippe Cullet
SOAS University of London

Water justice can only be achieved in a context where every water user’s water security is ensured. In a context of increasing physical, economic and social water scarcity at the local, national and international levels, it is crucial to ensure that available water is allocated according to equitable and environmental criteria. In a context where different users compete for the same water or water of a similar quality, preventing, addressing and solving sectoral water conflicts is essential. Legal frameworks tend to provide only limited responses to the challenges posed by such sectoral conflicts. A broad understanding of water security constitutes a first step towards ensuring water justice from the local to the transboundary level.

Multi-scalar conflicts – South Asian perspective

Birsha Ohdedar
SOAS University of London

South Asia, comprising eight countries connected by over twenty major transboundary rivers, presents a complex landscape of multi-scalar water relations. Despite this hydrological interconnectedness, cooperation often remains fragmented, framed through bilateral and sovereignty-centred legal approaches. This paper examines the analytical value of water security in understanding these dynamics, particularly in relation to ecological change and regional stability under climate stress. It first reviews international legal frameworks addressing water conflicts and cooperation, identifying how securitisation discourses and state-centric perspectives shape outcomes. It then focuses on the Brahmaputra basin to explore how local hydropolitics intersect with broader regional and legal structures. By linking transboundary governance with localised water conflicts, the paper situates water security within the wider discussion on sectoral and multi-scalar dimensions of water justice in South Asia, highlighting the implications for evolving legal and institutional responses to shared water challenges.

Water security, human rights, and climate change in borderlands: The case of the two Punjabs

Lovleen Bhullar
University of Cambridge

This paper explores the relationship between water security and sectoral water conflicts, human rights, and climate change in South Asia across three spatial scales: sub-national, national and international. A bottom-up approach is adopted to examine this relationship in the context of the two Punjabs (one in India, the other in Pakistan) that are separated by a partition but share an international border and more than one river. In August 2025, this proximity caused havoc in these borderlands when heavy monsoon rains in India led to the release of dam water into Pakistan, compounding the flooding there and leading to devastating losses of life, livelihood and other human rights. This calamity is likely to exacerbate sectoral water conflicts within and between the two countries and serves as a reminder of the need to place the issue of water (in)security front and centre in South Asia.

Sectoral water conflicts: An ecological perspective

Nate Palmer
SOAS University of London

This paper draws lessons on the relationship between the hegemonic framing of international water governance and local experiences. This will be achieved through an examination of evolving forms of water governance in Meghalaya, India, where customary institutions and diverse human-nature relations shape how water is managed and contested. This paper is particularly interested in how the conceptualisation of ‘what water is’ manifests in water governance through indigenous and sub-national institutions. It analyses how these local systems interact with international and national legal frameworks, by exploring the dynamics of conflict, cooperation, and accountability in practice. Further, it examines ways in which the hegemony of development practices and discourses, coemerging from international, national intra-state forces, often undercut this autonomy and marginalise diverse conceptualisations of water. This provides the basis for reimagining water governance through more relational, pluralist, and equity-oriented approaches with particular attention given to the rights of nature and biocultural community protocols.