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Agency in Regime Changes

Agency in Regime Changes. Dams, Development and Movements for Water Justice. Between activism and academic scholarship. Structure-agency relations Theory-practice relations Social action and structural transformations. Regime changes. Lower level of abstraction

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Agency in Regime Changes

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  1. Agency in Regime Changes Dams, Development and Movements for Water Justice

  2. Between activism and academic scholarship • Structure-agency relations • Theory-practice relations • Social action and structural transformations

  3. Regime changes • Lower level of abstraction • Involves institutions, relations between institutions and positions of social actors within institutions • Institutions as complexes of laws • states and markets are complexes of laws • Regime changes and changes in legal infrastructures • Social actors and discourses about the law

  4. Explorations • ‘Law and ‘development’ discourses about water: Understanding agency in regime changes’ in Ramanathan, U, Philippe Cullet and Jessy Thomas: "Water Law at the Crossroads In India : National and International”: New Delhi: International Environmental Law Centre and Sage Publications: (forthcoming) (2009). • “Liberal Theory, Human Rights and Water-Justice: Back to Square One?” which appears in LGD: Law, Social Justice and Global Development [2008 (1) Law, Social Justice & Global Development Journal (LGD).http://www.go.warwick.ac.uk/elj/lgd/2008_1/d’souza] • “The Prison Houses of Knowledge: Activist Scholarship And Revolution in the Era of “Globalisation” [McGill Journal of Education, forthcoming, 2009] • “The ‘Rights’ Conundrum: Poverty of Philosophy amidst Poverty” • ??

  5. Five themes • The importance of convergences in regimes and social structures • the common conceptual grounds that contestants share • The moment of transformative change • Significance for the type of social transformation • Importance of concepts and ideas of social agents in regime changes • Philosophies, world views • The capacity of social agents to envision social the social whole • Understanding social institutions • The socio-temporal lag between structure and agency, theory and practice • the moment of transcendence from understanding to action.

  6. Neo liberal regime change in water sector • Understanding two events in 1997 • World Commission on large dams • UN International Convention on Transboundary Watercourses • The transformative moment • WTO mandate to restructure institutional relationships • The convergences • State vs market regulation binary • From being ‘citizen’ to becoming ‘stakeholders’

  7. Neo-liberal change and social movements for water-justice • Opposing liberalism in theory • Fukuyama and the critique of ‘liberal triumphalism’ • Supporting liberalism in practice • The demands for human rights to water by water justice movements • The convergence on human rights • The transformative moment • UN Summit on Social Development in Copenhagen in 1995 – restructuring citizen-state relations • ‘Fix it’ not ‘nix it’

  8. Transcendence and human action: agenda for research • Recognising the limitations of institutional sites of knowledge production • Who speaks for the subaltern? • The spatio-temporal lag • Sites for transcendence? • Limitations of philosophical dualism • Emancipation v social change

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