METHODS

Celume et al did a massive --- wide and deep --- literature search using all the modern modes researchers use these days to  find relevant research on the effects of the 1981 Water Code and subsequent changes to it:  “Excluded studies included those that: (1) described conflicts, scarcity, or environmental impacts without connecting them to specific provisions, principles, or institutions of the Code such as tradability of rights, perpetual rights, limited regulatory powers, priority rules, or missing environmental flows; (2) referred vaguely to the water model or neoliberal extractivism without identifying the Code as a causal factor; (3) presented conflicts where problems derived mainly from project design, corporate decisions, or political discretion rather than the Code itself; or (4) mentioned the Code only as context in assessments of scarcity, drought, or climate change…  (5) descriptive legal analyses that did not present normative critiques linking Code provisions to social or environmental problems; (6) commentaries on constitutional, economic, or trade regimes that did not specify a causal link with the Code; (7) broad regional or conceptual studies of water governance that did not treat the Code as an explicit object of analysis; and (8) studies focused only on proposed solutions when these were not explicitly connected to structural shortcomings of the Code (pp. 395-396).” The result is to include and provide reference to findings in 63 studies conducted during the period 1990-2022.

The analysts then categorized the 63 studies, looking to:  “(i) substantive focus, the regime component targeted (e.g., property/market design, state capacity, distributional

outcomes, environmental gaps, human use priority); (ii) governance mechanism or domain, the institutional or functional area primarily concerned (e.g., rights and markets, state organization, social distribution, environmental safeguards, judicial or scientific roles, reform orientation); and (iii) linguistic markers, recurring terms used in the literature (e.g., ‘neoliberal,’ ‘weak state,’ ‘no environmental protection,’ ‘human right to water,’ ‘judicialization,’ ‘commons’) (p. 396).” Eight thematic clusters … (emerged pertaining to concerns) .. under CA81: (1) neoliberal, market driven regime design; (2) weak, centralized and fragmented governance; (3) weak human rights protection; (4) sectoral and territorial conflicts; (5) lack of environmental and ecosystem safeguards; (6) knowledge, expertise and judicialization of water conflicts; (7) hoarding and non use of rights; and (8) climate change, drought, and maladaptation (p. 396).” Through the DIT lens, all such concerns arise on path 0G, focused only on the profane.