Water rights between social activism and social enterprise Bronwen Morgan Professor of Law and Australian Research Council Future, UNSW School of Law, Australia Sarika Seshadri PhD Candidate, University of Bristol, UK Water rights involve an amalgam of property rights and socio-economic rights that possess an inescapable regulatory dimension. The resulting uneasy mix of public responsibilities and private property regimes means that the details of the legal entity structure involved are central to the viability and effectiveness of implementing water rights on the ground. Small-scale social enterprise structures offer a fascinating site for exploring the tensions endemic to the field of water rights. This article explores the ways in which the entrepre- neurial energies of business approaches to the implementation of water rights articulate with the impetus for structural change embedded in practices of social activism. Our main purpose is to interrogate too easy an assumption of uni-dimensional or static relation- ships between social activism and social enterprise. We argue that there are multiple diverse relationships possible between them, including oppositional, evolutionary, comple- mentary, and dialectical relations. We illustrate these shifts empirically with examples from India and Bolivia. The article stresses the ambiguous potential of both empowerment and oppression when business methods are used to secure social outcomes, including those promised by the guarantee of a human right to water. Keywords: water rights, social enterprise, social activism, governance, development 1 INTRODUCTION Water rights involve an amalgam of property rights and socio-economic rights that possess an inescapable regulatory dimension. 1 The regulatory aspects of ‘making rights real’ 2 often involve positive state regulation, and this has posed a number of challenges to the conceptualization of a human right to water as a right against a state. Perhaps paradoxically, one set of practices that partially responds to this concep- tualization challenge is to implement a socio-economic right, such as the right to water, through delegation to private enterprise. If the private sector is responsible for operational delivery, then the ‘public’ responsibility of the state can more easily be conceptualized as being that of ensuring universal access and other social respon- sibilities in the provision of access to water embodied in the regulatory dimension of 1. B Morgan ‘The Regulatory Face of the Human Right to Water’ (2004) 15 Journal of Water Law 179; B Morgan, Water on Tap: Rights and Regulation in the Transnational Governance of Urban Water Services (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, May 2011). 2. C Epp, Making Rights Real: Activists, Bureaucrats, and the Creation of the Legalistic State (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2009). Journal of Human Rights and the Environment, Vol. 5 No. 1, March 2014, pp. 25–48 © 2014 The Author Journal compilation © 2014 Edward Elgar Publishing Ltd The Lypiatts, 15 Lansdown Road, Cheltenham, Glos GL50 2JA, UK and The William Pratt House, 9 Dewey Court, Northampton MA 01060-3815, USA