UDTR — Radar mondial des droits de la Nature

The Promise and Practice of Ecuador’s Rights-Based Water Regime: Administrative Translation of Constitutional Commitments to Indigenous Communities, Small Farmers, and Nature

Identification

Clé publique

openalex:w7221843539

Auteurs

Emily L. Conrad

Année déclarée

2026

Langue déclarée

en

Type source

dissertation

Première détection

2026-11-09T19:04:47.595073+00:00

Dernière observation des métadonnées

2026-11-09T19:05:51.627745+00:00

Dernière vérification HTTP

Non effectuée

Résumé documentaire — langue originale

Ecuador’s 2008 Constitution and 2014 Water Law established an unusually progressive water governance framework. They recognize water as a human right, prohibit privatization, prioritize human consumption, food sovereignty, and environmental flows over other productive uses, and recognize the Rights of Nature, Indigenous collective rights, and community water governance. Yet these commitments have uneven force in practice. Commercial and extractive users often retain institutional advantages; Indigenous communities and small farmers face procedural burdens and fragmented state authority, while river protections remain weakly enforced. This thesis asks how and why these commitments are enabled, constrained, and transformed in practice. Drawing on legal, policy, and institutional analysis, 32 interviews, eight focus groups, documentary evidence, and 10 years of participatory engagement in rural Ecuador, it examines five domains: water allocation, minimum guarantees for the human right to water, environmental flows, basin-oriented governance, and state recognition of preexisting community water authority. I argue that these commitments acquire practical form through administrative translation: the choices that make them governable through methods, procedures, standards, jurisdictions, organizational arrangements, and enforcement decisions. These choices shape what commitments require in practice, which claims become actionable, and how far their protection reaches. Comparison across the five domains reveals a recurrent but contestable relationship I call patterned narrowing: forms that make commitments operative can also restrict their reach, condition their realization, or weaken enforceability relative to their legal scope and purpose. Three interacting dimensions explain how translation unfolds and why narrowing recurs. Ontological foundations shape recognition and legibility: which entities, relationships, and harms institutions recognize. Political-economic structures shape support: which actors, projects, and uses receive resources, expertise, urgency, and institutional attention. Governance architectures shape authoritative capacity: who can act, how legal and institutional cultures shape the exercise of authority, where responsibility lies, and whether decisions can be coordinated and enforced. Narrowing is not inevitable. Communities and allies contest administrative translation through evidence, challenges to official categories and methods, collective pressure, and legal remedies. When these challenges gain traction within receptive institutions with authority and capacity to revise practice, corrective translation can occur through revised standards, decisions, recognition arrangements, or enforcement. These efforts, however, impose substantial burdens and do not always succeed. The thesis therefore shows that the space between legal recognition and practical protection is a governing space in its own right, where administrative translation can both enable and narrow legal commitments and contestation can sometimes redirect how they are made operative.

Identifiants

OPENALEX

W7221843539

HANDLE

10150/681489

Repères documentaires

Famille documentaire

Thèse

Types déclarés par les sources

dissertation

Juridictions étudiées — sources explicites

EC

Entités naturelles mentionnées

Fleuve / rivière

Les mentions d’entités ne constituent pas une preuve de reconnaissance juridique. La juridiction étudiée est distincte du pays d’affiliation des auteurs.

Sources

OpenAlex · Document 1 · Document 2

• Document · https://hdl.handle.net/10150/681489
• OpenAlex · https://openalex.org/W7221843539

Statut documentaire

Pertinence à examiner

Bibliothèque

Cette identité n’est pas encore intégrée à la Bibliothèque juridique.