Rethinking collaborative governance: contested legitimacy of the Melamchi inter-basin water transfer for municipal use in Nepal

Rapidly growing cities are constantly thirsty for water. The most common approach to meet growing demands is to extract water from rural areas. Whilst rural people and the environment bear the major risks of water extraction, urban municipal service providers and affluent urban consumers, for the most part, benefit from it, where the raw water is processed in treatment plants to generate added value in the form of clean and safe water. Although various governance approaches, from central economic planning to market mechanisms, are touted as effective mechanisms to govern natural resources, research evidence is equivocal on how the state and non-state stakeholders perceive the legitimacy of high modern water transfer. This research employs the contested legitimacy lens to generate nuances in the neoliberal cooption of consensus-based collaborative governance within the context of the Melamchi River diversion, which is Nepal’s largest inter-basin rural-to-urban water transfer for municipal use in the Kathmandu valley, the national capital region with over 3 million population. The research findings revealed that the liberal idea of justice as fairness in water transfer fails to appreciate the contested production of legitimacy in planning and implementation. This research concludes that the dominant narrative of industrialisation and economic growth leading to water crises in urban areas does not sufficiently legitimate the state-led decision to transfer water and other resources from already vulnerable rural areas. The legitimacy of inter-basin water transfer does not come from hierarchical decisions and market mechanisms alone but more importantly from social solidarity movements. The latter especially provides novel sources of legitimacy moving away from the consensus approach to water resource planning and implementation.