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]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