1. Dr. Bettina Lange, Centre for Socio-Legal Studies, Oxford and Dr. Mark Shepheard, Law Faculty, McGill University

2.  An unresolved question in natural resource stewardship literature: what is the significance of private property rights for protecting common pool resources? How is an economic right to water conceptualized and what drives these conceptions?  Various types of ‘rights’ conceptions: administrative rights, ‘new property’, individual/collective rights, common pool resource conceptions – in flux – policy reforms  An unresolved question in natural resource stewardship literature: what is the significance of private property rights for protecting common pool resources? How is an economic right to water conceptualized and what drives these conceptions?  Various types of ‘rights’ conceptions: administrative rights, ‘new property’, individual/collective rights, common pool resource conceptions – in flux – policy reforms

3.  Purpose: map how farmers think about a right to water and identify key factors that shape such conceptions  2 contrasting exploratory case studies: a water rich region (North-East) and water scarce one (Anglia), variation in further factors  Qualitative empirical data: interviews with 12 key stakeholders and analysis of key public policy documents and relevant legislation  An eco-socio-legal perspective

4. HHybrid rights-stewardship conceptions: focus on water quantity -- on a substantive discursive level: water conservation is seen as part and parcel of running an efficient farm business -- on a procedural level: an administrative right to water becomes qualified through stewardship conceptions

5.  1. Green production and consumption standards: voluntary farm product assurance schemes and contractual relationships with supermarkets  2. The legal institutional framework: - the legal framework for abstraction licensing - self-regulation: water sharing among farmers  3. Ways of thinking about the space in which water for abstraction flows and in which it is used.

6.  Associated with commercial chains in which farmers are embedded  Stronger influence on water conservation than the abstraction licensing system?  Appear to foster stewardship, but…  Emphasis on product quality and market access creates a commercial reality that downplays water conservation e.g. potato skin finish (‘vanity vegetables’)

7.  Abstraction licensing: -qualification of individual administrative right to abstract: EU habitats protection  -limitation of compensation rights -transfer into environmental permitting  Response to this framework also shaped by nature of the farm tenancy: ‘quarry farming’

8.  Farmer collaboration to manage water scarcity, water abstractors groups: a forum for negotiation of water sharing arrangements with the regulator  Single common licence or agreed restrictions common to a group  Giving rise to hybrid rights-stewardship conceptions  Adjusting individual administrative rights toward stewardship requires arrangements to reward reductions and incentives for sharing.

9.  Space : a natural pre-given category or shaped by regulatory objectives and thus power relations?  The space of the farm: farms as networks of parcels of land common pool resource conception of water  The ‘catchment’: water flowing in interconnected channels: common pool resource conception of water  Ecologically embedded water stewardship

10.  ‘rights’ and ‘regulation’ often understood as distinct socio-legal phenomena  But here structural internal links between ‘rights’ to and ‘regulation’ of water  Approaches to water use also shaped by discursive constructions of ‘rights’ claims  Opening up a conception of rights: tort of breach of statutory duty