IWRA Proceedings

AbstractRegulation is only one of the tools to which we turn in hope to mitigate the freshwater challenges islanders currently face due to climate change. Legal theory must not defend abstract ideas about regulation because regulation can only be a useful tool if it ‘fits’ (1) the context of the islands, as lived by the islanders, and (2) the insights and tools from other fields focusing on islands e.g. decentralized water technologies. Legal transplants, importing regulation from mainland legal systems to islands, risk to ignore both. In that sense cherry-picking best-practices from foreign regulation is not desirable, neither from a democratic nor from a technocratic point of view. We want to present one particular feature of mainland property theory that ignores the insights and tools from other fields, and might thus result in maladapted regulation.