As demand and competition for water resources increase, the river basin has become the primary unit for water management and planning. While appealing in principle, practical implementation of river basin management and allocation has often been problematic. This paper examines the case of the Krishna basin in South India. It highlights that conflicts over basin water are embedded in a broad reality of planning and development where multiple scales of decisionmaking and non-water issues are at play. While this defines the river basin as a disputed "space of dependence", the river basin has yet to acquire a social reality. It is not yet a "space of engagement" in and for which multiple actors take actions. This explains the endurance of an interstate dispute over the sharing of the Krishna waters and sets limits to what can be achieved through further basin water allocation and adjudication mechanisms – tribunals – that are too narrowly defined. There is a need to extend the domain of negotiation from that of a single river basin to multiple scales and to non-water sectors. Institutional arrangements for basin management need to internalise the political spaces of the Indian polity: the states and the panchayats. This re-scaling process is more likely to shape the river basin as a space of engagement in which partial agreements can be iteratively renegotiated, and constitute a promising alternative to the current interstate stalemate.

中文翻译：

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超越水，超越边界：印度南部克里希纳河流域的水资源管理空间

随着对水资源的需求和竞争的增加，流域已成为水资源管理和规划的主要单位。虽然原则上很有吸引力，但流域管理和分配的实际实施往往存在问题。本文考察了印度南部克里希纳盆地的案例。它强调了围绕流域水的冲突嵌入在规划和发展的广泛现实中，其中涉及多种决策和非水问题。虽然这将流域定义为有争议的“依赖空间”，但流域尚未获得社会现实。它还不是一个“参与空间”，多个参与者为此采取行动。这解释了关于克里希纳水域共享的州际争端的持久性，并限制了通过进一步定义过于狭隘的流域水资源分配和裁决机制——法庭——所能实现的目标。需要将谈判范围从单一流域扩大到多尺度和非水部门。流域管理的制度安排需要内化印度政体的政治空间：国家和行政区。这种重新调整规模的过程更有可能将流域塑造成一个参与空间，在其中可以反复重新谈判部分协议，并构成当前州际僵局的有希望的替代方案。