Abstract
This chapter constructs a model for studying water rights on the basis of an indepth discussion about the term “water rights”. The structure of property rights in water resources is very complicated, far different from ordinary economic assets. This chapter reviews the development of the theories on property right structure of natural resources in the West and it discovers a “conceptual model of institutional hierarchy”, which is applicable in analyzing the property right structure of flowing natural resources, being the foundation of devloping a “conceptual model of water rights hierarchy” for understanding the water rights structure in China. The chapter will give particular stress to the differences between China and the Western societies in terms of water governance structure and the water rights structure resulting from these differences which cannot be reflected in descriptive models. China’s water rights structure is a special hierarchy, which has absolute precedence of public rights over private rights, with the latter greatly attenuated. There are also the features of a series of other rights compatible with the hierarchical structure.
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- 1.
The term “water withdrawal”, according to the Water Law of China, refers to acts that withdraw water from rivers, lakes or underground. Although some water withdrawal units are not end users, this book regards all the holders of water licenses as group policy -making entities. Chapter 6 will go into detail, which reveals the rationality in the simplification.
- 2.
See Ray Challen , Institutions, Transaction Costs and Environmental Policy, pp.116–119.
- 3.
In the forms of the models, I proposes the following methods to reflect such differences: in the hierarchical structure, all the policy -making entities are written in solid box. If it is not a hierarchical structure, only the policy-making entities under the allocation mechanism can be written in solid box and those above are expressed in dotted text box. In Challen’s works, he used dotted text box to characterize the policy-making entities in the Murray-Darling Basin in the early period. In the water rights structure in the Yellow River basin in later chapters, all the policy-making entities will be shown in solid text box, even in the structure during the Qin and Han periods.
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Wang, Y. (2018). Hierarchical Structure of Water Rights. In: Assessing Water Rights in China. Water Resources Development and Management. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-5083-1_3
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