Analytical framework - The Politics of Water Institutional Reform in Neopatrimonial States - page 37

In order to address this problem, this chapter outlined three analytical approaches that are
combined in order to reach a comprehensive understanding. These approaches indicate pre
sumptions on what influences politics, which I will explicate in this last subchapter.
Institutionalist policy analysis, and especially the interaction oriented approach by Scharpf,
stresses the role institutions play in structuring the preferences and strategies of actors in deci
sion making. While the political process is characterized by the strategic behavior of actors,
their intentions are shaped by institutions. Hence, the assumption is that the behavior of actors
and thus the policy outcomes are shaped by the institutions of decision making.
Policy analysis also points to the internal discrepancies that might have negative impacts
on the overall policy process. Therefore, the coherence between water law, policy, and admin
istration in the reforms is considered to be important in order to avoid negative impacts of
endogenous linkages between the water institutions themselves. As implementation research
stresses is the importance of the meso level of administration, it has particulary taken the water
administration and its inter linkage with the overall water institutional performance into ac
count.
In addition to this aspect, implementation research also stresses the importance of the
context. Agriculture sets the concrete socio economic context of water institutional reforms.
Irrigated agriculture consumes most of the water resources world wide and hence it is the
sector that is mostly affected by WIR. Consequently, it is assumed that the institutional condi
tions of the agricultural sector are important for the feasibility of WIR.
Finally, the participatory and bottom up perspective of political anthropology regards pol
itics not as a special sub system of society, but as manifoldly interwoven with culture, kinship,
informal social institutions, traditional mechanisms of power, etc. Especially concerning the
local level, the evolving assumption is that water governance is narrowly interwoven with other
local institutions and can only be grasped when their complex interrelationship is analyzed.
From these assumptions, four concrete variables have to be analyzed: the institutions of
decision making, the institutional conditions of the agricultural sector, the institutions of local
governance, and the water institutional linkages. The characteristics of these variables with
regard to the two case studies will be described in the following chapter.