New Approach and Tools for Comparative Institutional Analysis of Legal Regimes Used for Integrated Resources Management

At the moment in several parts of the world institutional reforms are taking place to deal with integrated water resources management (IWRM) issues. Increasingly intricate transboundary institutional arrangements will need to be and are established. Lessons can be learned from frontrunners, but this requires a new method to establish similarities and differences in levels of(de)centralization. In this paper an institutional law & economics perspective on the study of legal regimes for integrated management of such complex, multi-use and multi-actor ecosystems will be presented. From this perspective a new method is developed that can be used for comparative property rights analysis. The method is based on the combined insights from property rights theory, institutional legal theory (ILT) and the work of the American legal theorist Hohfeld. The paper will show how the adapted Schlager & Ostrom framework can be used to better understand the institutional arrangements used to implement IWRM. The method has been implemented in a web-based database system. The method incorporates visualization of the legal regimes and a formal model to establish similarities and differences in levels of (de)centralization for different policy fields. For the graphical visualizations of the legal regimes Graphviz is used. The formal model is transposed into SQL-scripts that can be executed through the website. At the end of the paper a first application of the method in a comparison of the legal regimes used for the IWRM of the Scheldt estuary, will be presented.