Legal pluralism in the area of human rights: water and sanitation

• Competing discourses lead to competing legal rules and to legal pluralism.
• Human rights implementation depends on existing laws.
• Water price recovery competes with the human right to water and sanitation.
• Legal pluralism can be addressed through strong mutual support between legal rules.

Access to clean drinking water and adequate sanitation and hygiene facilities is crucial to achieving social and environmental sustainability. We examine the global human water and sanitation right from a legal pluralism perspective to see if it is indifferent to, competes with, accommodates, or is mutually supportive of national laws and local customs. The paper concludes that legal pluralism in the area of human rights is a multilevel process operating at different levels of governance. Therefore, the effective implementation of international human rights depends on the nature of the relationship with existing regional, national and customary laws. After a legal pluralism diagnosis has been conducted for a specific region, there may be specific tools to deal with the related challenges.