Essential resources do more than satisfy people's needs. They ensure a dignified existence. Since the competition for essential resources, particularly fresh water and arable land, is increasing and standard legal institutions, such as property rights and national border controls, are strangling access to resources for some while delivering prosperity to others, many are searching for ways to ensure their fair distribution.

This book argues that the division of essential resources ought to be governed by a combination of Voice and Reflexivity. Voice is the ability of social groups to choose the rules by which they are governed. Reflexivity is the opportunity to question one's own preferences in light of competing claims and to accommodate them in a collective learning process. Having investigated the allocation of essential resources in places as varied as Cambodia, China, India, Kenya, Laos, Morocco, Nepal, the arid American West, and peri-urban areas in West Africa, the contributors to this volume largely concur with the viability of this policy and normative framework. Drawing on their expertise in law, environmental studies, anthropology, history, political science, and economics, they weigh the potential of Voice and Reflexivity against such alternatives as pricing mechanisms, property rights, common resource management, political might, or brute force.

Part 1: Analytical Framework
1. Introduction: Towards Voice and Reflexivity, by Olivier De Schutter and Katharina Pistor
Part 2: Essential Resources: Challenges Ahead
2. Land's Essentiality and Land Governance, by Derek Hall
3. Governing Boundaries: Exclusion, Essential Resources, and Sustainability, by Edella Schlager
4. Property Theory, Essential Resources, and the Global Land Rush, by Hanoch Dagan
5. MultipliCity: Water, Rules and the Making of Connections in Mumbai, by Nikhil Anand
Part 3: Beyond Voice and Reflexivity
6. Voice, Reflexivity, and Say: Governing Access to and Control of Land in China, by Eva Pils
7. Tenure Security and Exclusion Processes in Peri-urban areas and Rural Hinterlands of West African Cities, by Alain Durand-Lasserve
8. Redirecting Regulation? Land Titling and Cambodia's Post-Neoliberal Conjuncture, by Michael B. Dwyer
9. Erosion of Essential Resources in Neoliberal India: A Bottom-Up View, by Vamsi Vakulabharana
10. Comparing Water Access Regimes Under Conditions of Scarcity: The Tale of two Communities in the United States, by Michael Cox
Part 4: Governing Essential Resources in Action
11. Go with the Flow: Lessons from Water Management and Water Markets for Essential Resources, by Vanessa Cassado-Pérez
12. Ecology: Water Governance's Missing Link, by Scott McKenzie
13. Water Scarcity in Morocco: Voice, Narrative, and Essential Resource Governance, by John Hursh
14. Solving Trans-Border Water Issues in Changing Climate Scenarios of South Asia: A Theoretical Illustration Using a Principal-Agent Bargaining Approach, by Nilhari Neupane
15. Voice and Reflexivity in Essential Resources: Reforming the Community Land Regime in Kenya, by Laila Macharia
16. Do Traditional Institutions Matter in Participatory Essential Resource Governance Systems in Zimbabwe?, by Manase Kudzai Chiweshe
17. Local Corporations: An Organizational Form to Reduce Information Costs and Maintain Supportive Resources, by James Krueger
Epilogue, by Olivier De Schutter and Katharina Pistor
Contributors
Index