Dr. Bettina Lange awarded BA research grant

Dr. Bettina Lange (Centre for Socio-Legal Studies) has been awarded a small research grant of £7,460 by the British Academy for a comparative pilot study “Reconceptualizing farmers' water rights through stewardship”.  This project examines how farmers’ legal rights to access and use water resources are changing in light of contemporary expectations about water stewardship. Common law rights to water are increasingly interpreted in the light of general statutory duties to protect the environment, including water quality and quantity. While in a number of Australian state jurisdictions environmental duties of care have been enshrined in statutory provisions, water law in England has only begun to develop such duties.  Such duties of care matter because they are the prism through which conflicts between farmers’ rights to natural resource use and wider public interest expectations in relation to sustainable use of water are resolved.
Over a period of 16 months this socio-legal research project will gather through interviews qualitative empirical data about English farmers’ and the Environment Agency’s perceptions of rights of access to and use of water. The project also involves comparative analysis of Australian and English statutory and case law. The research is carried out in collaboration with Dr. Mark Shepheard from the Centre for Agriculture and Law at the University of New England, Australia.