ALSA 2025 meeting

This paper examines the historical emergence of water rights in Hani society, where terraced rice cultivation forms both a material infrastructure and a moral economy. Unlike the codified logic of state law or the state-evading practices of Zomia highland communities—what James Scott famously called the regions “where states do not climb hills”—Hani water rights emerge from sustained labor and social cooperation, constituting self-organized, evolving social norms rather than legal entitlements.

These water rights are institutionalized through everyday irrigation practices and embedded in a localized governance structure. Rather than fixed ownership, they reflect a composite rights regime shaped by labor-based entitlement, dynamic stratification, and reciprocal cooperation. This regime adapts over time in response to ecological conditions and collective needs, functioning as a flexible mechanism of resource access, use, and allocation within the terraced agricultural system.

Importantly, this study argues that the normative logic of water rights lies not in formal legal property or usufruct, but in how shared labor sustains order through cooperation. By drawing on the Hani community’s experience of water-related contestation, this paper shows how grassroots social norms around water use have, in practice, been absorbed into legislative texts and legal interpretation. This reveals not a binary between law and custom, but an ongoing entanglement where local practices shape formal governance.