Rethinking collaborative governance to enhance legitimacy co-production: a multipurpose rural–urban water transfer in Nepal

ABSTRACT This study examines the Sundarijal Water Supply System in Nepal, which involves over a century of experience on a multipurpose water supply project. Research findings suggest that the liberal idea of justice as fairness in the distribution of risks and benefits fails to appreciate the political nature of state interventions to transfer rural water for urban municipal use. The research rejects the neoliberal idea of procedural justice as creating non-argumentative spaces for decision-making common in collaborative governance in favour of the political ecological approach to developing argumentative spaces to facilitate contested co-production of legitimacy.