Drafting the Water Resources Act and Regulation

Nepal’s water law had been carrying a structure designed for a very different country: fewer users, fewer competing claims, and no federal tier between the centre and the local level. The replacement had to do three things at once. Settle who holds what right, say clearly how those rights are allocated between provinces and municipalities, and leave room for uses that did not exist when the original was written.

What I worked on#

I contributed to drafting work on the Act and, more closely, on the Regulation that gives it operational effect. The Regulation is where an Act stops being a statement of principle and becomes a set of forms, thresholds and timelines that an engineer in a district office has to apply. Getting those thresholds wrong is how a reasonable law becomes an unworkable one.

What I took from it#

The gap between a well-drafted provision and a well-functioning process is mostly about who has to do what, by when, with what evidence. A clause that says an authority “shall decide in a timely manner” produces a different world from one that says “within thirty days of a complete submission, failing which the application is deemed approved”. The second is harder to draft, harder to agree, and worth the effort.

The other lesson is that drafting is where you find out which data the state does not have. Several provisions had to be written more loosely than anyone wanted because the underlying abstraction and use records simply do not exist at the resolution the clause implied.