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Paper short abstract

This paper explores how illegal water practices emerge from socio-economic, institutional, and postcolonial power asymmetries, reconceptualising ‘water theft’ to highlight the informal practices and inequities that shape knowledge, technology, and policy in global water governance.

Paper long abstract

Unregulated water abstractions account for a large share of global water supplies. Despite presenting a substantial challenge, there is no universal definition of water theft. The absence of clarity on what constitutes theft has important governance implications, as how theft is defined could result in inappropriate, ineffective, and/or contextually insensitive enforcement strategies. This paper presents a systematic review of existing definitions of illegal water use to examine how water theft is conceptualised across academic literature, and how these understandings shape policy responses.

The review finds that water theft is rarely explicitly defined; instead, it is implicitly constructed through debates around scarcity, governance failure, property rights, and informality. The paper reveals that unauthorised abstractions arise through competing lenses of greed-driven over-extraction and elite capture, and grievance-based responses to drought, infrastructural exclusion, and inequity. Informal water markets are frequently deemed illegal, despite functioning as essential supply systems where formal provision is absent.

How water theft is defined is also shaped by broader shifts toward privatisation and economic regulation. When water is treated as private property, theft becomes an economic crime. Monitoring, metering, and enforcement act as technoscientific practices that reinforce commodified notions of legality by making certain flows measurable and enforceable while disregarding other ‘criminal’ practices.

By tracing how water theft is asymmetrically defined, normalised, and criminalised, the paper positions water as a site where knowledge, governance, and power intersect. Examining these definitional practices reveals how water governance strategies actively produce the conditions that make water use visible, legitimate, or punishable.