The Right To Water: An Inquiry into Legal Empowerment and Property Rights Formation in Tanzania¹

The legal empowerment approach is a recent attempt to be specific about the role of institutions for the eradication of poverty. This is a broad concept that includes not only the national formal judicial system in a country, but all formal and informal institutional structures providing the rules of the game of human interaction in any given society. The approach has invited a lot of debate as to what the role of the law is in relation to other institutional structures, how the concept of empowerment is to be understood and how the two enhance the process of poverty reduction and economic development (Moore 2001; Bruns 2007; Banik 2008; Sengupta 2008; Singh 2009). In this chapter, I will discuss legal empowerment as it was summarised and presented by the Commission of the Legal Empowerment of the Poor (hereafter CLEP) in its final report Making the Law Work for Everyone (2008).