Ken Conca presents what is close to a definitive statement of the transnational politics of water, but his larger purpose is to demonstrate and correct the inadequacies of current theories of international environmental politics (IEP). This well-written and well-argued book is a theoretical advance on the regime theory commonly used in IEP and has garnered two prestigious prizes: the Harold and Margaret Sprout award and the Chadwick F. Alger Prize.

In the first two chapters, Conca critiques the institutional forms of most international environmental agreements and the theory that both supports those forms and directs empirical inquiry into them. He argues that an “international” environmental perspective encourages the application of “border-reinforcing” regime theory. But many environmental problems are not tied to “a particularly obvious, immediate, and physically tangible transnational effect” (p. 14), the type of problem for which regimes may be effective. He argues that the “bordered, statist, and functional-realist features of the regime form prevent it from confronting the problem of protecting the planet's places” (p. 25). Thus, his central question is “whether other institutional forms … can emerge where regimes have failed to take root” (p. 9).

Using water as his substantive case, Conca seeks to demonstrate the constraining effect of what he calls the “metanorms” of knowledge, territoriality, and authority. After a sketch of the world's water problems in Chapter 3, he offers chapter-length case studies of each of four critical water governance institution-building processes. He then uses case studies of Brazil and South Africa to show how these processes interact in national water policy processes.

To illustrate his scathing critique of regimes and their limitations, Conca uses two very different international agreements commonly perceived as successes—Montreal and Basel. As he puts it, “if Montreal is a detective story, Basel is a morality play” (p. 36). But there are similarities, too. Both are regimes that stay outside state boundaries, presume state competency, and feign reliance on objective, scientific analysis.

For Conca, the weakness of the regime approach is that regimes are institutions “in which rules are contested, but roles are not; in which nature is territorialized; and in which legitimacy demands that knowledge be stabilized” (p. 41). While not all countries are treated equally by regimes, their roles are relatively fixed as the authoritative subjects of the regime and their primary objects. Nonstate actors, some of which are critical to the problem at hand, have little influence and no authority. The regime approach also assumes that most of nature sits still within borders and only concerns itself with the parts that do not. With this focus, it ignores the transnational character of economic, social, and political institutions, and treats natural systems piecemeal as, for example, problems of internationally shared river basins rather than watersheds, potentially supporting further commodification of nature into state rights. Finally, regimes use science to stabilize the problem of knowledge in order to make it amenable to political solution, allowing “the currencies of knowledge” to become weapons in states' search for power over regime rules.

Just as regimes have failed effectively to manage most global environmental problems, theory has failed to generate alternate, more holistic, problem framing and broader environmental governance goals. Having enslaved themselves to an excessively narrow definition of regimes as “formal, voluntary, negotiated institutions” (p. 64), theorists have been unable to conceptualize how to hybridize authority, de-territorialize nature, and destabilize knowledge. Conceptions of political institutions as the result of power in the pursuit of interests fail to recognize that all action occurs within an increasingly cohesive, powerful, and global normative context that legitimizes rational-functional institutional instruments and is unable to address most global environmental problems. More fertile ground for growing institutions that resist the hegemonic normative context and premature closure around a narrow regime form lies in issues in which state authority is contested, the quality of local governance is central, and ecological goals are persistently ambiguous. For Conca, the point of theory “is less to predict patterns of institutional development by guessing at the winners than to identify spaces where alternative institutional forms may be found, studied, understood, and nurtured” (p. 71).

Top-down, centralized governance imposes rational-functional institutional forms; bottom-up processes generate novel ideas and institutional forms. Conca shows that unlike Montreal, “a global rivers regime … is a bottom-up process of norm diffusion and normative convergence over time across separate regimes at the basin level” (p. 95). Throughout his analysis of the four institution-building processes in global water governance—development of a formal regime, networking among water experts, social opposition to large dams, and the debate over commoditization of water—the author shows how bottom-up pressures have promoted novel norms that have enlarged and enriched the discourse about global governance of water. For example, in the case of water commoditization, the liberal market norm subscribed to by states and multinationals has been opposed by the idea of water as a human right pressed by norm entrepreneurs. Thus, he concludes that effective institutions should be thought of “not as something to be designed but rather as something to be nurtured” (p. 384).

Conca advises us to “visualize a process of struggle among competing and often conflicting norms that are marked by more complex spatial distributions across multiple [social] sites” (p. 382), implying an ontological reformulation. IEP might be conceived as a dynamic tension between issue-specific bottom-up and top-down processes. Theoretical and empirical interests would then be extended well beyond the usual suspects of states and international (intergovernmental or nonstate) organizations to all actual and potential participants in environmental governance processes. Similarly, positivist epistemology should finally be discarded in favor of some derivative of evolutionary epistemology in which hypotheses about reality are selected for their contribution to increasingly effective action. The prizes notwithstanding, to fully honor Conca's work, his colleagues should begin a wholesale reconsideration of IEP theory.