Rutgerd Boelens has long been interested in the capacity for self-governance of small irrigation systems by Andean peasant Indian communities, as well as interference by government engineering officials. In this book attention is centred on the legislation that forces changes on the governance of the irrigation systems and even on water rights. Neoliberal policies impinge on legislation, and emphasis is placed on private property and the market. In the case of water this means a change from formal or informal community water rights to their individualisation or even to the loss of water rights in a context of growing water demand by other sectors (mining, urban, industrial, commercial agriculture).

Neoliberal policies are against peasant corporate village property (though not against capitalist corporations), as were nineteenth-century liberal policies; they advocate for private property and the market as the basis for progress and economic development. Individualisation of corporate village property does not seem to have benefited Andean Indian peasants, however. A comparative perspective with the impact of nineteenth-century liberal policies on village communities would have been useful. For example, the arguments for individualisation of property rights used by twenty-first-century authors are similar to those of the nineteenth century in Mexico – the Mexican liberal policies finalised in the so-called Reform Laws (1856) that prohibited any kind of corporate property. The adverse consequences of this legislation are said to have been the basis of the Mexican Revolution.

As well as an examination of the negative consequences of the nineteenth-century abolition of the corporate community, a comparative perspective on the village community would have been useful, such as has been provided by Haxthausen in 1847–52, Maine in 1861, Laveleye in 1874 and, more recently, Wade's Village Republics and Ostrom's Governing the Commons. In that Agua y derecho looks into Andean Indian peasant mobilisations against neoliberal policies that affect village corporate rights, the analysis of this capacity for mobilisation at a political level would also benefit from a comparative framework, as has been applied in studies of the pre-war Eastern European peasant parties and other theoretical analyses of peasant-based mobilisations, such as those by David Mitrany, Teodor Shanin and Eric Wolf.

Another important argument in the book is that politicians' statements on expanding public participation in water management as well as statements and legislation on rights for aboriginal people are very limited or even false. In the case of legislation favouring aboriginal people (Andean Indians), implementation is difficult and expensive, is in contradiction to neoliberal legislation and is opposed by interested oligarchies.

The collection of essays is a good introduction to recent impacts of neoliberal policies on Andean Indian peasant communities as well as the defence by these communities of their water rights and their self-governance practices. The insistence on racial and ethnic discrimination is irritating, however, and the authors, mostly foreign to the region, while harping on about the importance of Indians finally voicing their own concerns from their own identity, seem to be assuming the position of being the voice of the Indians, making the essays sometimes more a cri de coeur than a scientific endeavour. Again, in a comparative vein, the work of Manuel Gamio, Moisés Sáenz and Othón de Mendizábal in the early twentieth century as well as the founding of the Instituto Indigenista Interamericano in 1941 should be compared to contemporary attitudes and actions in Europe.

A parallel book on the Andean region, but with a stronger national viewpoint and more focused on establishing the basis for national policies, is El agua, ante nuevos desafíos: actores e iniciativas en Ecuador, Perú y Bolivia by Maria Teresa Oré, Laureano del Castillo, Saskia van Orsel and Jeroen Vos (2009). New research on government policies in the rural communities of the Andean region will also have to take into account the impact of land and water rights registered to women, but here gender-based analysis is mostly lacking, except for Victor Hugo Perales-Hernández's Uso, manejo y gestión del agua (2008) and Zulema Gutiérrez Pérez and Marina Arratia Jiménez's Derechos colectivos de agua y relaciones de género en escenarios de diversidad cultural (2009).

Notwithstanding its shortcomings, this book is a contribution to the evaluation of the impact of neoliberal policies on the poorest, and suggests policies that would benefit the Andean Indian peasants.