Water law is mostly about property rights. The State has an important role to play through its core function of defining property and use rights and responsibilities. In modern pluralistic democratic societies, the foundation of the State rests upon the nationalization (the term for the shift from the private to the public sphere) of the costly monitoring and policing needed to protect productive assets from being redistributed to intruding claimants. Without this policing, called the law, systems of property would never have advanced beyond appropriative behavior backed by force. Discussions of water rights usually focus upon the rights of the property right holder and ignore the contingent responsibilities, which that holder has with regard to others in society who do not share the rights. These obligations need to be stressed in any discussion of governance. In addition, any discussion on water rights must take account of land use and land ownership as they are often closely linked. To control the resource the State tends to appropriate most of the rights from the common property group to create State property with a lesser amount owned privately. The State then faces the responsibility of how to deploy the resource to the national advantage. A key to water governance at the beginning of the 21st century is how, through politics, the State can achieve this fairly and equitably, without reducing incentives for efficient use of the resource. (Rogers & Hall 2003)