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Latin America has entered a new political era. The election of left-leaning, populist governments in Brazil, Venezuela, Chile and Bolivia has prompted speculation particularly from conservative commentators in the United States that public policy in those countries will now be driven more by outmoded ideological convictions than by sound social goals and proven economic principles.

Yet, how the Bolivian government of Evo Morales, the country's first indigenous president, is tackling the contentious issue of water rights suggests that a very different dynamic is at work. The Morales administration, extending a process initiated under a former government, has used citizen engagement supported by scientific reasoning and hard quantitative, evidence-based policy work to try to achieve a long overdue goal in Bolivia: equitable access to water.

Water has long been a source of bitter conflict in Bolivia. Poor campesinos and indigenous people (about 60 per cent of the country's population) struggle for a small share of this precious resource. The powerful mining, industrial and hydroelectric sectors have been free to take what they want, a surefire recipe for social unrest.

Bolivia's explosive water politics made news in North America during the infamous Cochabamba water war in 2000. At that time, masses of people descended on Bolivia's third-largest city to protest against plans by Aguas del Tunari, a subsidiary of the U.S.-based Bechtel Corp., to raise water rates. The company had taken over Cochabamba's water utility in a privatization plan called for by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. The ensuing protests brought mayhem to the streets and destabilized the government, forcing it to cancel its contract with the private water firm. Bolivian water was again in the news in 2005, when social mobilization over the private concession of water to a French company, Aguas del Illimani, in the city of El Alto forced the government to cancel the contract.

Despite these clashes, a lot of positive changes have occurred. Dialogue has been encouraged and consensus brokered between the political left and right, between competing social and economic sectors whose divergent world views have more often been given expression in street protests, strikes and other forms of public confrontation.

The first steps toward consensus began under a previous government. In the wake of the Cochabamba water war, then-president Jorge Quiroga began an experiment with an inclusive approach to policy-making. The Consejo Interinstitutional del Agua was created and charged with drafting a water management law based on consultation with a broad range of social groups, including those that had protested against privatization in 2000.

Indigenous and peasant organizations had always been excluded from policy-making and had good reason to distrust this new consultation process. What gave them reassurance, however, was the inclusion of scientific research as the cornerstone of decision-making. The research process (supported by Canada's International Development Research Centre, and of which I was a part) employed a state-of-the-art mathematical water rights simulation model known as Mike Basin, developed by the Danish Hydrological Institute and used in many countries. This model allowed us to compare competing proposals for water distribution that had been offered as the basis of a new water law and, consequently, as a means of ending feuding over water.

The first proposal was to grant individual campesino families a certain water entitlement (measured in litres per second). The second proposal was to formalize the traditional, communal water distribution system that existed in indigenous communities with water use regulated by the communities themselves.

When it had been fed all the raw data, Mike Basin found that the traditional system, though not free of waste, allocated water more efficiently and equitably than the private market model. We believe this is partly because of the tight system of social controls that indigenous communities have evolved around water (requiring, for instance, that all families make sacrifices during times of drought). Since this conclusion was based on cold mathematical calculation, it cut through much of the heated ideological rhetoric that typically accompanies the debate over water and allowed for a surprisingly broad-based consensus.

In turn, that consensus enabled the government to pass a new irrigation law allowing indigenous people, peasants and small farmers control over their water resources. This was a remarkable achievement, since Bolivia had tried 32 times to replace a clearly dysfunctional water law that had been on the books since 1906.

The new Morales government is moving forward still further.

One of its first acts in office was to create a new ministry for water. This is a huge step since, previously, no one institution had been in charge of the overall public interest in the allocation of water.

Bureaucracies responsible for mining, municipalities or hydroelectricity all spoke for their own political constituencies. And since poor indigenous communities had no champions within the halls of power, their protests were never heard when, for example, a privatized urban water monopoly in Cochabamba proposed to divert water previously used to irrigate poor farmers' crops. That is, unless they took their message to the streets.

The Morales government is also planning, in the fall, to record and enshrine the ancestral water rights of indigenous and campesino families and communities under the framework of the irrigation law. What is particularly intriguing about this move is that the government, seen from abroad as encumbered by the ideological baggage of the left, is taking a classically right-wing, free-market approach - that is, seeing well-defined and enforceable property rights as the first step toward stability.

Not that this should be too much of a surprise, since Bolivians have been making a habit of defying expectations as we search for a "made in Bolivia" solution to our water woes. In the process, we have arrived at some conclusions with, potentially, international applicability: Meaningful consultation is essential to resolving resource disputes. If consultation is nourished by good, objective research, enduring solutions can be found to end long-standing political stalemates.

Juan Carlos Alurralde is a water resources engineer and director of the La Paz-based Agua Sustentable. His organization's research on water rights regulation systems received funding from Canada's International Development Research Centre.