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The proper governance of agriculture water is crucial for meeting global food security and achieving Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), especially when considering small-scale farmers in the Global South. Water management has been examined as a form of the commons for agriculture, but shortcomings in Ostrom’s Design Principles restrict the scope of analysis. There is an urgent need for a novel framework for informing theories and practices found in water commons. This research builds upon Ostrom’s Design Principles to suggest a new lens of environmental justice to explain one successful approach to the governance of water commons. Using an empirically grounded framework, the research examined the governance of irrigation water as a common-pool resource shared by multiple ethnic groups at a World Heritage watershed site in Yunnan Province, China. The research suggested that a local shared notion of multi-dimensional justice, incorporating distributive, procedural, and recognitional justice, is a precondition for the successful management of irrigation water. The policy implication calls for a wider understanding of plurality and multidimensionality of justice and the roles they play in justice practices situated in local value systems in China and beyond.