From Principles to Action: Incentives to Enforce Common Property Water Management

It is now commonplace to acknowledge the long history and broad geographical spread of common property resource management schemes. At present, common property solutions are also debated in arenas such as climate change (where the atmosphere is the commons) and water allocation. These discussions raise general questions about the efficiency and equity of cooperative solutions as well about the likelihood of their implementation. Several factors are relevant in this context: how actors overcome collective action problems in order to create a community of users (i.e., how to prevent “exit”), how to regulate overuse and thus prevent dissipation of resources (i.e., how to control “entrance”), and how to maintain open and democratic decision-making about property use to assure efficient and equitable exploitation. In the high mountain communities of the Valais, common property management of some water and land resources has a long history which has continued until today. The practice is well-documented, providing a wealth of data to examine the evolution of village-level institutions developed to regulate their uncertain resource base in order to meet the needs of current and future generations. This chapter argues that individual incentives and collective control produced systems that were both efficient and equitable. These historical solutions are relevant to contemporary challenges concerning collective action and resource management.