Scarcity, Equity, and Transparency: General Principles for Successfully Governing the Water Commons

A comparative cross-cultural study of several successful farmer-operated irrigation systems in two different parts of the world—the Andes of South America and the Mediterranean coast of Spain—reveals that the same set of institutions (or rules and operating principles) produces sustainable positive outcomes in each case. Several successful irrigation systems, well-documented in the literature, are thought to be of fundamentally distinct types and known to be of widely different scales: Valencia, Alicante, and Murcia in Spain. This success can only be explained in terms of basic similarities underlying the more obvious but superficial differences noted previously by other researchers. Similarities include operating principles the author first identified in his ethnographic research on successful irrigation communities in Peru. A brief overview of the comparative literature on successful systems in other semi-arid regions— India, Nepal, the Philippines—shows that the same basic system for sharing water under conditions of scarcity has emerged independently in a great many communities throughout the world, suggesting that this system is an optimal one, and constitutes a clear and unprecedented case of parallel or convergent social evolution. The author concludes with some implications of such a general model—or “universal” schema—for both the theory and practice of sustainable local irrigation.