Browsing by Author "Zetland, David"

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The End of Abundance: How Water Bureaucrats Created and Destroyed the Southern California Oasis
(2009) Zetland, David
"This paper describes how water bureaucrats shaped Southern California’s urban development and put the region on a path of unsustainable growth. This path was popular and successful until the supply shocks of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s made shortage increasingly likely. The drought of 1987‐1991 revealed that the norms and institutions of abundance were ineffective in scarcity. Ever since then, Southern California has teetered on the edge of shortage and economic and social disruption. Despite the risks of business as usual, water bureaucrats, politicians and developers continue to defend a status quo management strategy that serves their interests but not those of citizens. Professional norms, control of the discourse, and insulation from outside pressure slow or inhibit the adoption of management techniques suitable to scarcity. Pressure from increasing population and politically and environmentally destabilised supplies promise to make rupture more likely and more costly."
The Little Book of the Commons
(KYSQ Press, 2022) Zetland, David
"The Commons are as widely misunderstood and overlooked as they are widespread and critical in sustaining and enriching our lives. They come from nature, but humans can also create them. They are open for all to enjoy but often suffer from abuse and neglect. This book explains how we've come to understand the formation, function and failure of the commons and uses examples to show how the commons touch our lives in so many ways."
Teaching the Commons
(2019) Zetland, David
"In this paper, I describe 'Common Pool Management' (CPM), a course I designed to help students understand the difficulties in managing a real commons, how I taught and evolved CPM, and how CPM impacted my teaching and research. CPM has three important elements. First, students are randomized into groups that are 'too big to succeed.' Second, students choose and tackle a 'commons dilemma' within the duration of the course (Ostrom et al. 1994). Third, student grades depend on collective success and peer assessments. After teaching CPM seven times, I have these observations on the three elements above. First, students in 'too-large' groups need time to organize themselves productively, but they realize the importance of frequent, face to face communications and discipline to prevent free-riding. Second, students struggle to establish institutions to transforms common-pool dilemmas into common-pool situations. Most groups fail for lack of a simple, enforceable regime for, say, parking in the bike rack or collecting washed clothes from the laundry room. In a few cases, a group's 'pilot' intervention altered informal norms or inspired policy changes. Third, students learned a great deal about conflict and cooperation within their group, how to manage free-riders and reward cooperators, and the importance of endogenous rule-making and monitoring. As a teacher, I learned how to better manage students and incentives across all my courses, how to better communicate with my students, and how to reform course structures in response to student suggestions, struggles and surprises. As a researcher, I am pleased to present this paper as an inspiration to anyone who wants to think about putting theory into practice and improving public and academic understanding of the complexities of the commons."