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Conference Paper Co-creating Water Commons: Civics, Environmentality, and 'Power With'(2015) Bruns, Bryan"In Andhra Pradesh, Rajasthan, and other parts of India, the Foundation for Ecological Security is working with communities to develop better institutions for managing surface and groundwater. Sketch mapping, participatory hydrological monitoring, experimental games, crop-water budgeting, watershed conservation, and other activities develop shared knowledge of water resources, as citizens consider and carry out improvements. Habitations, containing dozens to hundreds of households, organize to work together, based on universal membership, within nested contexts of larger landscapes and social networks. From a practitioner's perspective, this paper explores ways of facilitating the co-creation of citizenship in water commons."Journal Article Agenda 21 - Chapter 11 - Combating Deforestation: Ecosystem Management(1998) Bucknum, Susan"This note discusses the United States' adherence to its Agenda 21 commitment to combat deforestation. Section II of the paper discusses the specific provisions of Chapter 11 that recommend strong governmental policy schemes and advocate a sustainable ecosystem management approach to the forests. Specifically, this section explains the concepts of Chapter 11 provisions and their importance to the United States. Section III examines actions taken by the United States to sustain its National Forests both before and after the Earth Summit. Section IV evaluates the United States' actions by analyzing the efforts of the United States Forest Service in implementing ecosystem management and determining the consistency of those efforts with Chapter 11 and the Forest Principles. Finally, Section V provides recommendations for future United States action in managing its National Forests so as to achieve the goals expressed in Chapter 11 of Agenda 21."Conference Paper Common Property as an Institutional Response to Ecological Variability(1992) Wilson, Paul N.; Thompson, Gary D."Relationships between the potential productivity of land and property rights generally have been couched in terms of measures of risk, also is critical in relating property rights and organizational arrangements developed within various property regimes. Meteorlogical and hydrological research results support the appropriateness of risk-spreading property regimes, especially in arid and semi-arid lands of the world. Spatial diversification models indicate that common property regimes can be a rational response to ecological variability. In the case of the ejido system in Mexico, the current reform efforts may have limited appeal on the grazing areas in the northern half of the country."Conference Paper Challenges in Getting off the Ground the New Nicaraguan Water Law: From Farmer Groups to Formalized Irrigation Districts?(2011) Novo, P.; Garrido, A.; Meinzen-Dick, Ruth"The Nicaraguan Water Law was passed in September 2007. While all new Water Laws need time to be implemented, the progress in Nicaragua is meager. Nicaragua’s water sector, especially in rural areas, is highly informal and primarily based on small water supply systems and on local informal water institutions. The new Water Law foresees setting up irrigation districts to improve water management in the agricultural sector. Despite the lack of formal users’ organizations, there is evidence of farmer groups sharing and managing common irrigation systems without any formal bonds or statutes. The objective of this research is to assess the challenges in the formalization process of the agricultural water sector in a developing country, such as Nicaragua. Since major water-related problems have already been identified, the new Water Law still faces a number of barriers that may delay its implementation. It is essential to indentify the socioeconomic, institutional and environmental factors that structure incentives for farmers to willingly become involved in a formalization process. The theoretical framework is based on the literature on collective action and social capital. The empirical focus is given by 5 focus groups and 98 surveys hold in the Upper Rio Viejo Sub-basin in North Nicaragua. The study focuses on (i) the problems related to agricultural production that farmers face, (ii) how they are organized for irrigation, (iii) how they perceive public organizations and (iv) the pros and cons of formalizing in irrigation districts. The study attempts to contribute to the Water Law implementation by analyzing both the impact of the Water Law in agricultural water managed areas and the cooperative behavior of the different farmer groups considered in the Upper Rio Viejo Sub-basin."Working Paper In Praise of the Commons: Another Case Study(2001) Tietzel, ManfredSubsequently published under the same title in the European Journal of Law and Economics, 12: 159-171 2001. "Common-pool allocation systems do not have the best of reputations in economic literature, since they are normally connected with the dissipation of rents. The present case study argues that in the case of procurement and allocation of human organ transplants a reciprocal common-pool allocation system is superior other systems, including market allocation."Journal Article Global-Scale Patterns of Forest Fragmentation(2000) Riitters, Kurt; Wickham, James; O'Neill, Robert; Jones, Bruce; Smith, Elizabeth"We report an analysis of forest fragmentation based on 1-km resolution land-cover maps for the globe. Measurements in analysis windows from 81 km 2 (9 x 9 pixels, 'small' scale) to 59,049 km 2 (243 x 243 pixels, 'large' scale) were used to characterize the fragmentation around each forested pixel. We identified six categories of fragmentation (interior, perforated, edge, transitional, patch, and undetermined) from the amount of forest and its occurrence as adjacent forest pixels. Interior forest exists only at relatively small scales; at larger scales, forests are dominated by edge and patch conditions. At the smallest scale, there were significant differences in fragmentation among continents; within continents, there were significant differences among individual forest types. Tropical rain forest fragmentation was most severe in North America and least severe in Europe-Asia. Forest types with a high percentage of perforated conditions were mainly in North America (five types) and Europe-Asia (four types), in both temperate and subtropical regions. Transitional and patch conditions were most common in 11 forest types, of which only a few would be considered as 'naturally patchy' (e.g., dry woodland). The five forest types with the highest percentage of interior conditions were in North America; in decreasing order, they were cool rain forest, coniferous, conifer boreal, cool mixed, and cool broadleaf."Conference Paper State Formation in Community Spaces: Control over Forests in the Kumaon Himalaya, India(1999) Agrawal, Arun"In the early part of this century, 1916 and 1921 were especially dry years in the Kumaon region of the Indian Himalaya. In each of these years, forest fires racked the countryside, burning beyond the power of the colonial British government to control or extinguish. It was not just the dry weather that was to blame. Villagers in Kumaon set the forest on fire; the dry weather merely helped their efforts along. The containment of this 'planned incendiarism' was one of the main planks of the scientific forestry that the colonial state had begun to introduce in the hills in the last quarter of the 19th century, and especially from around 1910."Conference Paper Social Capital and Cooperation: Communication, Bounded Rationality, and Behavioral Heuristics(1992) Gardner, Roy; Ostrom, Elinor; Walker, James M."Common-pool resources are natural or man made resources used in common by multiple users, where yield is subtractable (rival) and exclusion is nontrivial (but not necessarily impossible). The role of face-to-face communication in CPR situations, where individuals must repeatedly decide on the number of resource units to withdraw from a common-pool, is open to considerable theoretical and policy debate. In this paper, we summarize the findings from a series of experiments in which we operationalize face-toface communication (without the presence of external enforcement). In an attempt to understand the high degree of cooperation observed in the laboratory, we turn to a bounded rationality explanation as a starting point for understanding how cooperative behavior can be supponed in decision environments where game theory suggests it will not."Working Paper Non-Transferable Utility Values of Voting Games(1987) Gardner, Roy"A voting game is a non-transferable utility (NTU) game with a simple game structure. When the Shapley-Shubik index of a simple game is strictly positive, then the corresponding voting game has a strict NTU value. Moreover, the Shapley-Shubik index is the unique NTU value for a certain class of voting games. These results lead to a solution of the problem of a group choosing its leader."Conference Paper 'That's Not Right': Resistance to Enclosure in Newfoundland Fisheries(1995) McCay, Bonnie J."The option of quasi-privatization of fisheries, or individual fishery quotas, is one case among many involving the use of market mechanisms to help manage common pool resources. As a Beijer Institute working group has emphasized, it is very challenging to develop market-based systems that not only achieve economic goals such as efficiency but also deal with distributional equity in ways that help foster resource stewardship. This paper reports on recent field research among Newfoundland fishers who are on the verge of adopting privatized fishing quotas but are resisting this change in property rights, as well as those who adopted such a system but with stringent limitations. The case study is part of an attempt to identity the role of 'community' and related social and cultural factors in resistance to enclosure of the commons."