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Journal Article Water Rights Arenas in the Andes: Networks to Strengthen Local Water Control(2008) Boelens, Rutgerd"The threats that Andean water user collectives face are ever‐growing in a globalising society. Water is power and engenders social struggle. In the Andean region, water rights struggles involve not only disputes over the access to water, infrastructure and related resources, but also over the contents of water rules and rights, the recognition of legitimate authority, and the discourses that are mobilised to sustain water governance structures and rights orders. While open and large‐scale water battles such as Bolivia’s 'Water Wars' or nationwide mobilisations in Ecuador get the most public attention, low‐profile and more localised water rights encounters, ingrained in local territories, are far more widespread and have an enormous impact on the Andean waterscapes. This paper highlights both water arenas and the ways they operate between the legal and the extralegal. It shows how local collectives build on their own water rights foundations to manage internal water affairs but which simultaneously offer an important home‐base for strategising wider water defence manoeuvres. Hand‐in‐hand with inwardly reinforcing their rights bases, water user groups aim for horizontal and vertical linkages thereby creating strategic alliances. Sheltering an internal school for rights and identity development, reflection and organisation, these local community foundations, through open and subsurface linkages and fluxes, provide the groundwork for upscaling their water rights defence networks to national and transnational arenas."Journal Article Access and Resilience: Analyzing the Construction of Social Resilience to the Threat of Water Scarcity(2006) Langridge, Ruth; Christian-Smith, Juliet; Lohse, Kathleen A."Resilience is a vital attribute that characterizes a system's capacity to cope with stress. Researchers have examined the measurement of resilience in ecosystems and in social-ecological systems, and the comparative vulnerability of social groups. Our paper refocuses attention on the processes and relations that create social resilience. Our central proposition is that the creation of social resilience is linked to a community's ability to access critical resources. We explore this proposition through an analysis of how community resilience to the stress of water scarcity is influenced by historically contingent mechanisms to gain, control, and maintain access to water. Access is defined broadly as the ability of a community to actually benefit from a resource, and includes a wider range of relations than those derived from property rights alone. We provide a framework for assessing the construction of social resilience and use it to examine, first, the different processes and relations that enabled four communities in northern California to acquire access to water, and second, how access contributed to their differential levels of resilience to potential water scarcity. Legal water rights are extremely difficult to alter, and given the variety of mechanisms that can generate access, our study suggests that strengthening and diversifying a range of structural and relational mechanisms to access water can enhance a community's resilience to water scarcity."Working Paper Farmer-Based Financing of Operations in the Niger Valley Irrigation Schemes(2000) Abernethy, Charles L.; Sally, Hilmy; Lonsway, Kurt; Maman, Chegou"Presents the results of case-studies of the functioning of four pump-based irrigation systems in the Niger River Valley. Prospects for sustainability are analyzed, especially in the light of the government's policy of promoting irrigator organizations to take over responsibilities for operation and maintenance."Working Paper Improving Irrigated Agriculture: Institutional Reform and the Small Farmer(1982) Bromley, Daniel W."Irrigation is a technological and institutional innovation which permits cultivation of lands otherwise ill-suited to agriculture. The institutional environment in which irrigation takes place is critical to the successful operation of any system. This institutional environment has received little analytical attention by those concerned with irrigation. "A model of farmer interdependence is developed and is related to the concept of farmers as cautious optimizers. This allows a focus on institutional uncertainty as a major impediment to creating irrigation systems which meet both efficiency and equity goals. "Suggestions for improving existing irrigation systems-and for designing new ones-are derived from the framework."Conference Paper Collective Action in the Management of Water Sources in the Highlands of Eastern Africa(2008) Mowo, J.G.; German, Laura; Wickham, James; Zenebe, A.; Mazengia, Waga"Participatory constraints and opportunities analysis conducted in three watersheds in Tanzania and Ethiopia established that water quantity and quality were the major constraints to adopting integrated natural resource management (INRM) practices. The African Highlands Initiative (AHI) working with communities in the three watersheds considered management of water sources as an important entry point for enhanced INRM. Focus group discussion, key informants interviews and historical trend analysis were used to obtain information on the status of water sources in the target watersheds, reasons why most of them have deteriorated, the impact of this on NRM and available opportunities for reversing this trend. The study established that rehabilitation of water sources was possible through collective action, which in this paper refers to direct actions carried out by groups of people working toward common goals. Further, appropriate policies and realistic by-laws, planting of water friendly tree species and putting in place an effective management structure were necessary for the long term survival of the water sources. Through AHI interventions, 32 water sources have been rehabilitated in Baga Watershed in Tanzania where target communities indicated a reduction on the time spent in collecting water from 5 hours to 5 minutes. A health centre in one village in this watershed reported a 55 % reduction in the incidences of waterborne diseases. In Ginchi (Ethiopia) three springs have been rehabilitated and are being used to protect the catchments around through enacting of local rules and regulations for their management. In Areka (Ethiopia) a total of 300 households have benefitted from rehabilitated water sources while reduction in the time for collecting water has increased the time available to attending to other developmental activities. It is concluded that collective action in managing water sources is an effective way of addressing issues that are beyond the capability of individual households, and through this, save time that can be directed to other activities including NRM, apart from having a healthier community."Conference Paper Agricultural Groundwater Exploitation: An Experimental Study(2006) Giordana, Gastón; Montginoul, Marielle; Willinger, Mark"This paper is the initial part of a larger study motivated by challenges that the current practice in groundwater exploitation poses to sustainable development of coastal zones. The growing pressure on costal groundwater resources, due to the accelerated urban and tourism industry development combined to an irrigation water demand more and more demanding on high water quality, has arisen a commons problem that could have local catastrophic consequences. Notably, the overexploitation of groundwater in coastal zones may lead to water resource degradation as consequence of salt water intrusion into the aquifer. We present the case of the Roussillon coastal plane, a zone located in the Pyrénées-Orientales department (South of France), which is a good representative case of water problems faced in southern Europe. In this region, water demand is satisfied by surface water and a two-layer local aquifer. The superficial layer has sea connections, meaning that overexploitation can generate sea water intrusion. The layers are naturally separated by an impermeable substratum. This independency can be broken by an overexploitation of the deep layer; the impermeable substratum could become locally permeable letting polluted water from the superficial layer percolate. "We concentrate our effort on the agricultural water demand that remains the second one, in quantitative terms, after the urban water demand. Farmers can generally satisfy their needs by extracting water from substitute resources, namely, surface water (from irrigation channels) and groundwater. Due to end-users demand (of crop products) and due to irrigation techniques, farmers prefer groundwater than surface, especially the deep layer. But farmers' water exploitation behavior is not well known: tube wells are not registered even if it is compulsory and there is no water meter. In order to better analyze their behavior under this configuration, we implement laboratory experiments, by studying an N-person discrete-time deterministic dynamic game of T periods fixed duration. The objective function is stage-additive and depends on a state variable, whose dynamic evolution is linked to past decisions of all players. Players have to decide whether to use a private good or, by paying a lump-sum fee, to extract on one of two imperfectly substitute Common-Pool Resources (CPRs). Two type of experiments were done: firstly, we considered only the quantitative problem; in a second step, we introduced the qualitative problem and then the possible connection between the two layers leading non only to an overexploitation of the deep layer but also to its pollution, which impact farmers' income. For each case, two treatments were done. In the affect each CPR separately. In a second treatment, the CPRs are not independent, both types of externalities are considered. The observations are confronted to three benchmark outcomes corresponding to distinct behavioural assumptions: (a) sub-game perfection, (b) joint payoff maximization, and (c) myopic behaviour."Conference Paper Institutional Failure and Reform: A Problem in Economic and Political Analysis of Water Resource Development(1967) Ostrom, Vincent(From pp. 1, 2, & 8): "The purpose of this conference is to consider the question of what special contribution, if any, can political scientists make to the analysis and formulation of public policy? At an earlier time, essentially the same question might have been posed by inquiring about What special contribution can political scientists make to political reform? More recently, the reform motif has become something of an anathema to the more scientifically rigorous political scientists. Yet, we keep returning to the problems of reform like moths drawn to a candle flame. Perhaps we will be able to make a special contribution as political scientists to the analysis and formulation of public policy only when we develop the capability for analyzing the issue of reform with some measure of professional competence. "My invitation to participate in this meeting was to direct attention to the tangible and practical problems of public policy associated with water resource development and not to discourse about political reform as such. Yet, contemporary studies of water resource development persistently turn to allegations of institutional failure among resource development and management agencies and conclude by either explicitly or implicitly proposing a program of reform. Most of these studies have been made by economists, those done by political scientists have a similar, albeit, variant approach to institutional failure and reform. The studies by economists are both more systematic and more consistent in their critique, and I shall use their work as the principal point of departure. "There are quite tangible and practical reasons, unrelated to the wiles of politicians, for problems of water resource development to become deeply involved in the political process. The water problem is, in fact, a multitude of problems, but most of these are problems of fluidity. Whenever water behaves as a liquid, it has the characteristics of 1) a common pool, flow resource involving; 2) a complex bundle of potential goods and bads which sustain; 3) a high level of interaction or interdependency among the various joint and alternative uses. The interrelationships among all three of these characteristics of a water resource situation simply compounds the difficulties in settling upon stable, long-term institutional arrangements for the economics development of water resources."Journal Article Water Footprinting: How to Address Water Use in Life Cycle Assessment?(2010) Berger, Markus; Finkbeiner, Matthias"As freshwater is a vital yet often scarce resource, the life cycle assessment community has put great efforts in method development to properly address water use. The International Organization for Standardization has recently even launched a project aiming at creating an international standard for ‘water footprinting’. This paper provides an overview of a broad range of methods developed to enable accounting and impact assessment of water use. The critical review revealed that methodological scopes differ regarding types of water use accounted for, inclusion of local water scarcity, as well as differentiation between watercourses and quality aspects. As the application of the most advanced methods requires high resolution inventory data, the trade-off between ‘precision’ and ‘applicability’ needs to be addressed in future studies and in the new international standard."Working Paper Irrigation Impacts on Income Inequality and Poverty Eleviation: Policy Issues and Options for Improved Management of Irrigation Systems(2002) Bhattarai, Madhusudan; Sakthivadivel, R.; Hussain, Intizar"This study explores the conceptual and policy issues relating to the impact that irrigation has on crop production, farm income, inequities in income distribution and poverty alleviation. It also focuses, specifically, on poverty issues associated with head-tail water distribution inequity in an irrigation system."Journal Article Sustaining Aquatic Ecosystems in Boreal Regions(1998) Schindler, David"Few boreal waters are managed in a sustainable manner, because cumulative effects of a variety of human activities are not considered. Fisheries and water quality have declined in most large water bodies of the southern boreal zone. Some of the reasons are direct, including overexploitation of fisheries, alteration of flow patterns, introductions of non-native species, and discharge of eutrophying nutrients and persistent contaminants. However, improper management of watersheds and airsheds also causes degradation of aquatic ecosystems. Clear-cut logging, climatic warming, acid precipitation, and stratospheric ozone depletion are among the more important of these indirect stressors. There are important interactions among these stressors, requiring that they not be treated in isolation. Ecological sustainability of boreal waters would require that exploitation of all parts of the boreal landscape be much lower than it is at present. Unfortunately, management for sustainability is lagging far behind scientific understanding in most countries."