The Moral Economy of Water: General Principles for Successfully Managing the Commons

Few works in social science have had as much impact on policy as Garrett Hardin's attempt, in "The Tragedy of the Commons" , to explain the tendency of people to overexploit the resources that they hold in common in terms of an irresolvable conflict between the interests of the individual, said to be inherently selfish, and the cooperative needs of the group. The results of such a tragedy are, of course, evident today in many parts of the world in the use of common-property resources. Yet many authors have strongly criticized the theory, based on numerous examples of communities where local people have managed such resources cooperatively, and done so quite effectively, over a very long period of time. This rebuttal has turned attention toward the related task [2–5] of devising an alternative theory to explain how people have been able to overcome their conflict of interest, escape the 'commons dilemma', and pursue the common good. Progress toward this goal has been especially noteworthy with regard to one vital resource, irrigation water, which is particularly significant given the impending water crisis that threatens nearly every country in the 'developing' world. Recent research, however, lends new support to the effort and promises to thoroughly refute and revise the conventional theory. It indicates that local people in a great many communities in several different parts of the world long ago arrived, independently, at a sustainable solution to the 'commons dilemma', creating a set of principles for sharing scarce water in an equitable and efficient manner that minimizes social conflict. Wherever communities have managed a scarce resource autonomously, and done so effectively over a long period of time, the principles of distribution and use appear in many cases to be highly similar if not exactly the same, and this seems to be true regardless of whether the resource is communally or privately owned. This finding could have a major impact on the policies of institutions such as the World Bank and the various regional banks with which it is affiliated. Their development programs continue to be strongly shaped by the conventional theory and they now advocate water privatization – along with State ownership and control, one of Hardin's proposed solutions to the commons dilemma – on a massive scale . My research indicates that water markets do not work in the manner that they are widely thought to work, at least not in the small-scale systems that typify most of the 'developing world', since it reveals heretofore unrecognized commonalities in the dynamics of successful communal and market systems. Scholars and scientists have made steady and important progress in critiquing and revising the theory of the tragedy, most notably Ostrom [5, 7, 8 ] and Tang , who have led the way in identifying, through comparison of a large number of case studies in different countries, basic design principles that all effective locally-run irrigation systems seem to share. Their focus has tended to be on small-scale canal systems of 1000 hectares or less , the kind of "indigenous" or peasant community system found throughout much of the globe, since such limited scale, and the kind of intensive face-to-face interaction among water users that this makes possible, seems to be a critical thing that the systems have in common [7a, . However, most of the principles identified thus far remain rather abstract, more suitable for predicting the general conditions under which people will be able to come up with a solution than for showing them how, in concrete terms, to manage water effectively in situations where they have failed or lost the ability to do so on their own.