Abstract

In decentralized water management with earmarked budgets financed by user taxes and distributed back in the form of subsidies, net gains are often heterogeneous across user categories. This paper explores the role of negotiation over budget allocation and coalition formation in water boards, to provide an explanation for such user-specific gaps between tax payments and subsidies. We propose a bargaining model to represent the sequential nature of the negotiation process in water districts, in which stakeholder representatives may bargain upon a fraction of the budget only. The structural model of budget shares estimated from the data on French Water Agencies performs well as compared with reduced-form estimation. Empirical results confirm the two-stage bargaining process and provide evidence for systematic net gains from the system for agricultural water users.

Highlights

  • In semi-arid regions, agricultural production systems depend greatly on irrigation and encounter increasing challenges: growing uncertainty about how to respond to climate change, severe depletion of natural resources, high volatility in market prices, rises in energy costs, greater pressure from public regulations, and conflicts about sharing communal water resources [1]

  • Typologies are a convenient tool to simplify the diversity of farming systems while effectively describing their heterogeneity [8,9,10]

  • A statistically higher percentage of farmers grow cash crops during rabi in the Beemanabeedu gram panchayat villages, where more than 50% earn more than 12,500 Rs/hectare during rabi, vs. less than 30% in the Berambadi gram panchayat villages

Read more

Summary

Introduction

In semi-arid regions, agricultural production systems depend greatly on irrigation and encounter increasing challenges: growing uncertainty about how to respond to climate change, severe depletion of natural resources, high volatility in market prices, rises in energy costs, greater pressure from public regulations (agricultural, environmental, and health policies), and conflicts about sharing communal water resources [1]. Modeling farming systems at regional scale is a relevant approach to assess “ex-ante” targeted water management policies [3,4]. As modeling all individual farms within a region is usually not feasible, such approaches requires building a farm typology [5] representing in a simplified way the existing diversity of farming systems while accounting to the possible differential response of farm types to management policies. A typology is an artificial way to define different homogeneous groups, categories or types based on specific criteria in order to organize reality from a viewpoint relevant to the objectives of the model [6,7,8]. Typologies are a convenient tool to simplify the diversity of farming systems while effectively describing their heterogeneity [8,9,10]. Since farm types are adapted to local restrictions such as resource availability, it is necessary to identify their spatial distribution or location factors [11]

Methods
Findings
Discussion
Conclusion

Talk to us

Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have

Schedule a call

Disclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.