Abstract
This thirty-year case study uses surveys, semi-structured interviews, and content analysis to examine the adaptive capacity of Zanjera San Marcelino, an indigenous irrigation management system in the northern Philippines. This common pool resource (CPR) system exists within a turbulent social-ecological system (SES) characterized by episodic shocks such as large typhoons as well as novel surprises, such as national political regime change and the construction of large dams. The Zanjera nimbly responded to these challenges, although sometimes in ways that left its structure and function substantially altered. While a partial integration with the Philippine National Irrigation Agency was critical to the Zanjera’s success, this relationship required on-going improvisation and renegotiation. Over time, the Zanjera showed an increasing capacity to learn and adapt. A core contribution of this analysis is the integration of a CPR study within an SES framework to examine resilience, made possible the occurrence of a wide range of challenges to the Zanjera’s function and survival over the long period of study. Long-term analyses like this one, however rare, are particularly useful for understanding the adaptive and transformative dimensions of resilience.
Highlights
This paper chronicles the resilience of an indigenous irrigation collective, Zanjera San Marcelino, by finding complementarity between theories of common pool resources (CPR) and social-ecological systems (SES)
Two questions guided this research: (1) What was the impact of a large irrigation project that switched from engineering-based to participatory planning upon an indigenous irrigation system that operated as a participatory CPR? (2) How did the zanjeras’ CPR regimes change when they began participating in a national irrigation project? These questions were applied to 40 zanjeras, selected through a random stratified sample based on the variables of physical size and location with respect to National Irrigation Administration (NIA)
Zanjera leaders and membership in the pilot area held many meetings and met informally to discuss the project, and they agreed on a list of concerns: they had enough water without the government’s project; they did not want to pay the government irrigation fees; they did not want to cede their long-held, hard-earned water rights over to NIA; they were afraid that the right-of-ways for wider NIA canals might wipe out some of their smaller parcels; and they did not want to give up their zanjeras’ physical irrigation systems or collective management structure and be folded into one of NIA’s Irrigators Associations (IAs)
Summary
Looking over this three decade long Zanjera San Marcelino case study, a broader perspective on institutional persistence and adaptation emerges that has telling implications for our thinking about resilient, community-based resource management Over this period of observation there were repeated episodic shocks, as well as stress and surprises that were outside of the experience of Zanjera members and leadership. When potentially devastating surprises occurred, the Zanjera responded nimbly and creatively, deploying a variety of strategies over the spectrum from resistance to accommodation, sometimes forging new collaborative partnerships, and other times withdrawing from these relationships when the partnerships brought on new surprises We link this ability to both persist and adapt to Zanjera San Marcelino’s collaborative governance structure, adopting a social-ecological systems (SES) perspective that integrates concern with the rules and procedures that enable periodic recovery with the capacity to adapt institutions in response to dynamic and uncertain conditions. We end the discussion by describing how seemingly benign recent stresses are threatening to unravel the Zanjera’s ability to continue to respond to ongoing shock and surprises
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