Abstract
The success of local user groups managing communal natural resources depends to a great degree on external factors such as the legal environment. However, depending on their political power, the local users may exert some influence on the legal environment. This creates important dynamics between external legal factors and local resources governance. To explore this path dependent dynamic in common property resources, I conduct a historical case study of the development and legal transitions of acequias (irrigation ditches) in modern day New Mexico, US. Initially colonized by Spain in 1598, acequias have been developed and used for irrigation even as the region transferred from Spanish to Mexican to US sovereignty. The biggest legal changes occurred during the US territorial period (1851–1912), and I draw on the primary sources in the New Mexico Territorial Archives to better understand the origin, evolution, and motivation of irrigation statutes. I combine this with data on the timing of acequia and other irrigation enterprises development in New Mexico to show how the legal rules influence new development and how that new development shifts the vested interests and political coalitions, influencing future legal changes. The historical perspective highlights that external factors are important, but also that those factors are not entirely independent from the local systems: dynamic feedback loops create path dependence, in this case producing an incremental loss of local governance and power.
Highlights
Like other natural resources, water can fall prone to the tragedy of commons.1 a large body of work has highlighted that the tragedy metaphor is often too simplistic and that many user groups have sustainably managed resources and escaped the neo-classical economic outcome implied by the metaphor (e.g. Baland & Platteau, 1996; Ostrom, 1990, 2009)
The evidence presented makes a compelling case that the communal irrigation systems in New Mexico slowly lost political power, contributing to the legal environment to shift towards other organizations, and making it difficult for the acequias to operate
Beyond the legal history documented here the actual creation of large irrigation districts like Elephant Butte in 1918 (Smith, 2018), the Rio Grande Water Compact in 1938 (Paddock, 2001), groundwater development beginning in the 1940s (Edwards & Smith, 2018; Woodward, 1997), and the actual adjudication of water rights across New Mexico starting in the 1960s (Perramond, 2013) all altered the external setting for acequias even more
Summary
Water can fall prone to the tragedy of commons. a large body of work has highlighted that the tragedy metaphor is often too simplistic and that many user groups have sustainably managed resources and escaped the neo-classical economic outcome implied by the metaphor (e.g. Baland & Platteau, 1996; Ostrom, 1990, 2009). I assess whether they encourage and support the acequias as local organizations based on commons theory and I explore the motivation for the laws by detailing legislative records from the New Mexico Territorial Archives. My argument is that the delay was rooted in the political power the acequias held initially but slowly lost, and, more broadly, that legal changes external from the local governance regimes are not entirely exogenous. In this case, the early laws were supportive of the acequias’ communal arrangements, and acequias continued to propagate. This paper explicitly addresses dynamic political relationships, documenting how the broader governance arrangements are shaped by altering the vested interests slowly over time, increasing the exposure of the local groups to later disturbances
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