Abstract
This study investigated a community-managed irrigation system, the Wang hilltop pond irrigation system (WHPIS) in Guangdong, China. Via a field survey and case study, this paper describes the WHPIS’s two-stage process of evolutionary governance since the 1960s. First, it explains how the WHPIS achieved 50 years of successful self-governance and robust operation. Then, based on the requirements for adaptive governance outlined by Dietz et al. (2003), it addresses how the WHPIS, when faced with a climate-anomaly, has achieved robustness through institutional change. It finds that with strong social capital based on lineage events, the community, working in partnership with the local government, collectively revised investment, maintenance, and water distribution rules, and developed a new patroller rule. These new rules were effectively enforced by the community through social capital, which enabled the WHPIS to adapt to the climate anomaly. Last, this study concludes that a long-term self-governing irrigation system disturbed by abrupt change can be restored to a robust state via institutional measures enabling adaptive governance. Strong social capital enables a community to absorb the external power from the local government and internalize it, enforce incremental rule changes, and efficiently achieve a robust irrigation system subject to adaptive governance.
Highlights
The problem of governing irrigation systems challenged by external disturbances has gained increasing attention in recent years (Dietz et al 2003; Araral 2013a; Yu et al 2015; Lam and Chiu 2016; Wang et al 2016; Villamayor-Tomas 2017)
This study investigated a community-managed irrigation system, the Wang hilltop pond irrigation system (WHPIS) in Guangdong, China
These new rules were effectively enforced by the community through social capital, which enabled the WHPIS to adapt to the climate anomaly
Summary
The problem of governing irrigation systems challenged by external disturbances has gained increasing attention in recent years (Dietz et al 2003; Araral 2013a; Yu et al 2015; Lam and Chiu 2016; Wang et al 2016; Villamayor-Tomas 2017). External disturbances indicate unexpected changes in the environment, typically climate change, which breaks the normal service flow of the irrigation systems (Villamayor-Tomas 2017). Some systems are generally robust, they are characterized as having trade-offs (Anderies et al 2004) and can lose essential functions with changes in the ecological, sociological, and economic environments. This has been seen in the Indonesian subak system (Lansing 1991), the Spanish irrigation community in Murcia (Pérez et al 2011), the Nepalese irrigation systems (Bastakoti and Shivakoti 2012), and the American Taos Valley (Schoon and Cox 2012). Just 1 mu per capita on average (see Table 1)
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