Communal Water Management Research Articles

Resilience of communal water management in La Gomera (Canary Islands): discussing with Hardin and Ostrom

ABSTRACT We analyse the main keys of the traditional agroecosystem of the palm grove (Phoenix canariensis) in irrigated terraces in Valle de Arriba in the municipality of Valle Gran Rey (La Gomera, Canary Islands, Spain). Here, irrigation water is not only associated with the land but is also being managed as a communal resource by the inhabitants. The change in the economic model from agriculture to tourism is putting the survival of this traditional agrarian system at risk (agricultural exit, population ageing and economic touristification). The need for preservation is then suggested, but the question that leads us to a re-edition of the so-called “Tragedy of the Commons” arises again: What actors should carry out this preservation? Private agents or the State, as suggested by Hardin, or the rural community, as maintained by Ostrom? We conclude that for the case studied of La Gomera, the rural community has kept managing the communal water resource but at the expense of the secular class struggles won by the farming community against the privatisation of water by private agents and/or the State.

Revisiting irrigation efficiency before restoring ancient irrigation canals in multi-functional, nature-based water systems

CONTEXTIn the Middle Ages, the Muslims introduced communal water management in the Iberian Peninsula. Some irrigation systems of medieval origin are still in operation in the mountainous areas of Southern Spain. Snowmelt runoff is diverted during spring from high-altitude streams into contoured recharge ditches that convey the water to areas of high infiltration (shallow aquifers). This regulates and delays discharge into the main river, from which downstream flow is diverted, during late spring and summer, to irrigation ditches that supply terraces and fields on river plains. The Busquístar irrigation ditch and its irrigation scheme comprise one of these ancient systems. OBJECTIVES1) To characterize the Busquístar system, its water source and regulation, its water users' association, its multi-functionality, and its quality as a nature-based solution for water security. 2) To review the irrigation efficiency concept applied to the restoration of ancient irrigation systems, taking into account their ecosystem services. METHODSi) Semi-structured interviews with stakeholders to evaluate irrigation system operation and perceptions of multi-functionality; ii) field surveys for description of the irrigation ditch and its riparian flora; iii) satellite imagery for quantifying riparian vegetation; iv) water balance for irrigation efficiency computation. RESULTS AND CONCLUSIONSCrop production is the main function of the Busquístar irrigation scheme but additional ecosystem services are creation of landscape and biodiversity. Eight riparian plant communities were distinguished along the irrigation ditch. The discharge measured at its head on 23 July and 3 September 2017 represented 14 and 50% of the mean river flow in July and September, respectively. The flow measured at the first bifurcation of the ditch was about half that at the head, revealing the proportion filtered along its 6470-m long conveyance reach. The remaining flow was then diverted to 4 branches along the 3140-m long distribution reach proportionally to the irrigable area in each branch. Return flows and irrigation efficiency were estimated for the two measuring dates considering riparian and crop evapotranspiration. The estimated efficiency was highly dependent on which water uses were considered beneficial and on the scale of analysis, field, entire system or watershed. SIGNIFICANCEThe study revealed the integrated approach behind the traditional water management in these ancient systems. The article proposes a review of the irrigation efficiency concept that allows reconciling the character of a nature-based solution with the current restoration of the system, responding to the needs of the emerging export horticulture in the area.

Subak, a Nature-based Solutions Evidence from Indonesia

Subak, an inherited communal water management in the agricultural system for centuries in Bali Island – Indonesia, has been widely known as a UNESCO World Heritage Culture since 2012. Subak’s philosophy “Tri Hita Karana” (three causes of prosperity) has become the foundation for Subak members to practice sustainable agriculture. Its institutional and operational practices were found to be a good example of ecosystem services management in a cultural way. In an attempt to assess Subak’s eligibility as a Nature-based Solutions (NbS) activities in ensuring the ecosystem services delivered to its people, we conducted a self-assessment using 8 criteria and 21 indicators based on NbS guidelines. The result shows that Subak addressed three out of seven societal challenges as a core of NbS: environmental degradation and biodiversity loss, food security, and water security. We also identified some problems and challenges faced by Balinese and Subak in terms of the system’s sustainability. We concluded that Subak could be categorized as an NbS, specifically NbS Type 2 for sustainability and multifunctionality of managed ecosystems. Supports from the central government both in terms of regulatory and policies are needed, as well as promoting Subak to other related sectors such ecotourism.

NEGOTIATING WATER ON UNEQUAL TERMS: CATTLE LOANS, DEPENDENCIES AND POWER IN COMMUNAL WATER MANAGEMENT IN NORTHWEST NAMIBIA

Abstract This article shows how the distribution of costs for communal boreholes in the Kunene region of northwest Namibia is largely shaped by patron-client relationships based on cattle loans among pastoralists. Drawing on a case study in the context of state water decentralisation reforms, the paper argues that, while cattle loans provide livelihood security for poor Himba herders, they also limit their bargaining power with regards to negotiating local contribution rules for the communal water point. Poorer heads of household find it difficult to negotiate on equal terms with their wealthy counterparts because they depend on their cattle transfers to make a living. As a result, contribution rules disadvantaging the poor are put into practice, leading to tensions between herders and putting pressure on social relations of support.

Socio-ecological dimensions of Andean pastoral landscape change: bridging traditional ecological knowledge and satellite image analysis in Sajama National Park, Bolivia

In the Andes, indigenous pastoral communities are confronting new challenges in managing mountain peatland pastures, locally called bofedales. Assessing land cover change using satellite images, vegetation survey, and local knowledge (i.e., traditional ecological knowledge) reveals the multi-faceted socio-ecological dimensions of bofedal change in Sajama National Park (PNS), Bolivia. Here, we present results from focus groups held in 2016 and 2017 to learn about the local knowledge of bofedales in five Aymara communities in PNS. Land cover maps, created from Landsat satellite imagery, provided a baseline reference of the decadal change of bofedales (1986, 1996, 2006, and 2016) and were field verified with vegetation sampling. At the park level, the land cover maps show a reduction of healthy bofedales (i.e., Juncaceae dominated peatland) cover from 33.8 km2 in 1986 to 21.7 km2 in 2016, and an increase in dry mixed grasses (e.g., Poaceae dominated land cover) from 5.1 km2 (1986) to 20.3 km2 (2016). Locals identify climate change, lack of irrigation, difficulty in water access, and loss of communal water management practices as key bofedal management challenges. Local improvement of bofedales was found in one community due to community-based irrigation efforts. Bridging knowledge of mountain land cover change helps to articulate the socio-ecological dimensions that influence local decision-making regarding bofedal management, and consideration of local actions that may be strengthened to support the sustainability of bofedales for local livelihoods in the context of climate change in the Andes.

Seasonal Water Crises and Social Dilemmas in Semi-Arid Areas of the Lake Zone of Tanzania

The absence of formal institutions regulating water resources indicated a need to examine how informal governance works in semi-arid areas of the Lake Zone of Tanzania. Ostrom’s theory of common property resources was adapted to develop a questionnaire administered to 162 households using five different water sources (lake/dam, ponds near lake/dam, ponds, wells and waterholes) along with focus group discussions (6), key informant interviews (33) and field observations. The results indicated that communities do not have water management systems where water is abundant (lake/dam and ponds near these water sources). Conversely, where water is scarce (ponds, wells and water holes), communal water management occurs. However, such communal water governances are location specific and limited and, though they appear to function well at preventing water exhaustion, they fail to resolve the complex social dilemmas in that ecological system. Thus, most water resources are dominated by households with sound economic resource base, they take deliberate efforts to establish private wells in wetlands to intercept underground resources, raising issues of equity, contamination of underground water resources and human safety. Sandy river beds seemed to represent the worst ‘tragedy’ of unmanaged common resources, often being located in ‘no-man’s land’ between districts or regions, with uncontrolled competition resulting in enormous water holes dug by local resource users from both sides, and exhaustion by those with the deepest waterholes and access to engine-driven pumps. There are two water main crises: (1) too little is available to meet the current demand during an annual prolonged dry season (6-7 months) and (2) increasing social dilemmas on how to manage the little available. How external interventions could address these issues is discussed.

Does participation in communal water management improve household income? Evidence from Malawi

This paper presents empirical evidence of whether participation in community water resource management improves household agricultural income using a case study of irrigation co-management under the Bwanje Valley Irrigation Scheme in Malawi. An endogenous switching regression was applied on a dataset of 412 farmers to correct the outcome (net agricultural income) for sample selection bias. Propensity score matching was then used to measure the impact of participation in irrigation co-management on net annual agricultural income. Despite variations in the magnitude of benefits among different groups, empirical evidence suggests that net annual agricultural income of the poor, youths and female-headed farmers participating in the scheme would have worsened had they not participated in the scheme.

Why Participation Matters: Communal Drinking Water Management in Bolivia and Ecuador

In the past 30 years, Drinking Water Users' Associations (DWUAs) have emerged in peri‐urban and rural areas in Bolivia and Ecuador where public utilities do not operate. While recognising the challenges to service provision and the problematic around the role of the state that exists in both countries, this article seeks to understand why and how local participation in drinking water systems has been so important for the formation of newly formed peri‐urban and rural communities in both Andean nations. It argues that through participation in collective (communal) activities and decision‐making, communities are constructed. This article will highlight, through our own experiences, why it became so important for us as researchers to participate in communal water management activities during fieldwork.

In-crisis delivery rate: a novel measure of success in communal water management

Of the plethora of studies that discuss requirements for successful irrigation management, few pay close attention to what actually happens when the supply of water becomes extremely low. Such an oversight in the literature is unfortunate, because this is precisely when management matters. To understand what separates success from failure in irrigation management at times of critical water shortages, the authors conducted emergency fieldwork in February 2010 along four major irrigation channels in a drought-stricken rice-growing area within the Chinese province of Yunnan. Separately, satellite images of the four villages dated February 2009 and February 2010 were jointly analysed to produce a novel indicator for a village’s success in water management. Called the in-crisis delivery rate, this indicator compares water delivery between normal and drought years and directly evaluates performance in water management during crisis periods. The results led to an unexpected discovery that, contrary to common expectations, the only village of the present study that deployed a traditional earthen water channel secured substantially more water throughout the drought period than those with concrete-lined channels. It is hypothesised that the labour intensive, rather than capital intensive, nature of repair work of the earthen channel enabled flexible operations, and hence had the comparative advantage under a skilled management team. This result confirms the importance of daily maintenance work, which tends to occur less often after modernisation of water paths.

Floodplain hydrology of the Mekong Delta, Vietnam

AbstractThe Mekong Delta is one of the largest and most intensively used estuaries in the world. Each year it witnesses widespread flooding which is both the basis of the livelihood for more than 17 million people but also the major hazard. Therefore, a thorough understanding of the hydrologic and hydraulic features is urgently required for various planning purposes. While the general causes and characteristics of the annual floods are understood, the inundation dynamics in the floodplains in Vietnam which are highly controlled by dikes and other control structures have not been investigated in depth. Especially, quantitative analyses are lacking, mainly due to scarce data about the inundation processes in the floodplains. Therefore, a comprehensive monitoring scheme for channel and floodplain inundation was established in a study area in the Plain of Reeds in the northeastern part of the Vietnamese Delta. This in situ data collection was complemented by a series of high‐resolution inundation maps derived from the TerraSAR‐X satellite for the flood seasons 2008 and 2009. Hence, the inundation dynamics in the channels and floodplains, and the interaction between channels and floodplains, could be quantified for the first time. The study identifies the strong human interference which is governed by flood protection levels, cropping patterns and communal water management. In addition, we examine the tidal influence on the inundation in various parts of the Delta, since it is expected that climate change‐induced sea level rise will increase the tidal contribution to floodplain inundation. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Institutions and Conflict: Communal Water Management in North-West Namibia

In the context of recent legal developments in Namibia promoting the common based management of water resources, the main focus of the project underlying this paper was to gain a detailed impression of how the rural communities in the country were dealing with the development of institutional arrangements for the water access and usage. Based on an anthropological fieldwork this paper aims to describe and to analyse the conflict over water a rural community in North-West Namibia is confronted with. From a theoretical perspective, the objective of this paper is to analyse the role of power in the development of institutions by means of Knight’s (1992) bargaining theory of institutional development. This paper concludes that the case study provides important evidence that the development of institutions at the local level can be the by-product of a strategic conflict and not the result of the users’ attempts to achieve collective goals, as frequently assumed by the mainstream communal natural resource management theory.

Contributors

margaret chowning is Associate Professor of History at the University of California at Berkeley. She is author of Wealth and Power in Provincial Mexico: Michoacán from the Late Colony to the Revolution. Her book on the convent of La Purísima Concepción in San Miguel de Allende will appear shortly from Oxford University Press.david guillet is a Professor in the Department t of Anthropology of Catholic University. He received his Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Texas in 1974. His specialties include economic and ecological anthropology, natural resource management, and irrigation. He is the author of Covering Ground: Communal Water Management and the State in the Peruvian Highlands (University of Michigan, 1992), Irrigation at High Altitude: Social Organization of Water Control in the Andes (with W. Mitchell, American Anthropological Association, 1995, and articles in American Anthropologist, Current Anthropology, and Comparative Studies in Society and History.brian owensby is Associate Professor in the Department of History at the University of Virginia. His current research on the legal culture of seventeenth-century Mexico joins earlier research on nineteenth- and twentieth-century Brazil (Intimate Ironies: Modernity and the Making of Middle-Class Lives in Brazil, Stanford University Press, 1999).

Covering Ground: Communal Water Management and the State in the Peruvian Highlands. DAVID W. GUILLET

Covering Ground: Communal Water Management and the State in the Peruvian Highlands. DAVID W. GUILLET

Book reviews

Bryant, Bunyan and Paul Mohai, eds. Race and the Incidence of Environmental Hazards: A Time for Discourse. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1992. 251 pp. $36.50 (paper). Downing, Theodore E., Susanna B. Hecht, Henry A. Pearson, and Carmen Garcia‐Downing. Development or Destruction: The Conversion of Tropical Forest to Pasture in Latin America. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1992. 405 pp. Downing, Theodore E., Susanna B. Hecht, Henry A. Pearson, and Carmen Garcia‐Downing, eds. Development or Destruction: The Conversion of Tropical Forest to Pasture in Latin America. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1992. 405 pp. $49.50 (paper). Guillet, David W. Covering Ground: Communal Water Management and the State in the Peruvian Highlands. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1992. 250 pp. $39.50 (cloth), $16.95 (paper). Roberto P. Guimaraes. The Ecopolitics of Development in the Third World. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1991. Healey, Christopher. Maring Hunters and Traders: Production and Exchange in the Papua New Guinea Highlands. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1990. xxii, 401 pp. + plates. $45.00 (cloth).

Covering Ground: Communal Water Management and the State in the Peruvian Highlands:Covering Ground: Communal Water Management and the State in the Peruvian Highlands.

Covering Ground: Communal Water Management and the State in the Peruvian Highlands:Covering Ground: Communal Water Management and the State in the Peruvian Highlands.