Meinzen-Dick, Ruth

Groundwater is a vital resource for domestic, irrigation, and industrial water supply in most countries. But it is one of the most difficult common pool resources to govern due to mobility, invisibility, conflicting interests, large numbers of stakeholders, and limitations of available institutions. While groundwater may seem like a typical example of a common pool resource, conventional solutions based on controlling extraction through regulatory sanctions or financial incentives usually fail. Framing the problem in terms tragic overexploitation or sustainable yield can leave out or misconstrue many of the complexities, dynamics, and tradeoffs of multiple uses and users, including groundwater quality and environment. Approaches emphasizing only top-down or bottom-up approaches are not so helpful for finding combinations of institutions for effective agency in governing groundwater commons.
This presentation draws from work on groundwater governance in Punjab Province, Pakistan, particularly Rahim Yar Khan District, where a recently-developed Groundwater Management Information System (GMIS) highlighted hot spots of groundwater depletion and contamination. This case illustrates how addressing wicked problems requires tailored approaches, starting with the understanding and involvement of the key actors. As a contribution towards finding comprehensive and lasting solutions, we apply a framework to identify the key actors and consider what can provide them with the knowledge, motivation, and agency to act together to address the groundwater problems. Experiences of a recently-convened multistakeholder platform for water governance in the district provide examples of the scope and limits of existing approaches, and the need for more attention to the narratives and power dynamics that might move or constrain action to address critical groundwater problems.

Experiential learning games are increasingly applied as participatory engagement tools to improve management of the commons, strengthen self-regulation of resource use and enhance constructive interaction of resource users. Pilot studies have shown that combining games with community debriefings and technical planning instruments can support institutional and behavioral change. Nevertheless, there is poor evidence on the potential of experiential learning games to achieve impact on a larger scale. We applied a package of experiential learning tools for groundwater management in 1779 communities in five states of India. As a largely invisible common pool resource, groundwater management requires effective coordination among users. In India, this coordination is still poor which is one explanation for half of all wells showing falling water tables. Our experiential learning interventions intended to improve water users’ system understanding, strengthen water related norms, support local water governance, and trigger sustainable water management behavior. A rigid impact assessment was conducted in 472 communities in Rajasthan, Karnataka, and Andhra Pradesh. Our results indicate that individuals who participated in the interventions more likely reported contributions to the maintenance of community water infrastructure. We also found that women more likely reported to participate in agricultural household decision making after playing the game. At the same time, we did not find the expected effect on knowledge, norm, and institutional change indicators. This challenges our theory of change which assumed that behavioral change follows understanding, norms and institutional change. Our results confirm the ability of experiential learning games to support collective action. At the same time, we see the need to better understand the mechanisms of how they trigger behavioral change, especially when being applied on a larger scale.

Within discussions of land and resource rights, feminist scholarship and advocacy, along with numerous empirical studies, have drawn attention to the importance of women’s land rights. However, this work focuses primarily on household and individual rights to private property. This leaves unanswered questions about whether and how women’s land rights can be secured under collective tenure. Because billions of people worldwide depend on the commons and resources under collective tenure, understanding women’s rights within this context requires new conceptual tools, empirical understanding, and policy recommendations. To lay the foundations for a sound body of empirical studies and appropriate policies, we develop a conceptual framework to improve understanding of women’s land rights under collective tenure, based on the Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) framework. We discuss what secure tenure for women on collective lands would entail, then present our framework for factors that would affect women’s tenure security. We give attention to particularities of rangelands, forests, and other types of collective lands as well as commonalities across types. A key theme that emerges is that for women to have secure tenure under collective tenure, the collective (group) itself must have tenure security and the women must have secure rights within this group. The latter requires us to consider the governance structures, how men and women access and control land, and the extent to which women have voice and power within the collective. More consistent analyses of collective tenure systems using the conceptual framework presented in this paper can help to identify which action resources are important for groups to secure rights to collective lands, and for women to advocate for their rights within the group.

Supporting the sustainable management of commons in the face of rapidly evolving and complex challenges calls for systemic changes. For instance, addressing over-extraction of groundwater in India, with profound implications for food security, livelihoods, and economic development, depends in improved coordination among various stakeholders at different scales. Strengthening this coordination through governance mechanisms requires a good understanding of the factors driving individual and collective behavior. We offer a behavioral perspective to system transformation and apply it to the design of an intervention strategy for supporting sustainable water management and governance in India. The starting point was the question who needs to take which actions in order to improve groundwater management. In a second step, we inquired about what drives actors’ behavior paying special attention to their knowledge, motivation and agency. Based on this assessment, we co-designed and applied interventions in collaboration with NGOs, academic and government partners. At the local level, these interventions include groundwater monitoring and crop water budgeting, combined with experiential learning tools such as games for demand management, and supply side interventions to support water harvesting and recharge. At the regional level, we strengthened multi-actor platforms, built coalitions and developed the capacity of government, civil society and private sector actors to support groundwater governance. By combining these approaches, we aimed to influence water governance and management on a larger scale. Our experience illustrates how conceptual thinking can inform multi-method approaches which consider that sustainably improving groundwater management requires inter-linked behavioral changes of diverse actors. Our approach constitutes critical reflection and conceptualization, based on situated knowledge which contributes to designing better adapted and more powerful intervention strategies through informed arguments.