Session 3. 1.

Theoretical explanations for why local resource users cooperate to sustain common-pool resources also point to its limitations in situations where there are pollution problems. In agroecosystems, farmers can sometimes cooperate to reduce negative externalities arising from modern farming practices, such as water quality degradation, but theory to predict when and how cooperation can be effective remains lacking. Two key factors are missing in negative externality situations: interdependency of consequences (i.e., the need to internalize costs) and livelihood benefits gained from reducing the negative externality. In canonical CPR cases, interdependencies supply the need for rulemaking while livelihood benefits provide the motivation to cooperate; in pollution problems, third-party enforcement is typically required. A similarity between these types of situations may be the role of social norms (as common and/or acceptable behavior) in shaping the level of self-compliance that occurs. While CPR research has focused largely on explaining the presence of how rules are made and enforced, the underlying support for developing the rules has not been central to theoretical explanations. Analyzing farmer social norms can provide a valuable window into explaining why farmers support or oppose changes practices or policies that cause negative externalities because norms can reflect prevailing beliefs about what farming practices or policies are acceptable or problematic, and whether acting on those beliefs are obligatory or suppressed due to social pressure. This paper looks at how social norms have been theorized in research on how farmers respond to water quality degradation challenges and its implications for the role of cooperation in negative externality situations.

Property rights in natural resources and how they affect cooperation and collective action towards their sustainable management has been a key thread of scholarly inquiry for decades. However, a key knowledge gap is a comparison of different conceptual or theoretical approaches to the analysis of property rights. To fill this knowledge gap, we compare and contrast economic and legal anthropological approaches to property rights to present a comparative review of studies on water rights in drainage and irrigation systems. In particular, we review studies on water rights in relation to managing agricultural drainage systems in the Midwestern United States and water rights in relation to the warabandi irrigation system prevalent in North-West India. Our comparative review demonstrates that economic approaches to the analysis of property rights recognize the role of incentives in motivating or hindering collective action behaviors pertaining to natural resource management. In contrast, legal anthropological approaches to property rights recognize their different bases of legitimacy. Overall, we find that whereas economic approaches focus on the relationship between property rights structures, incentives, behaviors and outcomes, legal anthropological approaches focus on the co-existence of different systems of property rights with different bases of legitimacy and their relationship with each other. We conclude our review by presenting the implications of our findings for research and practice, including how our findings contribute to theorization of collective action.

Collective action inherently entails political behavior in agroecosystem. While the concept of power has received some attention in the literature, the analysis of how farmers act as a political actor tends to be overlooked. As groundwater politics intensify in California and Arizona due to state-level regulatory frameworks to address groundwater shortage problems, conflicts between farming communities and other stakeholder groups tend to intensify in the process of developing collective solutions. I apply Narrative Policy Framework (NPF) to understand the media narratives around farmer’s engagement in collective action. I will analyze local and regional news articles covering this topic using Nexis Uni from 2015 to 2025. Using NPF, this study will code and identify key policy narratives around this issue and focus on farmers engagement in collective action. Further, I will engage in discussions on how NPF can offer us new lens to the study of collective action in agroecosystems.