Session 1. 3. C.

Inequalities in access are a major concern in the management of common pool resources. In the case of irrigation water, inequalities in access are mainly produced by various actors, power relations, institutions, and infrastructures. Launched in the 1970s, Turkey’s Southeastern Anatolia Project (GAP) aims to address the Kurdish question through economic development. The project involves 22 dams and 19 hydroelectric power plants on the Euphrates and Tigris rivers, with the goal of irrigating 1.8 million hectares of land. This ongoing initiative seeks to cover 46% of the planned irrigation canal areas. Ample scholarship exists on GAP’s adverse effects, such as village inundation, water deprivation for small farmers, and soil/nutrient loss. Examining the Qoser/Kızıltepe plain, we discuss impacts in areas where GAP is anticipated but not yet implemented, and where laws issued in the name of environmental protection overlap with infrastructures that monopolize access to water and energy. By focusing on farmer-built and farmer-managed irrigation infrastructures, such as boreholes, transformers, and solar panels, we unveil how farmers access water ‘illicitly’ in areas where the state did not build irrigation canals. Additionally, we explore how farmers resist not only state authority but also the climate crisis through self-built and self-governed irrigation infrastructures.

In recent years, studies have analyzed governance dynamics taking in weakly institutionalized contexts, for example, by focusing on how stakeholders develop different strategies to participate in policy venues within polycentric systems. Other studies have also shown how collaborative decision-making venues in weakly institutionalized settings face challenges in emerging as the go-to spaces for addressing policy crises. This is particularly salient in the context of environmental governance, where multiple stakeholders with varying degrees of authority and power coexist. However, the empirical evidence surrounding these claims has been limited largely to cross-sectional analysis, with limited work paying attention to the role of participatory venues in facilitating discussions, fostering dialogue, and building consensus regarding policy problems. In this manuscript, we assess the role of one of such venues, the Santa Lucia River Basin committee in Uruguay, from a longitudinal perspective. The Santa Lucia River Basin committee was created in 2013 to foster collaboration and dialogue among a variety of stakeholders involved in water governance related issues in the basin that provides drinking water to 60% of the population of Uruguay. Over the last decade, the basin committee served as a space for debating water governance issues (including, most recently, one of the country’s most intense water crisis in history) and large infrastructure works. Using data from 22 meeting minutes covering a span of ten years, we apply social network analysis techniques to assess hypotheses regarding the interactions among stakeholders participating in the basin committee’s meetings, as well as the role of the committee as a venue for facilitating such interactions. Our study is among the first to provide a longitudinal and quantitative analysis of discursive dynamics within a basin committee in a weakly institutionalized setting. In doing so, we highlight the challenges and opportunities for the development of long-lasting participatory venues for the governance of water resources in weakly institutionalized settings.

This paper models cooperation in self-governing irrigation systems as a repeated game. Asymmetries arise as the headenders have first mover advantage in appropriating water. However, the need for cooperation in provision (maintaining the irrigation system) can incentivise the headenders to leave water for the tailenders.

We first analyze symmetric cooperation where the headenders and tailenders share the water equally and exert equal effort in maintenance. Symmetric cooperation can be sustainable when maintaining the irrigation system is difficult/costly. Costly maintenance reduces the value of the relationship but the dominant effect is the reduced temptation to deviate so that overall incentives to cooperate are improved.

If maintenance is less costly, the headenders do not have incentives for symmetric cooperation. Their incentives can be restored by asymmetric cooperation where the headenders get more than their equal share of the water. However, asymmetric cooperation in the sense that tailenders put more than equal effort in maintenance weakens the headenders’ incentives because it is more tempting to expropriate tailenders’ large maintenance effort.

This study examines the role of trust and reciprocity in the effectiveness of collective governance systems in hydrosocial territories, focusing on water associations managed by indigenous Aymara communities in the Bolivian Altiplano. Using path analysis and experimental economics, we measure the interaction between trust and reciprocity and cooperative behavior among 100 Aymara community members. Our results suggest that while trust is a critical factor in fostering cooperation, reciprocity is equally important in supporting the cooperation required for effective collective governance in hydrosocial territories. We find that reciprocity is particularly low in the associations studied. Our results show that the initial acts of trust were not reciprocated, making cooperation within the governance system difficult. Although communities exhibited prosocial behavior, this lack of reciprocity affected trust between members of different communities, leading to ineffective functioning of collective water resources management. More generally, our results show the vulnerability of collective governance in hydrosocial territories when collaboration is strongly based on negative reciprocal paradigms and increasingly dependent on extrinsic motivations. To address the internal causes of ineffective collective governance, a nuanced exploration of ways to foster intrinsic motivation and positive reciprocal interactions is needed and seems to require joint efforts by communities and political actors.