A farming systems analysis of irrigation institutions.

摘要

The potential for cooperation on common property resources is affected by asymmetries among their users. The fundamental asymmetry on an irrigation canal is that of location. As water flows down the channel, it seeps, evaporates, and is stolen out of turn by upstream farmers. The principal contribution of this thesis is the development of a mathematical programming model to study the causes and consequences of locational asymmetry.;The model is written as a sequence of representative farms over space, each farm a linear programming problem over 9 crops and 14 inputs. The numerical parameters are from data collected in a canal-irrigated village in Maharashtra, but the underlying farming systems analysis is general. Three model versions represent different management regimes--the efficient "planner" who maximizes total revenues on the channel; the equitable Irrigation Department which allots each acre an equal share of water, but cannot adjust for seepage; and finally, individualistic farmers who steal extra water, often with the connivance of the canal inspector.;The numerical solutions to each version answer the following questions: What is the spatial distribution of water, crops and profits? Is the water allocation efficient and/or equitable? If not, which farmers would support a change in water management? The three regimes lead to very different outcomes. The solutions indicate that only farmers on the lower two-thirds of the channel would cooperate to reduce stealing or seepage. This prediction is consistent with observations from an irrigators' association in the study village.;The model provides a tool to derive quantitative relationships between the extent of water theft and the quality of farmers' wells, their recharge capacity, the crop choices, and the penalty upon detection. These objective conditions vary across watercourses on a canal, so the potential for cooperation also varies, a fact rarely recognized in sociological or game-theoretic analyses of cooperation.;For irrigation policy to succeed, the irrigators must cooperate. The location-centred models in this dissertation show that a cooperative formed by simple majority, rather than by consensus or a two-thirds majority, has the best chance of encouraging efficiency and equity.