Water Organization

Water and Organized Collective Action

The organized control over water that has sustained all civilizations has been a product of various combinations of central state bureaucracies and local water providers that empowered individual citizens to do things collectively that could not be accomplished by individual producers and consumers in private marketplace exchange. Water organizations are necessitated in any state-level society and culture (as distinguished from a clan/folk level society) by a most fundamental need to manage human interdependence across large landscapes. Individual self-seeking rationality must somehow be reconciled with encompassing community requirements that can be fulfilled only by well-designed organizational effort.

Consider an example. Two individually rational farmers ponder the possibility of building an improved water course for channeling irrigation water to their adjacent fields. The total cost of improvement is $600. However, the benefits to farmer A equal only $400, whereas those to farmer B amount to $500. From the standpoint of their private rationalities, as disconnected unorganized social atoms, neither will build the improvement. Each individual does better not contributing while hoping that the other—in an economically irrational move—will build the improvement and thereby allow the noncontributing member to enjoy benefits of increased water supply and control; that is, take a “free ride” on the investment of the other party. They will fall into an equilibrium with each other that is much worse when compared to what they could gain together by organized cooperative action. From the standpoint of their collective joint benefit, the watercourse improvement should be made because together they will enjoy benefits worth $900, well in excess of the $600 cost.

The study of water organization, therefore, brings into sharp relief an age-old problem confronted by people in all cultures; that is, although people possess and act upon their private rationalities, they live not as disconnected social atoms but in continuous interdependence. People, in interaction, modify each other's prospects. What one does, or is expected to do, conditions the actions of another. Social science research on water organizations permits systematic study of alternative ways in which human beings representing many water cultures manage their interdependence. If farmers A and B can devise organizational means of [Page 1015]holding each other accountable for making a “fair-share” contribution, if they can mutually ensure that the other will not defect from agreed-upon cooperative action, they can collectively transcend their private self-seeking rationality and empower themselves to do things together on behalf of themselves and the community of which they are a part.

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