Elsevier

Ecological Economics

Volume 191, January 2022, 107221
Ecological Economics

ANALYSIS
Understanding the effects of institutional diversity on irrigation systems dynamics

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolecon.2021.107221Get rights and content

Abstract

Comparative institutional analyses of social-ecological systems (SESs) have advanced our understanding of features and performances of single institutions such as state, market, and self-organized institutions. However, such studies have hardly extended our understanding of institutional diversity to combinations of different institutions and their joint impacts on the dynamics of SES. We address this gap by focusing on government-managed irrigation systems as a quintessential example of SESs. We developed a formal stylized model to examine how institutions affect social processes in a government-managed irrigation system. More specifically, we examine how infrastructure dynamics and farmers-agency interactions are affected under the coexistence of two institutions: groundwater market and participatory institutions. The former institutionalizes the use of private irrigation infrastructures as an exit option to the public infrastructure managed by a government agency (exit). The latter institutionalizes farmers' voicing of concerns and participation as a pressure mechanism on the agency (voice). The model results show that the joint effects of those institutions on system outcomes vary with the agency's reactions to the exit and voice. We also demonstrate that the silence option – use of neither option – is a double-edged sword. Silent farmers can impede infrastructure improvement, but in some cases, help it dramatically.

Introduction

Irrigation systems are critical for agricultural production and food security worldwide (Carruthers et al., 1997). These irrigation systems are a representative social-ecological system (SES) consisting of human agents, biophysical units, and institutions for governing their interactions (Anderies et al., 2004; Janssen and Anderies, 2013; Ostrom and Cox, 2010). Because institutions are key to governing interactions among irrigation infrastructure providers, water, and farmers, irrigation systems are intrinsically reliant on human governance for their performance (Anderies et al., 2016; Muneepeerakul and Anderies, 2020; Yu et al., 2015). Identifying and implementing governance structures that lead to their sustained, high-quality performance is therefore of great interest (Domènech, 2015; Turral et al., 2010). Currently, government-managed irrigation systems (GMISs) are widespread, commanding over 60% of the global irrigated area, and thus stand to gain the most from enhanced irrigation performance (Burton, 2010). However, the agricultural productivity and infrastructure efficiency of these systems have been declining in many developing and less-developed countries (Lam, 1998; Mukherji et al., 2009; Suhardiman and Giordano, 2014).

In an effort to rescue underperforming GMISs, many have been transformed into either farmer-managed or privatized systems (Johnson III et al., 2004; Molle et al., 2009). Yet, such “big bang” approaches have often proven underwhelming due to a variety of contextual conditions, such as bureaucratic resistance and the absence of market-friendly institutions (Easter and Qiuqioing, 2014; Molle et al., 2009; Suhardiman and Giordano, 2014; Vermillion et al., 2000). The consensus from the irrigation reforms of the past 50 years is that the era of institutional “silver bullets” for irrigation reform has passed (Ostrom, 2012; Senanayake et al., 2015). Instead, there is a need for a combination of diverse institutions to produce effective governance regimes capable of addressing resource overuse and infrastructure under-provision problems (Meinzen-Dick, 2007; Vallury et al., 2020). Although institutional diversity has been emphasized as a potential “solution” for sustainable resource governance, the joint effects of multiple institutions on the productivity of GMISs remain underexplored. We address these key sustainability questions by specifically focusing on the joint effects of competitive and participatory institutions on the sustainable governance of GMISs.

A large volume of literature has investigated the institutions that can achieve an efficient provision of public services, which is a more general example of the specific problem of governing shared resources that we examine here. Economists have long argued that competition between government and private agencies can improve the provision of public services by a monopolistic government agency (Cornes and Sandler, 1989; Laine et al., 2017; Vining and Weimer, 1990). On the other hand, a volume of literature on governance reforms argues that participatory institutions can ensure democratic responsiveness and thereby improve public service delivery (Agrawal and Gupta, 2005; Meinzen-Dick, 1997; Özerol, 2013; Ricks, 2016; Speer, 2012; Thompson, 1995). Both these literatures have often focused solely on the performance of either competitive or participatory institutions and have largely ignored the joint effects of these institutions on system outcomes.

Our study attempts to move beyond such a dichotomous approach to analyze the coupled effects of these institutions on population dynamics and public infrastructure quality of GMISs. We draw upon Hirschman (1970)’s typology to define exit and voice as manifestations of competitive and participatory institutions, respectively. In the context of GMISs, the structure of participatory institutions is that farmers pay irrigation service fees to government agency in exchange for not only the water they receive, but also the right to assert their “voice” in determining operation and maintenance (O&M) needs (Bruns, 2004; Groenfeldt and Svendsen, 2000). On the other hand, groundwater markets – an example of competitive institutions – provide farmers an “exit” to purchase irrigation water from the owners of private groundwater pumps in response to a decline in public infrastructure managed by government agencies (Shah, 2009; Wang et al., 2014). For example, increasing use of privately-owned tubewells has led to active informal groundwater markets at the local level in northern China and South Asia (Shah, 2009; Wang et al., 2014). In South India, private groundwater pumps have become attractive substitutes for shared irrigation infrastructure (Vallury et al., 2020).

The combination of the competitive and participatory institutions can generate interesting feedbacks on the government agency's incentives to maintain the irrigation infrastructure. For example, the exit option allows farmers to stop paying irrigation service fees to the irrigation agency and instead purchase water from private groundwater pump owners (Mosse, 2006). Consequently, this generates a loss of revenue to the irrigation agency. Similarly, the voice option allows farmers to articulate their discontent with the agency's inefficiencies in the O&M of the infrastructure. Farmers, who continue to rely on the agency-provided infrastructure, can inflict direct costs on poorly performing irrigation agencies through various mechanisms (e.g., protests, public hearings, lawsuits, etc.) and pressure irrigation agencies to improve the declining infrastructure (Baker, 2005). Clearly, the agency's reaction to farmers' exit and voice determines how the public infrastructure is maintained. However, these feedbacks between farmer-responses and agencies' reaction to monetary losses are poorly understood in water governance research (Molle et al., 2009).

The process of irrigation management transfer continues in several developing countries and hence, the role of irrigation agencies – at both local and regional levels – becomes more critical. This work seeks to sharpen our understanding of the dichotomy and complementarity of competitive and participatory institutions that can increase or decrease the sustainability of irrigation agencies and the public infrastructure they support in the face of new global-change-related shocks. A key contribution of this paper is the development of a mathematical model that operationalizes Hirschman (1970)’s conceptual framework of characterizing irrigation agencies' reactions to monetary losses in order to rigorously analyze our research questions in a fairly general setting. The analysis brings to clear focus – through concise mathematical expressions – the interplay between farmers' choice of competitive and participatory institutions, dynamics of physical infrastructure, and the irrigation agency payoffs. We derive a variety of scenarios in which we examine the agency's reaction to the farmers' choices and subsequently the quality of public infrastructure. Furthermore, this study lays the groundwork for examining the resilience of infrastructure to external shocks under different types of agency's reactions.

In our model, we specify a nonlinear response of an irrigation agency to the monetary losses caused by farmers' choice of exit and voice. Specifically, we characterize the agency's response to monetary losses by two dimensions based on Hirschman (1970)’s discussion of how organizations react to the exit and voice options: sensitivity, which is defined as the rate at which the agency increases maintenance efforts, and durability, which is defined as how persistently the agency can perform maintenance activities in the face of increased monetary losses. The model examines the coupled dynamics of farmers-agency interactions and public infrastructure in two stages. First, we ask how the irrigation agency's response on public infrastructure maintenance affects the farmer's choices of exit and voice and consequently the quality of infrastructure in the long run. We examine four types of agencies varying in sensitivity (low and high) and durability (low and high). Our comparative analysis of four agency types shows that sensitivity and durability can improve public infrastructure and enhance its resilience to external shocks, respectively.

Second, we examine how the presence of the silence option – exercising neither the exit nor voice option – affects long-term system behaviors. Silent farmers pay the irrigation service fees to the agency but do not make their voices to stimulate the agency to improve public infrastructure. They could be seen as free riders especially from the perspective of farmers exercising the voice option. This is because silent farmers do not bear the cost of voice but benefit from public infrastructure improvements. The framing of silent farmers makes it easy to expect that the silence option makes no contribution to keeping the momentum for further improvements in public infrastructure. In the agency's view, however, silent farmers can help avoid a certain amount of monetary loss beyond which the agency cannot maintain public infrastructure. This is because they do not exercise the voice option that inflicts monetary loss on the agency. Such a buffer role of silence can contribute to improving public infrastructure. Our results demonstrate that the silence option is a double-edged sword because it can either impede or assist improvement in public infrastructure.

Our model's simplified features render it only illustrative of the more complex set of choices that farmers and irrigation agencies actually confront and are not intended to replicate any particular geographic region. However, the model's basic structure is sufficiently general and flexible that additional attributes of irrigation systems may be easily incorporated in later developments. Our model results can provide valuable insights into how social factors, i.e., irrigation agency's reaction and farmers' silence, are critical for shaping the outcomes of irrigation reforms towards institutional diversity. Although this model is focused on irrigation systems, the insights can readily be extended to the study of users-agency interactions in the provision of other types of public services as well.

Section snippets

Model

Investing in the O&M of existing infrastructures is as important as direct capital investments in new facilities for well-functioning GMISs. Yet studies show that providing an adequate O&M is often challenging in developing countries due to the lack of appropriate incentives. For instance, irrigation officials' promotion and salary in Nepal are predominantly determined by the seniority system, an incentive structure misaligned with key O&M performance indicators such as effective delivery of

Analysis I: effects of reaction variations

We first analyze a binary model in which all farmers actively use two available institutions (groundwater market and participatory institutions), i.e., choose either the exit option or the voice option. It is obvious that when there are no silent farmers, the agency experiences more monetary loss compared to when silent farmers are present. Hence, analyzing the binary model enables us to focus on how system dynamics unfold when farmers push the agency towards more extreme conditions in terms of

Analysis II: effects of silent farmers

In Analysis I, we investigated how system dynamics are shaped in the absence of silent farmers (Ss). We observed that three different regimes expand, shrink, and disappear, depending on different patterns of agency's reactions to exit and voice. In this section, we analyze how the presence of Ss can affect qualitative system behavior. The initial proportion of Ss is set to be very low (z0 = 0.1) to explore how such a small proportion of Ss can make a significant change in system dynamics. Here,

Conclusion

Research and policy on natural resource governance have followed three major institutions, such as state, market, and self-organized institutions (Meinzen-Dick, 2007). As recognizing that one of the three types of institutions cannot be a panacea for successful resource governance, a growing body of literature has emphasized the importance of institutional diversity (e.g., Ostrom, 2012; Andersson et al., 2014; Sjöstedt, 2015). However, studies on resource management still seem to devote more

Declaration of Competing Interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Acknowledgments

Hoon C. Shin, and John M. Anderies, and David J. Yu gratefully acknowledge financial support from the National Science Foundation, Grant number GEO-1115054.

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