Irrigation watercourse, "Area One", Pakistan

Resource System
Watershed and associated topography
Resource Units
Freshwater
Location
Pakistan

The resource appropriated from this watercourse in Area One (actual names of communities were removed in the case study) is water for irrigation. Area One is a large irrigation system managed by a government bureaucracy. There are no formal organizations at the watercourse level, though informal arrangements exist in all watercourses for mobilizing farmers to carry out maintenance on a communal basis. The system as a whole is not managed effectively. There are over 5000 total appropriator teams appropriating from the resource.  This is one of four cases studies used in a comparative case study conducted by Bottral.  

Governance and management of Area One: There are major irregularities in tubewell operation and management. These were attributed to technical or design factors, as well as socio-political barriers. Decision-making in Area One was found to be over-centralized. The watercourse exhibited a fragmented management pattern at the project level, which is reinforced by the horizontal governance structure of provincial and national administration.

 This case study is part of the original Common-Pool Resource (CPR) database. A summary of the original CPR coding conducted in the 1980s by Edella Schlager and Shui Yan Tang at Indiana University may be found under the CPR tab under Institutional Analysis