The Quest for Governance: Decision Making on a Groundwater Commons in India's Drylands.

Abstract

Natural resource management in much of the global south is characterized as a shift to governance involving hybrid engagements between neo-liberal states, communities and markets based incentives. Agriculture, a large part of rural livelihoods, turns out to be the largest user of groundwater, an increasingly declining common pool resource (CPR). India is the world’s largest groundwater extractor for combined agriculture and drinking purposes and offers a challenging arena for groundwater governance. Recent trends in decentralization in the form of community based natural resource management (CBNRM) are slowly making their way to groundwater regulation. This work uses a CPR experiment replicated with students from all disciplines at the University of Michigan (n=50), The University of Delhi (n=75) and residents of six villages in three different states of India (n=360) to study the differences in extraction decisions across locations and livelihoods in a groundwater setting and test theories of collective action involving the concept of social capital. Post experiment surveys and interviews were also conducted to augment and explain the experimental results. The main findings are that student groups differ from rural participants in extraction choices but only in treatments that involve voting for a costly external enforcement of rule adherence on the commons. While the two student groups were not statistically different in extraction levels across all treatments, Indian students differed from Indian rural participants in the experimental treatment involving a costly external monitor. The variance in decision making by subject group is attributed to differences in preferences, beliefs and experience. Evidence for this is found in the post game interviews and surveys conducted with each group. This furthers the findings of recent work on the role of social framing in decision making. Additionally, social capital was marginally significant in lowering extraction levels but institutions were more so. Broadly, my findings indicate that decentralization policy for groundwater will be a negotiated process that needs to consider the tensions within populations. Also, there is a role for the state as an external actor in CBNRM projects since farmers seemed to express a need for fuller citizenship by engaging with the state.