Shared well ownership provides grounds for collective action in Northwest China

February 9th, 2015

Eefje Aarnoudse, Prof. Thomas Herzfeld, Dr. Bettina Bluemling & Prof. Wei Qu

Collective action has gained a prominent place in the debate on managing common-pool resources. The negotiation over institutions to manage resource allocation amongst users is often presented as an alternative to centralized distribution or privatization of resources. Yet, what role collective action can play to protect groundwater resources is controversial. Particularly in a contemporary setting of motorized pumping, examples of collective groundwater management are rare. The extension of groundwater aquifers and their invisible boundaries are seen as a critical difficulty in this regard.1, 2 Users hardly know with whom they are sharing their groundwater resources, which eliminates common ground for negotiation.

Nevertheless, the principle of collective action is regularly used as a basis to reform groundwater management. Authorities try to encourage collective groundwater management through the formation of so-called groundwater user associations, which are ideally meant to set their own water use rules. This follows the example of water user associations in canal irrigation districts, which have been established world-wide to increase participatory decision making over surface water allocation and decentralize managerial and financial responsibilities.

In China, water user associations (WUAs) often overlay existing structures of village leadership and may be held responsible for both surface water and groundwater. In the case of Minqin County (Northwest China), WUAs have been actively involved in groundwater management. The question remains to what extent collective institutions steer the process of resource management. In this paper we discuss the role of collective institutions in Minqin with regard to: 1) regulating groundwater use; and 2) coping with reduced access to groundwater.

Regulating groundwater use

Minqin County is located in the arid Northwest of China. In response to an alarming desertification rate caused by falling groundwater tables, the government has enforced far-reaching restrictions on farmers’ groundwater use since 2007, and therewith increased the perceived water scarcity. The implementation of these restrictions coincided with the formation of WUAs designed by the government. The boundaries of the WUAs correspond to the boundaries of the administrative villages. As an organizational structure, the WUAs did not bring anything new; the WUA board consists of the village committee and a leader from each sub-village farm group. Those village authorities have historically been in charge of various administrative tasks; however, the responsibilities regarding groundwater regulations are new.

Although it should be recognized that the WUAs have not been involved in setting groundwater quotas and thus failed as a participatory decision-making platform,3 they were critical in the implementation of groundwater use restrictions for two reasons.4 First, the WUAs helped the government reach out to groundwater users by reducing the number of individual users to be approached. As most wells are share-owned by farm groups, it was relatively easy to include one representative per well-owning group in the WUA board.

Second, the link between WUAs and pre-existing collective governance structures facilitated on-the-ground enforcement of groundwater use restrictions because the WUA board is held responsible for the selection of wells to be closed and the calculation of water rights per household. As also argued by other authors,5 in China, decollectivisation of farmland and reassignment of well ownership did not lead to unequal distribution of groundwater amongst farmers, mainly because wells continue to be share-owned by multiple households.

In Minqin, each farm group – consisting of around thirty households – shares ownership of two to eight wells. Each household has plots of land located at each of the wells, and groundwater is allocated in accordance with the household’s proportion of total landholdings; because lands are equally distributed amongst the households, groundwater access is also equal. This setting of shared well ownership allowed the WUA boards to choose one out of many wells easily without disrupting the distribution of land and water rights within the farm groups. Likewise, losses caused by restrictions imposed on groundwater pumping from the remaining wells were shared amongst the group of farmers.

Coping with reduced groundwater access

While the WUAs simplify governmental efforts to reach out to all groundwater users, the institutions that form the back-bone of the WUAs – namely village leadership and shared well ownership – also play another role with regard to groundwater management. In fact, the constellation of shared wells within farm groups helps farmers to coordinate irrigation turns and reduce water losses.

Interviews with villagers from Minqin County indicate that the restrictions on groundwater withdrawal have urged them to negotiate collective crop choice and coordinate groundwater irrigation usage. Since decollectivisation in the late 1970s, farmers have grown accustomed to making cropping decisions at the household level, which has turned the landscape of Minqin into a patchwork of small plots with different crops. As different crops have different water use requirements, single households decided when to irrigate their plots with water from the well. Due to this uncoordinated, repeated filling of the earthen canal, water use efficiency remained low. Confronted with reduced groundwater access, farm groups began to reconsider this practice.

To adapt to the new situation, farmers have increased efforts to grow similar crops within one well command area and coordinate irrigation turns to avoid unnecessary losses. As such, in response to the restrictions imposed by the government, the farm groups developed behavior close to the classical understanding of collective action as a mechanism to preserve common-pool resources.

Conclusion

It is widely argued that collective institutions negotiated between individuals may provide sustainable solutions when resources are exploited by multiple users. However, the case of groundwater demonstrates that collective coping mechanisms are unlikely to emerge when resource boundaries are vague and the scale of the shared resource use is too large.1,2

Interestingly, the experience of Minqin shows that collective institutions that originally facilitated groundwater abstraction can significantly simplify the implementation of centralized restriction policies. Moreover, when we consider the resource management problem faced by the small-scale shared well owners, we observe the emergence of collective coping mechanisms. In the case of Minqin County, collective action at the level of farm groups – in the form of collective crop choice and coordinated irrigation turns – emerged to cope with top-down, centralized groundwater use restrictions.

References:

Moench, M., H. Kulkarni, J. Burke, 2014. Trends in local groundwater management institutions, in Groundwater Governance: A Global Framework for Country Action, Thematic Paper 7. Ross, A. and P. Martinez-Santos, 2010. The challenge of groundwater governance: case studies from Spain and Australia. Regional Environmental Change, Vol 10 (4): 299-310. Yu, H., M. Edmunds, A. Lora-Wainwright, D. Thomas, 2014. From principles to localized implementation: villagers’ experiences of IWRM in the Shiyang River basin, Northwest China. International Journal of Water Resources Development, Vol 30 (3): 588-604. Aarnoudse, E., B. Bluemling, P. Wester, W. Qu, 2012. The role of collective groundwater institutions in the implementation of direct groundwater regulation measures in Minqin County, China. Hydrogeology Journal, Vol 20 (7): 1213-1221. Wang, J.X., J. K. Huang, Q. Q. Huang, S. Rozelle, 2006. Privatization of tubewells in North China: Determinants and impacts on irrigated area, productivity and the water table. Hydrogeology Journal, Vol 14 (3): 275-285.

Eefje Aarnoudse is PhD candidate at IAMO (Leibniz Institute of Agricultural Development in Transition Economies), Germany. She has an MSc in International Land and Water Management from Wageningen University, the Netherlands. This article is based on outcomes from her PhD research on “Tapping two sources: Farmers’ conjunctive use of surface water and groundwater in Northwest China” and earlier research for her MSc thesis. She conducted field work in the research area in 2010 and again in 2013 and 2014; Thomas Herzfeld is professor of Agricultural Economy at IAMO. His main research areas are institutional change and labour in transition economies; Bettina Bluemling is lecturer in Social Sciences at the University of Glasgow, UK. Her research focuses on institutions influencing natural resource use in rural China; Qu Wei is professor at the College of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Lanzhou University, China. Her research focuses on rural development issues in Gansu Province, China. In her former position as Head of the Rural Development Group at the Gansu Academy of Social Sciences, she supervised the field work for the research project referred to in this article.

The views expressed in this article belong to the individual authors and do not represent the views of the Global Water Forum, the UNESCO Chair in Water Economics and Transboundary Water Governance, UNESCO, the Australian National University, or any of the institutions to which the authors are associated. Please see the Global Water Forum terms and conditions here.