This book examines how state and local institutions that manage water conveyance and drainage actually function. Thus a great deal is revealed about the relationships and power struggles that exist between government and the people and between central and local authorities.

This book examines how state and local institutions that manage water conveyance and drainage actually function. Thus a great deal is revealed about the relationships and power struggles that exist between government and the people and between central and local authorities.

Why do some people get together to manage their common assets? Why do other groups of people leave those assets to be over-exploited by each member of the group? The answers could be crucial to the proper maintenance and use of 'common property resources', from grazing land through fish stocks to irrigation water. Robert Wade, drawing on research in areas of Andhra Pradesh where rain is scarce and unreliable, argues that some villagers develop and finance joint institutions for cooperative management of common property resources in grazing and irrigation - but others do not. The main reason lies in the risk of crop loss.Villages located towards the tail-end of irrigation systems, and with soils fertile enough to support a high density of livestock, show a larger amount of corporate organization than villages elsewhere. Placing his work in the wider context of both the developing world today and the open-field system of medieval Europe, the author argues that peasants can under certain conditions organize collectively. Privatization or state regulation are not the only ways of preventing degradation of common property resources in peasant societies.

Published originally in 1990 to critical acclaim, Robert Wade's "Governing the Market" quickly established itself as a standard in contemporary political economy. In it, Wade challenged claims both of those who saw the East Asian story as a vindication of free market principles and of those who attributed the success of Taiwan and other countries to government intervention. Instead, Wade turned attention to the way allocation decisions were divided between markets and public administration and the synergy between them. Now, in a new introduction to this paperback edition, Wade reviews the debate about industrial policy in East and Southeast Asia and chronicles the changing fortunes of these economies over the 1990s. He extends the original argument to explain the boom of the first half of the decade and the crash of the second, stressing the links between corporations, banks, governments, international capital markets, and the International Monetary Fund. From this, Wade goes on to outline a new agenda for national and international development policy.