Drawing upon a worldwide survey of river basin organizations and in-depth studies of eight river basins in a variety of locations around the globe, this book examines how institutional arrangements for managing water resources at the river-basin level have been designed and implemented, the impetus for these arrangements, and what institutional features appear to be associated with greater or lesser success in river basin management.

This book is a firsthand investigation into water management in a fast-growing region of the arid American West. It presents three states that have adopted the conjunctive management of groundwater and surface water to make resources go further in serving people and the environment. Yet conjunctive management has followed a different history, been practiced differently, and produced different outcomes in each state. The authors question why different results have emerged from neighbors trying to solve similar problems with the same policy reform. Common Waters, Diverging Streams makes several important contributions to policy literature and policymaking. The first book on conjunctive water management, it describes how the policy came into existence, how it is practiced, what it does and does not accomplish, and how institutional arrangements affect its application. A second contribution is the book's clear and persuasive links between institutions and policy outcomes. Scholars often declare that institutions matter, but few articles or books provide an explicit case study of how policy linkages work in actual practice. In contrast, Blomquist, Schlager, and Heikkila show how diverging courses in conjunctive water management can be explained by state laws and regulations, legal doctrines, the organizations governing and managing water supplies, and the division of authority between state and local government. Not only do these institutional structures make conjunctive management easier or harder to achieve, but they influence the kinds of problems people try to solve and the purposes for which they attempt conjunctive management.

This edited collection further expands our knowledge about what comprises a successful constitution in both theory and application. Building on the research and analysis of Vincent Ostrom, who as one of America's leading scholars on constitutions has spent a lifetime writing about constitutions in America and overseas. Each essay shows how particular countries, governments, and organizations devise constitutions to reflect their visions of governance and sets of rules for their leaders. On a higher theoretical level, the contributors emphasize the importance of choosing the rules of the political game in order to determine the nature of the game itself. Extending Ostrom's intellectual quest to solve constitutional dilemmas, the scholars gathered here discuss a wide variety of issues, ranging from the problems of water scarcity and local public economies in Africa to the prospect of a new political order in the European North.

Drawing upon a worldwide survey of river basin organizations and in-depth studies of eight river basins in a variety of locations around the globe, this book examines how institutional arrangements for managing water resources at the river-basin level have been designed and implemented, the impetus for these arrangements, and what institutional features appear to be associated with greater or lesser success in river basin management.

In addition to winning the 2009 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for her path-breaking research on "economic governance, especially the commons," Elinor (Lin) Ostrom also made important contributions to other fields of political economy and public policy. This four-volume compendium of papers written by Lin (often with coauthors, most notably her husband, Vincent), along with papers by others expanding on her work, brings together the strands of her entire empirical, analytical, theoretical, and methodological research program. Together with Vincent's important theoretical contributions, they defined a distinctive "Bloomington School" of political-economic thought. Volume 2 examines Lin's work on "the commons," in which she demonstrated that, in many cases, local resource users can solve collective-action problems through common-property management regimes. It comprises papers, including some that are not well known, related to and building on the findings of Governing the Commons (1990). Part I focuses on key attributes of biophysical resources and the institutions human communities have designed to govern them. Part II shows how in various social and ecological circumstances, different sets of institutions facilitate or impede the long-run sustainability of resources. Part III highlights Ostrom's first major research project on water resources in Southern California. It was a topic she (and her students) returned to with the specific intention of gathering data (more than 50 years' worth) for longitudinal analyses of combined institutional and ecological change. In sum, this volume contextualizes what is, at present, thought to be Lin's greatest legacy to social science: the conditions under which resources can be sustainably managed over very long periods of time by the collective action of ordinary people, beyond markets and states.