Commoning #8: Water Commons with Ruth Meinzen Dick, Tomás Olivier, and Edella Schlager

In this Commoning episode, Courtney speaks to Edella Schlager, Tomás Olivier, and Ruth Meinzen Dick on the Water Commons. Edella, Tomás and Ruth were part of the organizing team for the IASC 2021 Virtual Water Commons conference held in May. Edella Schlager is the Director of the School of Government and Public Policy at the University of Arizona. Tomás Olivier is an Assistant Professor of Public Administration in the School of Public Administration at Florida Atlantic University. Finally, Ruth Meinzen Dick is a Senior Research Fellow at the International Food Policy Research Institute. In this conversation, we run the gamut on water commons, discussing Ruth, Tomás and Edella's take on the state of water commons research, core canonical topics, such as collective action in governance of water that remains of top relevance today, and new directions, such as the need for greater theorizing on complexity and coordination around collective action in water commons. We also get some insights from the field, drawing on Edella and Tomás research linking institutions and behavior in the New York City watershed, Tomás insights from work in Argentina and Ruth's recent work on irrigation games for social learning in India.

 

You can find more about the Water commons Conference and other IASC events on their website: https://iasc-commons.org/ 

 

Here are a couple of the publications that we reference in the conversation:

Ruth Meinzen-Dick's paper on property rights and collective action in irrigation : https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0378377414000894

Edella Schlager and Tomás Olivier's paper on integrating institutional analysis and behavior: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/psj.12429?casa_token=qby9ACV3S74AAAAA:XyZjtK25Sat87uRHnJ3Uctwl3wVNrFLdN50vCAlkwgWlkCGg2IDCouQ8yp3C3UH_vxYREuUAkG0I

 

For more information about our guests, you can check out their webpages:

Ruth Meinzen-Dick: https://www.ifpri.org/profile/ruth-meinzen-dick

Tomás Olivier: https://www.fau.edu/artsandletters/public-administration/people/olivier/

Edella Schlager: https://sgpp.arizona.edu/people/edella-schlager