Las instituciones de riego en la España del este. Una reflexión a la luz de la obra de Elinor Ostrom

In Governing the Commons, Elinor Ostrom studied a large sample of institutions developed to regulate the use of common pool resources, in order to obtain empirical data that could provide the basis for her theory of self-organized collective action. Olstrom observed that all the analyzed institutions, which had survived for a long time, fulfilled the same eight «design principles». The communities of irrigators in the orchards of Valencia, Murcia, Orihuela, and Alicante were amongst the sample institutions. However, the information taken from them came from works that defended their democratic character or sustained that irrigators themselves had the capability to modify irrigation rules, views with which most Spanish experts disagree. In this article we study whether Olstrom´s eight «design principles» were present in the orchards or not and reach the conclusion that sometimes they were not, a fact that does diminish the helpfulness of the powerful theoretical instruments developed by Ostrom, to understand the logic behind the workings of the Spanish irrigators’ institutions.