Blaming the releases of water from dams for exacerbating the floods that buried huge parts of Northern Luzon at the height of Typhoon Pepeng, some people in government are reviving proposals to privatize dams, such as San Roque in Pangasinan; Angat and Ipo-Ipo dams in Bulacan; and, Magat Dam in Isabela.
Apparently, it assumes entrepreneurs are better managers of dams than government.
But there is a better way to run dams and waterways than by bureaucrats or by self-interested private individuals. It’s through cooperatives, according to studies done by Elinor Ostrom, 76, winner of the 2009 Nobel prize for economics, the first woman to ever receive the prize.
The multi-country study—which includes Switzerland, Japan, Spain, Nepal and the Philippines—is contained in the book much-cited by the Nobel prize committee: Governing the Commons, published by the Cambridge University Press in 1990.
This empirical work looks at collectively managing, through cooperatives, shared or common resources, such as fisheries, forests, oil fields, grazing lands, ground water basins, and irrigation systems.
The book criticizes conventional solutions to problems of common resources, which typically involve either centralizing government regulation or privatization of the resource.
Ostrom finds that local people had for many years successfully managed irrigation systems to allocate water between users, but their governments decided to build modern dams made of concrete and steel with the help of foreign donors.
Failed big projects
Despite flawless engineering, many of these projects ended up in failure, the studies find.
That was because the new, modern dams cut out communication and ties between the users. The new dams required little maintenance whereas the local dams, such as the earthen ones found in Nepal, forced users to work together to make them functional.
Ostrom also shows how traditional communities have addressed the problem that upstream farmers may take all the water from a canal or stream to irrigate their farms, leaving downstream land dry and infertile.
In Spain and in the Philippines, these problems are handled with intricate systems that allow farmers to draw water for only a fixed period of time. These systems are monitored both by peers and irrigation officials, such as in the Banaue rice terraces in the Philippines.
Ostrom is a political science professor at Indiana University. She won the economics Nobel prize together with Oliver Williamson of the University of California in Berkeley.
Her feat seems to indicate that the Nobel prize committee has truly decided to award the economics prize to a broader range of social scientists, says Harvard economics professor Edward L. Glaeser in an article for the New York Times.
“The greatest lesson from the work of Ostrom,” Glaeser writes, “is a hopeful one: mankind has the enormous ability to create institutions that enable us to work collectively.”Source: abs-cbnnews.com
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