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Under what conditions are irrigators able to develop adaptive governance arrangements? This paper addresses this question by developing an empirically-grounded theory of self-governance of a snowmelt commons in Southern Colorado. Drawing on previous work in collective action and institutional theory, we argue that self-regulation of the hydro-commons is driven by changes in shared user perceptions with regards to the salience and scarcity of the resource, as well as the perceived probability of salvaging the resource system. We further posit that several conditioning factors affect the likelihood of effective local responses, including the existing institutional arrangements for self-governance, techno-institutional complementarities, and vested interests. We test and refine our theoretical argument by conducting a historical analysis of regional responses to hydrologic, social, and institutional disturbances in Colorado's San Luis Valley.

Irrigation of crops is responsible for 40 percent of the world's food supply. A ubiquitous issue in irrigation is the tendency of upstream users to deplete the stream and deprive downstream users of water. Climate change threatens to exacerbate this problem by threatening the water supply to many irrigation systems, especially those that rely on snowmelt. Using a natural experiment in the Rio Grande Basin of Colorado, I examine five hypotheses about how water rights and physical properties of irrigation systems interact to produce varying levels of irrigation performance. Results indicate that enforced water rights are reliably influential, but their influence depends on diversion location, geographic features of the watershed, physical water availability, and higher level water policy. Results highlight the interdependence of institutions and geography and support a role for carefully crafted water rights congruent with cultural norms and higher level policy in adaptation to climate change.

Irrigation is important for global food supply and is vulnerable to climate change. Internalized cultural norms are important for the performance of Common Pool Resource (CPR) regimes such as irrigation systems, but much is unknown about the role of norms in shaping irrigation performance. This paper applies multi-level selection (MLS) theory and CPR theory to a stratified, semirandom sample of 71 irrigation systems of distinct cultural origins in the Upper Rio Grande Basin of the United States to test hypotheses related to the role of norms in irrigation system form and function. Results show that internalized norms of cooperation are strongly associated with the rules and technologies adopted by irrigators, the frequency of water use violations, average crop production, and the equality of crop production. Systems with internalized norms of cooperation have adopted rules and technologies which are associated with increased care for the commons, public goods, and higher equality between irrigators. Further, agents designated as monitors of CPR use have different effects depending on whether irrigators possess cooperative or competitive norms. Notably, the presence of monitors that enforce rules that are incongruent with norms is associated with increased water use violations and lower average crop production. These findings add weight to the growing body of work giving greater attention to cultural context when analyzing user-governed CPR regimes and climate resilience, and further illustrate the compatibility of MLS theory with other prevailing theories in CPR research.

Designing adaptive institutions for achieving sustainable groundwater use is a central challenge to local and state governments. This challenge is exacerbated by the growing impacts and uncertainty of climate change on water resources. Calls to reform water governance systems are often made in the context of these challenges, and reform efforts increasingly emphasize the need for solutions that are locally designed and administered. Such reforms often require fundamental institutional change that is difficult to achieve amid the myriad forces that stabilize and reproduce existing institutional structures and functions. In practice, governance change is instead overwhelmingly incremental and tends to be punctuated by periods of adjustment in response to social or environmental shocks and disturbances. We present a comparative study of four major Colorado river basins and examine how each has evolved distinct arrangements of groundwater governance in response to regulatory and drought disturbances over the past century. We interrogate concepts of path-dependence and apply a historical lens to understand why locally designed institutions for self-regulation emerge in some Colorado groundwater basins but not in others. We uncover a pattern of collective action by groundwater users that first seeks to oppose state regulation, followed by acceptance and efforts to comply, and eventual attempts to get ahead of state regulation by enacting local institutions for self-regulation. We report these findings and discuss the insights they offer for understanding how adaptive natural resources institutions are shaped through time by the constraints and opportunities of path-dependence and local contexts.