Reconfigurations of the commons: Equity and irrigation practices in the Liangshan Mountains, China, 1958--1995

This historical research illuminates the ways in which conceptions of equity enter into the nested rule structure and performance of the Da Cao He irrigation system in China's Liangshan Mountains over the period 1958 to 1995 that encompasses two key policy phases: collectivization, and economic reform. It examines how three types of equity conceptions (procedural, distributive and retributive) are embodied in rule structures that govern both benefits and responsibilities. How the resultant architectonics of the commons creates particular patterns of resource use and transformation in the agricultural landscape is analyzed.; The irrigation scheme is in a poor, mountainous, agrarian region located on the southwestern periphery of the national body in Sichuan Province. Two distinctly different ethnic groups, the Yi and Han, utilize water from its trunk canal. A comparative assessment is firstly made of how the state-led specialized irrigation management was informed by the state's changing moral and development visions. Secondly, how this management structure articulated with the irrigation district's discrete Yi and Han village's irrigation management practices is examined.; The research shows that as irrigation management policies were transformed by changes in land tenure (from collectivized forms to the Household Responsibility System), as well as new sets of economic imperatives that promoted financial self-reliance of irrigation systems, the equity principles underlying the rule systems of the commons were also altered. The change involved a shift away from an egalitarian focus on “needs” rules that attended to both the subsistence needs of the local peasantry and the state's grain requirements during collectivization, to one where “contributions” rules increasingly came into play that sought to recover the costs of running the irrigation system from the direct beneficiaries. Secondly, the decentralization of state control in the post-Maoist phase led to differential changes in the practice of irrigation within Yi and Han villages. Now, the increased political space allowed for the possibility of new irrigation practices informed by variegated culturally-constituted conceptions of equity in both Yi and Han villages leading to divergent patterns of water distribution, that in turn brought about differentiation in the type of natural resource transformations in the mountain agricultural landscape.