Zanjeras are resource management institutions that have endured for centuries in the Ilocos region of northern Luzon. By most accounts, these cooperative irrigation societies emerged during the Spanish regime when Augustinians were deployed to congregate indigenous populations into pueblos, convert them to Christianity, and raise tributes for the Crown. The book explores these challenges and proposes actions that governmental bodies can undertake to strengthen the adaptive capacity of zanjeras and other irrigation communities around the world.

Managing resources sustainably on the local level is essential for achieving the global goal of sustainable development. The importance of people's participation for sustainable development has recently become increasingly acknowledged yet there is little understanding of the multiple dimensions that such participation involves. Grassroots Environmental Action questions the viability of traditional management systems. Case studies from Latin America, Asia and Africa focus on areas where local people are vigorous actors in the determination of their own future and that of their environment.

This volume examines some of the major factors—social, demographic, and environmental—that account for the success of communal irrigation in Ilocos Norte and, by implication, its absence in adjacent areas, other parts of the Philippines, and, more widely, in other parts of insular Southeast Asia. However, whether this explanation accounts for all the factors involved, or even adequately weighs those that are here discussed, is secondary to the main concern of this volume: corporate groups. What zanjeras [irrigation societies] show are repeated examples of how individual farmers, working in concert, developed and employed corporate principles to the solution of a common goal or problem. It is a kind of “solution” that has been widely and effectively employed in much of human history.

Water for the People features twenty-five essays by world-renowned acequia scholars and community members that highlight acequia culture, use, and history in New Mexico, northern Mexico, Chile, Peru, Argentina, Spain, the Middle East, Nepal, and the Philippines, situating New Mexico’s acequia heritage and its inherent sustainable design within a global framework. The lush landscapes of the upper Río Grande watershed created by acequias dating from as far back as the late sixteenth century continue to irrigate their communities today despite threats of prolonged drought, urbanization, private water markets, extreme water scarcity, and climate change. Water for the People celebrates acequia practices and traditions worldwide and shows how these ancient irrigation systems continue to provide arid regions with a model for water governance, sustainable food systems, and community traditions that reaffirm a deep cultural and spiritual relationship with the land year after year.

An effective response to contemporary environmental problems demands an approach that integrates political, economic and ecological issues. Third World Political Ecology provides an introduction to an exciting new research field that aims to develop an integrated understanding of the political economy of environmental change in the Third World. The authors review the historical development of the field, explain what is distinctive about Third World political ecology, and suggest areas for future development. Clarifying the essentially politicised condition of environmental change today, the authors explore the role of various actors - states, multilateral institutions, businesses, environmental non-governmental organisations, poverty-stricken farmers, shifting cultivators and other 'grassroots' actors - in the development of the Third World's politicised environment. Third World Political Ecology is the first major attempt to explain the development and characteristics of environmental problems that plague parts of Asia, Africa and Latin America. Drawing on examples from throughout the Third World, the book will be of interest to all those who wish to understand the political and economic bases of the Third World's current predicament.

The governance of natural resources used by many individuals in common is an issue of increasing concern to policy analysts. Both state control and privatization of resources have been advocated, but neither the state nor the market have been uniformly successful in solving common pool resource problems. After critiquing the foundations of policy analysis as applied to natural resources, Elinor Ostrom here provides a unique body of empirical data to explore conditions under which common pool resource problems have been satisfactorily or unsatisfactorily solved. Dr Ostrom uses institutional analysis to explore different ways - both successful and unsuccessful - of governing the commons. In contrast to the proposition of the 'tragedy of the commons' argument, common pool problems sometimes are solved by voluntary organizations rather than by a coercive state. Among the cases considered are communal tenure in meadows and forests, irrigation communities and other water rights, and fisheries.