IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/h/spr/sprchp/978-1-4020-9690-7_11.html
   My bibliography  Save this book chapter

The Downgrading Effect of Abuse of Power on Trust and Collective Action in Bulgaria’s Irrigation Sector

In: Institutions and Sustainability

Author

Listed:
  • Insa Theesfeld

    (Leibniz Institute of Agricultural Development in Central and Eastern Europe (IAMO))

Abstract

Bulgaria’s irrigation facilities have largely deteriorated, property rights over the infrastructure are ambiguous and water loss in the system at present amounts to 70%. Thus, the Bulgarian government is currently attempting to formally reform the sector by implementing collective action management schemes. In analyzing the possible success of this envisaged local cooperation, I draw on Ostrom’s (2007) development of collective action theory. In her theoretical framework, Ostrom posits variables affecting the likelihood of undertaking diverse forms of collective action leading to positive or negative results for others. The core relationships affecting cooperation are between reputation, trust, and reciprocity. In turn, eight structural variables influence these core relationships: one of them being the “heterogeneity of participants“. In the following, empirical evidence from Bulgaria’s irrigation sector is provided to explain how incongruity of rules helps to maintain opportunistic strategies, how various transactions in the foundation of a water user association are affected by abuse of power, and how low the level of trust in formal actors actually is. Based on that, I examine one detailed link in Ostrom’s theory, namely between heterogeneity of participants and trust, showing in particular that the interdependency between abuse of power and decrease in trust produces a downgrading effect on collective action.

Suggested Citation

  • Insa Theesfeld, 2009. "The Downgrading Effect of Abuse of Power on Trust and Collective Action in Bulgaria’s Irrigation Sector," Springer Books, in: Volker Beckmann & Martina Padmanabhan (ed.), Institutions and Sustainability, chapter 11, pages 223-242, Springer.
    • Handle: RePEc:spr:sprchp:978-1-4020-9690-7_11
    DOI: 10.1007/978-1-4020-9690-7_11
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Theesfeld, Insa & Pirscher, Frauke (ed.), 2011. "Perspectives on institutional change - water management in Europe," Studies on the Agricultural and Food Sector in Transition Economies, Leibniz Institute of Agricultural Development in Transition Economies (IAMO), volume 58, number 109519.
    2. Konrad Hagedorn, 2013. "Natural resource management: the role of cooperative institutions and governance," Journal of Entrepreneurial and Organizational Diversity, European Research Institute on Cooperative and Social Enterprises, vol. 2(1), pages 101-121, September.
    3. Ahmed Soliman & Andreas Thiel & Matteo Roggero, 2021. "Institutional Performance of Collective Irrigation Systems: A Fuzzy Set Qualitative Comparative Analysis in the Nile Delta of Egypt," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 13(3), pages 1-29, January.
    4. Villamayor-Tomas, Sergio, 2014. "Cooperation in common property regimes under extreme drought conditions: Empirical evidence from the use of pooled transferable quotas in Spanish irrigation systems," Ecological Economics, Elsevier, vol. 107(C), pages 482-493.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:spr:sprchp:978-1-4020-9690-7_11. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.springer.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.