Institutional Boundaries and Common Pool Resource Management: a Comparative Analysis

William Blomquist for their comments, ideas, and valuable feedback on this work. 1 In the field of water resource management, public administrators and policy makers face the perplexing task of finding ways to increase water resource supplies for growing populations, while conserving water for environmental needs such as in-stream flows and habitat conservation. Increased urbanization and higher intensity agriculture have created severe water supply and water quality dilemmas worldwide, particularly in arid regions such as the southwestern United Sates (El-Ashry and Gibbons 1986; Reisner and Bates 1990; Case and Alward 1997).1 What factors affect our decisions to use limited water resources more efficiently? Obviously, physical and technical factors, such as access to storage and distribution systems, can largely determine the feasibility of different types of water management methods. Institutions, however, also can influence on the implementation of water management programs. Institutions are the laws, policies, and organizational arrangements that communities devise to permit, forbid, or require certain human behavior (E. Ostrom 1990; Crawford and Ostrom 1995; North 1990). In the water resources field, institutional arrangements can include formal law