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Groundwater is a vital common pool resource for water supply, irrigation, and ecosystems, but can be difficult to govern due to invisibility, conflicting interests, and limitations of available institutions. While there are many policy and technical instruments (tools) available, efforts to apply them are often ineffective. This special issue of the International Journal of the Commons presents a set of papers with insights into policy instruments and other methods for groundwater governance. The relevance and effectiveness of tools and combinations of tools (toolboxes) in addressing problems that emerge from groundwater use is related to how they fit with diverse physical and social contexts. Drawing on research and applied experience, including that presented in this issue, we outline a conceptual framework for groundwater governance that emphasizes attention not just to knowledge, but also to motivations, and to agency for effective coordination among key actors. Articles in the special issue analyze groundwater governance in areas of Africa (east, south, and north), Central Asia, India, and the United States. The articles cover a range of scales from small groups playing experiential games to international agreements about transboundary aquifers. Several papers illustrate the crucial role of knowledge about groundwater, and the need for governance instruments and interventions to go beyond only changing knowledge. Three papers focus on groundwater games and their use to understand and change behavior, especially when combined with other tools that facilitate collective deliberation and action. Several papers illustrate how understanding of the ways people care about and practice care for groundwater illuminates examples and capabilities for groundwater governance. Highlights • There are many institutional tools for governing groundwater, but no panaceas, and successes are rare • Effective groundwater governance requires that key stakeholders have combinations of knowledge, motivation, and agency to act together effectively • Groundwater co-management can combine stakeholders’ knowledge, values, and collective action with external science, resources, and authority • Participatory processes can craft combinations of tools to fit contexts and pursue shared gains

Over-extraction of groundwater is a prominent challenge in India, with profound implication for food security, livelihoods, and economic development. As groundwater is an ‘invisible’ and mobile common pool resource, sustainable governance of groundwater is complex, multifaceted, requiring coordination among various stakeholders at different scales. It remains an open question as to what can be done to strengthen the governance of groundwater, particularly on the scale necessary to address widespread depletion of resources. The growing competition over groundwater resources calls for systemic changes towards sustainable water management. These require understanding the behaviours of actors in the system network, as well as the institutions that shape the direction in which the system moves. In this paper, we offer a behavioural perspective to system transformation and apply it to the example of an Indian NGO working on sustainable natural resource governance. The organisation, Foundation for Ecological Security (FES), has been co-designing and using various institutional tools for groundwater governance with the collaboration of other NGOs and government partners, academic and research organisations towards strengthening governance of water. At the local level, these include groundwater monitoring and crop water budgeting, combined with experiential learning tools such as games for demand management, and supply side interventions to support water harvesting and recharge. These tools are combined with efforts to strengthen multi-actor platforms, building coalitions and capacity of government, civil society and private sector actors to support groundwater governance at scale. By combining local and systemic approaches, the aim is to influence water governance on a larger scale and contribute to the sustainable management of water resources in India. Our reflections illustrate how conceptual thinking can inform multi-methods approaches which consider that sustainably improving groundwater management at large scale requires inter-linked behavioural changes of diverse actors. Our approach constitutes critical reflection and conceptualization, based on situated knowledge which contributes to designing better adapted and more powerful intervention strategies through informed argument.

Groundwater management is highly complex, with many users sharing the same resource often with limited understanding of their interconnectedness. Behavioral experiments (games) that simulate real-life common-pool resource use have shown promise as an experiential learning tool for improving resource governance. This study pilots an experiential learning intervention in Ethiopia using a groundwater game to help raise awareness of groundwater over-extraction and improve understanding of the importance of collective action in governance. In the Meki River catchment in Ethiopia, small-scale irrigation is expanding, but overextraction and competition over groundwater have not yet reached alarming levels. The groundwater game, adapted from India and including the addition of a rule-making round, was played in 15 villages with 30 groups. The game was accompanied by subsequent community-wide debriefing in each village to reflect on the experience and lessons learned, which stimulated discussions about groundwater governance. We surveyed participants to capture individual mental models regarding groundwater use and management, as well as any immediate learning effects. Focus group discussions in each village prior to the intervention and again six months after the intervention assessed possible lasting effects. The findings indicate cognitive, normative and relational learning, including increased understanding of groundwater dynamics (such as the joint effect of diverse water uses and users), the importance of collective action in resource management, and the benefits of communication. We find gendered differences in decision-making about resource extraction in the game and development of group-level resource management, confirming the need for gender-responsive approach to sustainable groundwater management interventions. We discuss community-wide learning and institution-building, and considerations for future intervention designs. We recommend embedding experiential learning, facilitated by local extension officers and other practitioners, in intervention packages that include both technical assistance on water-conserving technologies and groundwater management approaches and support in building communities’ institutional capacity.

India has been hard hit by the COVID-19 pandemic. In the context of a larger quasi-experimental impact assessment, we assess the pandemic’s effects on household coping behavior in 80 villages spread across four districts and three states (n = 772). Half of these villages were targeted by a largescale common land restoration program spearheaded by an NGO, the Foundation for Ecological Security (FES). The other half are yet to be targeted but are statistically similar vis-à-vis FES’s village targeting criteria. Analyzing the results of a phone survey administered eight to ten months into the pandemic and its associated lockdowns, we find that the livelihood activities of households in both sets of villages were adversely impacted by COVID-19. Consequently, most households had to resort to various negative coping behaviors, e.g., distressed asset sales and reduced farm input expenditure. From the same mobile survey data, we construct a Livelihoods Coping Strategies Index (LCSI) and find that households in villages targeted by FES’s common land restoration initiative score 11.3% lower on this index on average, equating to a 4.5 percentage point difference. While modest, this statistically significant effect estimate ('p' < 0.05) is consistent across the four districts and robust to alterative model and outcome specifications. We find no empirical support that our observed effect was due to improved access to common pool resources or government social programs. Instead, we speculate that this effect may be driven by institutional factors, rather than economic, a proposition we will test in future work.

Nepal has a long history of irrigation, including government and farmer-managed irrigation systems that are labor- and skill-intensive. Widespread male migration has important effects on Nepalese society. How institutions such as Water Users’ Associations (WUAs) respond and adapt, is therefore critical to the understanding of rural transformation and the likely impact on gender equality, food production, and rural livelihoods. This paper examines the effects of male migration on institutional change in WUAs, women’s roles, technological change, and outcomes affecting effectiveness of irrigation systems based on a mixed methods study, combining a phone survey of 336 WUA leaders from all provinces in Nepal with qualitative data from case studies in 10 irrigation systems. Results indicate WUAs have adapted rules to increase women’s participation, and to monetize the contributions for maintenance. Women exercise agency in whether and how to interact with WUAs. Mechanization has reduced the need for some male labor, though the ability to mechanize is limited by hilly terrain and small plot sizes. Overall, systems are adapting to male migration, with relatively low idling of land or labor shortages causing deterioration of the systems, though there are concerns with the high levels of women’s labor burdens.

Common pool land and water resources in India play vital, but often overlooked, roles in livelihoods and ecosystem services. These resources are subject to the authority of various government departments and are often managed in ways that result in uncertain tenure for the people who depend on these resources for fodder, fuel, water, and other products. An Indian NGO, the Foundation for Ecological Security, has developed a process for “commoning”—assisting communities to secure the commons by forming inclusive local institutions to manage the resources, and to work with the different government departments to gain stronger rights to the commons. This study examines how the polycentric governance of natural resource commons shapes the ability of communities to do effective commoning, with particular reference to appropriation and provisioning rules. Using participatory network-mapping in FES sites in Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka states, we identify the constellation of actors involved in the commons, the relationships among them, and community knowledge of these arrangements. The results reveal the complex flows of resources, information, and authority related to commons, with programs and agencies across different sectors, offering different opportunities and requirements, for commons management. The Net-maps show linkages that are present, and others that are missing or not well-understood, Net-mapping helps assess the extent of community understanding of the polycentric governance of the commons, and can help identify opportunities to strengthen participatory processes for planning and implementation.

The food security crisis and international “land grabs” have drawn renewed attention to the role of natural resource competition in the livelihoods of the rural poor. While significant empirical research has focused on diagnosing the links between natural resource competition and (violent) conflict, much less has focused on the dynamics of whether and how resource competition can be transformed to strengthen social-ecological resilience and mitigate conflict. Focusing on this latter theme, this review synthesizes evidence from cases in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Building on an analytical framework designed to enable such comparative analysis, we present several propositions about the dynamics of conflict and collective action in natural resource management, and a series of recommendations for action. These propositions are: that collective action in natural resource management is influenced by the social-ecological and governance context, that natural resource management institutions affect the incentives for conflict or cooperation, and that the outcomes of these interactions influence future conflict risk, livelihoods, and resource sustainability. Action recommendations concern policies addressing resource tenure, conflict resolution mechanisms, and social inequalities, as well as strategies to strengthen collective action institutions in the natural resource sectors and to enable more equitable engagement by marginalized groups in dialogue and negotiation over resource access and use.

Where access to renewable natural resources essential to rural livelihoods is highly contested, improving cooperation in resource management is an important element in strategies for peacebuilding and conflict prevention. While researchers have made advances in assessing the role of environmental resources as a causal factor in civil conflict, analysis of the positive potential of collective natural resource management efforts to reduce broader conflict is less developed. Addressing this need, we present a framework on collective action, conflict prevention, and social-ecological resilience, linking local stakeholder dynamics to the broader institutional and governance context. Accounting for both formal and informal relationships of power and influence, as well as values and stakeholder perceptions alongside material interests, the framework aims to provide insight into the problem of (re)building legitimacy of common-pool resource management institutions in conflict-sensitive environments. We outline its application in stakeholder-based problem assessment and planning, participatory monitoring and evaluation, and multi-case comparative analysis.