Linking Institutions for Collective Action to Agrarian Change: Insights from Transformations in an Irrigation Community, Central Mexico

In commons studies, broad attention has been given to understanding how and why natural resource management systems function through institutions for collective action. However, little attention has been given to how agrarian change impacts institutions for collective action and related resource access. In this paper we address this gap through the case study of a groundwater irrigation community in the northeast of the state of Guanajuato, Central Mexico. In a context of neoliberally induced agrarian change, over the last two and a half decades, in this community a few producers with capital acquired through international migration and remittances have accumulated access to land and water. This accumulation has gone hand in hand with the transformation of production to the high value agro-export crop asparagus and the creation of a cooperative for the collective production and marketization of the crop. We show that the irrigation community has proven institutionally robust in the midst of agrarian change because it was able to adapt to, and enable, this productive transformation. At the same time, we also show that this process led to the accumulation of access to land and water by a few irrigators and that the irrigation community is now composed of a very different and smaller group of users/producers. These results imply that processes of agrarian change, transformations in access to productive resources, and the adaptation and resilience of institutions for collective action are deeply intertwined and interdependent.