Abstract
Community is understood to be one of the main conditioning factors in the management of common-pool resources (CPRs): its attributes, understood as the context for collective action, largely determine the communal management of natural resources. This article proposes a recursive relationship between CPR management and the community building process. A case study carried out in La Alpujarra (Andalusia, Spain) shows how the social interaction developed in order to manage a specific resource —irrigation water— has a significant impact on the community building process within a heterogeneous, polarised and vulnerable local society. Therefore, not only does community “produce” collective management, but also the collective management of a CPR can “produce” community. This perspective helps to provide a more in-depth understanding of socio-ecological phenomena and re-examines the very notion of community from a praxeological and processual perspective, which is more useful to environmental studies.
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Notes
“Careo” is an ancient hydrological technique used in high mountainous areas that harnesses the mountain’s filtration capacity in the upper reaches to retain water and make it available at lower levels during the summer (Fernández et al. 2006).
In 2012, the electoral census registered 645 Spanish nationals and 133 foreign residents (IEA 2013).
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Acknowledgments
The authors wish to acknowledge the irrigators and inhabitants of La Taha for the time, knowledge and friendship they have unselfishly shared with us; and the anonymous reviewers and the editor for their insightful comments on an earlier version of this paper.
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Ruiz-Ballesteros, E., Gálvez-García, C. Community, Common-Pool Resources and Socio-Ecological Systems: Water Management and Community Building in Southern Spain. Hum Ecol 42, 847–856 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10745-014-9705-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10745-014-9705-1