Irrigation, until recently a major water user in Bulgaria, has been drastically affected by the political and economic changes that came about after the collapse of the socialist system. Collective action might be a way for societies to overcome the well-known common-pool resource dilemma,...

Local self-governance based on institutions for collective action can help overcome social dilemmas in the management of complex Common Pool Resources, such as fish. A common path towards local self-governance is decentralization, and within this context, a transfer of property rights from...

In Bulgaria’s irrigation sector, collective action solutions have been propagated by the Bulgarian Government and the World Bank in recent years. However, the introduction of a World Bank Project, the enforcement of the Bulgarian Water Law in 2000 and the Water User Association Act in 2001...

In the 50 years since Garret Hardin published his “Tragedy of the Commons”, scholarship has revealed what Hardin did not recognize: that a wide range of shared agricultural resources can be sustainably managed through commons governance approaches. Yet, there are common-property regimes that...