Economic theories and tools provide only partial insight into the many complexities affecting various uses and flows of water. To usefully teach water economics, it is therefore necessary to understand and cooperate with other disciplines. Many economic concepts can be used to understand...

In 1992, Amsterdam's voters pushed for a more-aggressive autoluw (`nearly car free'') policy, but progress has been slow. Hourly parking tariffs are the highest in the country, but more cars than ever park in Amsterdam. We explore this promise-results gap in a spatial comparison of the price of...

This paper explores the economic and political dimensions of responding to water scarcity by increasing supply rather than reducing demand with examples from San Diego (US), Almeria (ES) and Riyadh (SA). Each case explains how leaders benefit by obscuring the costs of desalinated supplies. In...

The transformation of water services that began with the privatisation of water companies in 1989 extended to households with the implementation of water metering. Meters 'privatised' water and the cost of provision by allocating to individual households costs that had previously been shared...

Water meters are necessary for tracking leaks, using prices to encourage conservation, and allocating costs in proportion to use. They are not necessary when water is abundant or costs are covered by taxes or transfers. This paper discusses the move to residential water metering in England and...

This paper describes the structure, incentives, assessments, and results of a course in common-pool resource management (CPRM) that can be run in 8 weeks with 15-30 students. The course structure helps students learn about the complexity of CPRM by grouping students into "too large" groups where...

International aid travels from donor to recipient through a chain of middlemen. Middlemen play two roles: as agents delivering aid and as principals monitoring other middlemen delivering aid. As the quality of middlemen falls, shirking (theft) increases, and aid effectiveness falls. While...

Bilateral or multilateral organizations control about 90% of official overseas development assistance (ODA), much of which is wasted. This note traces aid failure to the daisy chain of principal-agent-beneficiary relationships linking rich donors to aid bureaucrats to poor recipients. Waste...

Managers of public water companies present themselves and are seen as public servants maximizing public welfare. Because water is rarely allocated through market mechanisms, this maximization requires that managers cooperate in a bureaucratic version of a social dilemma. Members of the...

This apology is neither a wholesale rejection of economic thought and perspective nor an admission of error in our understanding of ecological values or human impacts on the environment. Life is complex. It's an apology for the unintended damage that's resulted from misapplying economic ideas:...