ABSTRACT
In recent years, the adverse effects of growing water scarcity on the lives and livelihoods of poor people have become a major policy concern in India. This paper reviews the effectiveness of macro-level policies for rainwater conservation and critically examines micro-level local community institutions for the sustainable management of traditional water bodies. Using Ostrom’s design principles and qualitative data from three different multipurpose tanks, the study finds that management decisions at the local level have benefited few influential members of local communities and deprived a large number of poor households from resource uses, making the local institutions ineffective.
Acknowledgments
This paper was presented in the 8th International Conference on Critical Geography (ICCG 2019) on ‘In Permanent Crisis? Uneven Development Everywhere War and Radical Praxis’, 19–23 April 2019, hosted by the National Technical University of Athens, Greece, in partnership with the International Critical Geography Group (ICGG). The authors thank the conference participants for their comments on the paper. The authors also express their gratitude to the anonymous reviewers who contributed decisively to improve the quality of this paper.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Supplementary material
Supplemental data for this article can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.1080/07900627.2021.1916448.