What happened
Mixed outcomes. User institutions endured and retained meaningful local autonomy within a wider legal order. That continuity does not establish that irrigators always had equal power: claims of uniformly peasant, democratic, and unchanged governance across the thirteenth to eighteenth centuries remain contested.
- Irrigators' tribunals, including Valencia's Water Tribunal, have legal recognition, elected members, and oral dispute-settlement procedures. Irrigators' tribunals of the Spanish Mediterranean coast
- Irrigation communities exercised local autonomy while interacting with municipal and higher authorities. Valencian vegetable gardens: the imperative need to update Maass, Glick and Ostrom's postulates
- Claims that the thirteenth-to-eighteenth-century institutions were uniformly peasant, democratic, or unchanged remain historically contested. Valencian vegetable gardens: the imperative need to update Maass, Glick and Ostrom's postulates
What might explain it
Plausible
Locally knowledgeable dispute resolution, backed by legal recognition, plausibly lowers the difficulty of enforcing irrigation agreements. Irrigators' tribunals of the Spanish Mediterranean coast Valencian vegetable gardens: the imperative need to update Maass, Glick and Ostrom's postulates
Alternative explanation: Landownership power and public authorities' coercive capacity may also sustain compliance without equal influence among users.
Supported in case
The institutional history may be better understood as recurrent adaptation than as preservation of a single ancient blueprint. Valencian vegetable gardens: the imperative need to update Maass, Glick and Ostrom's postulates
Alternative explanation: Some procedural continuities may remain important even when membership, property relations, and surrounding government change.
Understanding the outcome
Nested commons governance in the Maass–Glick–Ostrom tradition
Local self-organization and larger-scale authority can complement each other. Valencian vegetable gardens: the imperative need to update Maass, Glick and Ostrom's postulates
Legal recognition and long survival leave separate questions about who could bring a claim, whose interests shaped decisions, and whether judgments distributed water fairly.
Questions to take into practice
- Local dispute settlement can depend on recognition and enforcement beyond the community itself.
- A continuing procedure can operate through major changes in who owns land and who holds influence.
- Elected irrigator representatives do not by themselves reveal the position of tenants, smallholders, or users outside the recognized membership.
What remains uncertain
- How accessible, timely, and impartial the tribunal is for different present-day users remains a separate question from its historical endurance.
- Changes in landownership and representation make it difficult to infer a continuous distribution of power from the survival of a named institution.