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Water

Irrigation and water districts: the oldest continuously governed institutions in the state, and the leadership demands of allocating a resource under scarcity.

  1. 01

    The Year There Is Not Enough

    A curtailment year is the test every ordinary year has been preparing for. What a board can do in it is narrow, and almost all of it depends on work done before the season…

  2. 02

    The Arrangement That Was Never Written

    Informal understandings between water users have held for generations because everybody shared the same expectations. They cannot survive a party who was not present when they were made.

  3. 03

    Governing a Finite Resource

    A water district board allocates something that cannot be increased, among neighbours, under rules established before anybody serving was born. Every leadership problem in this Library appears there at once.