درک تکامل و عملکرد بازارهای آب و سیاست تخصیص: A معامله هزینه چارچوب تجزیه و تحلیل

Water markets and associated allocation policy reforms have struggled to achieve their intended goals in many water-stressed rivers, in part due to the institutional friction imposed by transition and transaction costs. This paper elaborates a transaction costs analysis framework to examine the evolution and performance of water markets and allocation policy reforms. This analysis rests on three pillars: i) a synthesis of three theoretical traditions of institutional analysis (Williamson, North, and Ostrom) often considered independently; ii) a framework to examine the types and interactions of transaction costs in market-based water allocation over time; and iii) an illustrative analysis of three large river basins – the Colorado, Columbia and Murray–Darling – with varying levels of success in market-based water policy reforms. The resulting framework accounts for water's complexity as an economic good. This framework and the case studies lead to the identification of several policy implications including the need for: a multiphase sequencing of reform, strategic investment in institutional transition costs, and institutional choices that preserve future flexibility to adjust water rights and diversion limits to manage social and environmental externalities.

Australia and the United States have experimented with market-based water-rights trading to enhance flexibility and manage a shared set of challenges: natural aridity, competition for water, climate variability, tradeoffs across multiple jurisdictions and an increasing commitment to balance human and environmental water needs. Market-based water policy reforms involve two linked components: i) imposition of diversion limits (cap) to balance production and conservation, including market mechanisms to adjust to lower diversion limits in over-allocated systems (buybacks of water entitlements) and ii) establishment of tradable water rights (trade) to allocate water within and across productive sectors. Market-based water allocation policy reforms have achieved varying levels of success, often leaving the theoretical promise unfulfilled, in part due to the institutional friction imposed by transition and transaction costs. There is increasing empirical research about market-based water policy design and performance in a world of positive transaction costs (e.g. Colby, 1990, Easter et al., 1998, Garrick and Aylward, 2012, Garrick et al., 2013 and McCann and Easter, 2004). However, longitudinal analysis of transaction costs and institutional change in market-based water allocation has been rare (but see, e.g. Libecap, 2011). Consequently, existing theoretical frameworks and empirical evidence have yet to account for and explain (1) the interplay of transaction costs, institutional change and path dependency in market-based water policy reform, and (2) the transaction costs associated with managing complex water-related economic goods with interdependent private and collective values. The core contribution of this paper is a transaction-costs analytical framework to examine the evolution and performance of water markets and associated water allocation institutions. This framework shifts from taking institutional constraints as fixed to an analysis of institutional change. It focuses on water as a complex economic good (following Hanemann, 2006) governed by mixed property regimes (public–private–common pool) with pervasive externalities and, hence, relatively high transaction costs. The paper contains three parts: Section 2 provides a synthesis of concepts and evidence about water rights reform and transaction costs across three theoretical traditions of institutional analysis often examined independently (Williamson, North, and Ostrom). Section 3 presents a transaction-costs analytical framework to understand the evolution and performance of market-based water policy reform. Section 4 offers an illustrative analysis of three large river basins – the Colorado, Columbia and Murray–Darling Rivers – with varying levels of success with market-based water allocation policy reforms. The final section provides concluding remarks and future research priorities.

Water stress in large river basins is a pressing challenge in the 21st century. In this paper we have synthesised the broad range of theory and evidence from transaction costs analysis of market-based water policy reform. The resulting framework for water policy analysis builds a multilevel typology of transaction costs and institutional change, drawing together the common threads across the Williamson, North, and Ostrom schools of institutional analysis. A uni fi ed approach allows us to delineate static transaction, institutional transition and institu- tional lock-in costs in the market-based water policy context along with posited interactions of these types of transaction costs over time. This approach explores the levels at which transaction costs occur, and the trade-offs and interactions between these in market-based policy design and performance. These path dependent interactions between institutional transition and static transaction costs are par- ticularly important due to water's mixed character as a private good, public good, and common pool resource. This framework and the illustrative case studies in the US and Australia identify several policy implications about the evolution of market-based water policy reform, including the need for a multiphase sequencing of reform (informal trading, diversion limits, water rights reformandadaptation),sustainedinvestmentininstitutionaltransition costs and institutional choices that limit the risk of lock-in. We recog- nise that there are practical dif fi culties in robust application of such a complex framework, following from McCann et al. (2005) who observe a tradeoff between precision and accuracy in transaction costs estima- tion. Future research priorities include the advancement of this framework for diagnostic purposes to inform rigorous and comparable empirical studies.