The article, published in the journal History of Agriculture, adds to an increasingly common trend on the study of water management. “This is a historic issue, but it also has current repercussions, not so much for developed countries, but for developing countries, where food needs are very high and here collective decisions on irrigation are crucial”, explains Salvador Calatayud, one of the authors of the study. In fact, this inclination has led to hundreds of articles on how to manage canals in India or sub-Saharan Africa, for example.

This investigation on the Royal Júcar Canal explains how the social inequality that existed in the government of the riverbed in the nineteenth century affected its operation and continuity, as it was the largest community irrigation system in Spain and currently irrigates a large part of the wide coastal plain that extends south of the city of Valencia.

As Calatayud points out, although the management of the canal was remarkably autonomous during most of its existence, “the state’s intervention caused internal conflicts to diminish, which favoured the viability of the communal use of the water. What we wanted to show in the article is that the autonomy of irrigators and state intervention are fully compatible”.

On the other hand, another of the novelties presented by the study in the field of Agricultural Economic History is that social inequality can be consistent with stable vertical cooperation and with an allocation of resources perceived as fair. “It was the rich people who managed the ditch, but they did it with everyone’s interests in mind because the irrigation system structures almost forced it to”, Calatayud says.

Moreover, the authors state that what favoured the sustainable functioning of community irrigation was not the degree of formal participation of irrigators, often low, but the key was their informal participation. The professor of Economic History explains that “it was essential that they be heard and that their proposals be considered, on several occasions expressed through non-compliance with the rules and even through violence”.

The study of the Irrigation Canal

The organisation of the Royal Irrigation Canal of the Júcar river since its creation in the thirteenth century has been analysed by many authors, including the winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics Elinor Ostrom. In one of her articles, the political scientist highlighted the Valencian canal as one of the best historical managements in the world in terms of the distribution of common goods.

She argued, along the same lines as Calatayud and Garrido, that the autonomy of Valencian irrigators had been essential, but that was not why the state intervention was null and void. As the authors of the article explain, it is a question of the union of both agents so that the canal has survived so many processes of change from the Middle Ages to the present day.

Article: Calatayud, S.; Garrido, S. (2021). Desigualdad social y toma de decisiones en los comunales: El gobierno del mayor canal de riego de España (la Acequia Real del Júcar, Valencia) en el siglo XIX. Historia Agraria: Revista de agricultura e historia rural, 83, 97-128. https://dialnet.unirioja.es/servlet/articulo?codigo=7836801