Previous Page Next Page

Extracted Text (may have errors)

COMPARING WATER ACCESS REGIMES UNDER CONDITIONS OF SCARCITY 219 are something to be minimized so that trading can ensue and allocative efficiency can be maximized (Colby 1990). This exact argument has been applied in the case studies I will describe with respect to water and water markets, where high transaction costs are seen as a barrier to transfer- ring water from supposedly “low-value” agricultural uses to “high-value” urban uses. I do not find the standard argument convincing, because I do not find the notion of allocative efficiency to be an unproblematic or “scien- tifically neutral” policy goal, given that it strongly weighs the preferences of those with the needed political clout and financial resources to express their interests in well-functioning markets. I have no problem with the goal as such, but I do not see it as value neutral, which the language of efficiency strongly implies, nor do I see it as one that should be preferred over many others that we might specify. In any case, I do not think that path dependence is something that can be avoided. If we like the path we are on, then we presumably want to encourage at least some measure of path dependence. There is another way in which the emphasis on path dependence departs from standard economic analysis. Within the discipline of environ- mental economics (and applied/welfare economics generally), a diagnosis begins by imagining an ideal situation, usually the perfectly competitive market. The diagnosis then proceeds by analyzing the extent to which a particular situation departs from this ideal, and these departures are seen as evidence that one type of policy intervention or another might be appropriate for approximating the ideal. In contrast, a diagnostic that recognizes path dependence turns this approach on its head. It proceeds in an inductive fashion from a particu- lar social and ecological context and considers how it might be adapted to achieve a particular goal, keeping in mind the constraints inherent in the existing path. This approach is analogous to differences between “hard energy paths” and “soft energy paths” or a chemical analysis that starts off with observing the constraint of the “adjacent possible,” which in a chemi- cal context is all the possible products that a set of reactants could produce (Kauffman 2002). Simply put, recognizing path dependence means that we cannot start with an idealized abstraction, because we may not be able to obtain something that could meaningfully approximate such an ideal. To a large extent we have to deal with what we have and make marginal steps from there. With this discussion in mind we now turn to the case two studies.

Help

loading