Groundwater governance and social capital E. López-Gunn ⇑ Water Observatory, Botin Foundation, Geodynamics Department, Geology Faculty, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Madrid 28040, Spain Formerly at London School of Economics, Houghton Street, London WC2 2AH, United Kingdom article info Article history: Received 6 May 2010 Received in revised form 3 June 2012 Available online 13 October 2012 Keywords: Social capital Collective action Social learning Groundwater Governance Common pool resources Leadership Social networks abstract This paper argues that positive social capital underpins the key factors identified by Ostrom (1990) in self-governance systems. The paper discusses the different types of social capital from a social network perspective and empirically analyses social capital in the context of two neighboring aquifers in central Spain. It examines the type of institutional arrangements that foster or hinder the creation of social cap- ital by discussing in turn, bonding and bridging social capital with particular reference to water user groups, taken as classic collective management institutions, illustrating also the role leaders play as link- ing social capital and catalysts (or obstacles) in the creation and blending of different types of social cap- ital. It concludes that social capital is differentially embedded in social networks and that careful institutional design can help foster strong ‘positive’ social capital, which in turn favors self-governance in groundwater. It also stresses the dynamic nature of social capital through time and its productive aspect in terms of incentivizing social learning and collective action in groundwater management. Ó 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction Social capital is increasingly recognized as key to both successes and failures in natural resource management. It is a concept that has proved difficult to define in terms of reaching an agreed defini- tion, and even more problematic in terms of its measurement. Yet this paper argues that social capital is fundamental to understand first order dilemmas in institutional analysis. When in the early 1990s Ostrom (1990, 1992) identified factors in natural resource management that may lead to mutually beneficial collective action (MBCA), it was difficult to explain why in some cases these factors exist and in others these are absent. Ostrom (2000, p. 4) herself ex- plains: ‘In the currently accepted theory of collective action the temptation to free ride – to receive benefits without paying the costs – prevents individuals from voluntarily contributing to joint efforts without selective benefits. The real challenge lies in first or- der dilemmas i.e. overcoming the temptation to free ride’. Second and third order dilemmas refer to rules developed and their enforcement through monitoring and sanctioning and are easily identified. It is however much harder to explain how first or- der dilemmas are addressed e.g. why individuals such as farmers start to act together, avoiding free riding and rent-seeking behavior to solve the tragedy of the commons. How do individuals succeed in their effort to self-govern? This paper argues that social capital is key to this effort by looking at a classic common pool resource: groundwater. The main hypothesis and focus of this paper is that the proxi- mate causes of social capital lie in social connections between and across social networks (Grafton, 2005), inherently and inti- mately connected to institutional arrangements, and increasingly to the path dependence created by different organizational designs (Ebbinghaus, 2005). This paper will aim to show how institutional arrangements can incentivize or hinder the creation of social cap- ital, in our case focused on and reflected in collective action to manage natural resources, in this case groundwater. Furthermore, there are arguments that social capital is actually embedded in participatory structures (Pretty and Ward, 2001), arranged as net- works, which can help stabilize relationships (Murphy, 2006), reducing transaction costs. Social networks have featured highly on the ‘good governance agenda’, and this paper argues that in the ‘good enough governance’ agenda (Grindle, 2007), social capi- tal should be one of the priorities for action. This paper will aim to provide evidence that robust social networks are underpinned by strong and positive social capital. The paper is structured in the following way: the first section reviews the literature on social capital and defines and character- izes what aspects and types of social capital are used in this paper. The second section introduces the case study areas and methodol- ogies used, while the third section analyzes the different types of social capital. The final section briefly considers whether social capital in the case study areas was translated into collective action to manage groundwater resources towards reducing abstractions 0016-7185/$ - see front matter Ó 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2012.06.013 ⇑ Address: Water Observatory, Botin Foundation, Geodynamics Department, Geology Faculty, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Madrid 28040, Spain. E-mail address: e.lopez_gunn@geo.ucm.es Geoforum 43 (2012) 1140–1151 Contents lists available at SciVerse ScienceDirect Geoforum journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/geoforum