Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• SEVILLA JIMÉNEZ, MARTÍN
• TORREGROSA MARTÍ, TERESA
• Moreno, Luis

Titel

Las aguas subterráneas y la tragedia de los Comunes de Vinalopó (Alicante, España)

Ist Teil von

• Estudios de economía aplicada, 2010-01, Vol.28 (2), p.305-332

Ort / Verlag

Madrid: Estudios de Economía Aplicada

Erscheinungsjahr

2010

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

Alma/SFX Local Collection

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• In a market economy, different economic goods are managed trying to look for maximum efficiency, especially for the owners. Collective management is applied in the case of some goods with specific characteristics, such as the difficulty of its divisibility and private appropriation. Groundwater falls into this group. Water located under large areas of land to facilitate its exploitation to a large number of users in order to get the highest profit. In Spain, this situation was favoured by the consideration of groundwater as a private good by the 1879 Water Act, in force until 1985, to distinguish from the surface waters, which had the character of the public domain. This legal framework created a strong process of water extractions especially in arid areas, which has resulted in unsustainable situations today. In the case studied here, we tried to analyze, not only the private behaviour in the process, but how public policy also contributed to this situation in the regions of Vinalopó, showing that sometimes, public intervention can contribute to what has been called “the tragedy of the commons”