A Common Pool Resource in Transition: Determinants of Institutional Change for Bulgaria's Postsocialist Irrigation Sector
研究了保加利亚灌溉部门在1990年代至2000年代初向市场经济转型期间的制度变迁，分析了政治、经济和社会系统同时变化下公共池塘资源面临的集体选择问题与制度缺陷。
This volume is part of the series ‘Institutional Change in Agriculture and Natural Resources’ (ICAR) edited by Beckmann and Hagedorn. The study is a result of scrupulous analysis of institutional change in Bulgaria's irrigation sector during the period of transition to a market economy in the 1990s and early 2000s. It is based on research and empirical observations that spanned two and half years in order to detect the direction of change in the institutional arrangements. The research has evolved within the EU Fifth Framework Programme project ‘Central and Eastern European Sustainable Agriculture’ (CEESA). From the very beginning, two main features of this book become obvious: The thorough knowledge of the author of the peculiar features of the transition period in Bulgaria in general, and in agriculture in particular, and the holistic approach chosen to tackle the problems of institutional change in the irrigation system. The main attraction of the book is that it provides a thorough description of the institutional arrangements and those collective choice problems that are related to common-pool resources during a period of simultaneous changes in the political, economic and social system. It underlines the institutional weaknesses stemming from the vacuum left by the destroyed pre-reform institutions and the lack of stability of the new post-reform institutional forms. This vacuum provided fertile grounds for the flourishing of opportunistic behaviour and the discretionary power of individuals using the system for their own interests by exploiting information asymmetries, and the incongruity between formal and informal institutional arrangements.