Institutional Path Dependence in Climate Adaptation: Coman's “Some Unsettled Problems of Irrigation”
回顾1911年Coman关于灌溉问题的论文，指出美国西部早期形成的用水权和灌溉区制度提高了当今水市场的交易成本，阻碍了水资源向高价值用途的重新分配，体现了制度路径依赖对气候适应的约束。
Katharine Coman's “Some Unsettled Problems of Irrigation,” published in March 1911 in the first issue of the American Economic Review, addressed issues of water supply, rights, and organization. These same issues have relevance today, in the face of growing concern about the availability of fresh water worldwide. The central point of this article is that appropriative water rights and irrigation districts that emerged in the American West in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in response to aridity to facilitate agricultural water delivery, use, and trade raise the transaction costs today of water markets. These markets are vital for smooth reallocation of water to higher-valued uses elsewhere in the economy and for flexible response to greater hydrological uncertainty. This institutional path dependence illustrates how past arrangements to meet conditions of the time constrain contemporary economic opportunities. They cannot be easily significantly modified or replaced ex post.