[Themaintainers] My book on maintenance

[Atul Pokharel]

Dear Maintainers,
  I have been lurking on this list for about a decade and I finally have
something to share that might be of use to some of us on the list.

Short version:
My book, titled "Beyond Collective Action Problems: Perceived Fairness and
Sustained Cooperation in Farmer Managed Irrigation Systems in Nepal" came
out recently.  It tries to understand the maintenance of shared
infrastructure (via irrigation systems), and argues that the core problem
faced, over time, by groups who are maintaining things they use are
"fairness problems."  These are different from the more familiar collective
action problems in ways I detail in the book. I explain maintenance (or
lack of it) as a consequence of how fair the uses perceive their governance
arrangements to be ("perceived fairness").

Long version:
When I joined the list, I was a newly minted academic (in Urban Planning)
trying to understand why some communities can maintain infrastructure that
they share, while others cannot.  The keyword here is "maintenance" because
the overwhelming amount of existing work on cooperation dealt with getting
(selfish) people to work together. This seemed to me to apply more to
building things, and less to maintaining built things. There were also some
methodological shortcomings in the existing work. So I replicated a
well-known study done by Elinor Ostrom (of Governing the Commons fame) and
her team. This resulted the first large N dataset of commons governance,
and let me examine what actually explained why some groups could maintain
their irrigation canals over time. (Hint: The Design Principles are not
enough, and can even be misleading with regards to maintenance).
Eventually, I argued that existing theories of cooperation have trouble
explaining maintenance because they deal with initiating cooperation among
selfish people. However, maintenance often has to do with sustaining
cooperation among people who have already cooperated to build something.
This led down a long path of analyzing about 1200 hours of interviews with
farmers in order to understand why they stopped maintaining their systems,
and coming up with this idea of "perceived fairness".  Eventually, I tried
to pull things together into a theory of sustained cooperation in the
maintenance of shared resources based on perceptions of fairness that I
present in the book.

I'd love to hear your comments. If you have trouble getting a copy, either
for financial reasons or otherwise, please let me know and I may be able to
help. The publisher gave me a few copies, and I have two left.  In case you
are in the Boston area, I am also giving a book talk at MIT tomorrow, Nov
18, 2025 from 12:00-2:30 in room 9-450. So please stop by to say hi.

And If you can think of ways to publicize the work to relevant audiences, I
would be very grateful.

Regards,
Atul
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