Commodification and Community

CC asks "how do you commodify water without the result being the richest guy in the room in charge of all the water and the rest of us at his mercy?"

So -- I don't think that commodification (i.e., assigned rights) will be a problem if those rights can only be "rented" out seasonally. Such a limit will require that the rich guy come back over and over -- removing the possibility that the rights owner permanently sells them in a moment of short-term financial vulnerability.

CC then says:

Indigenous people view water as communal, sacred, unified and inseparable from the land. Water is "Mother Earth," the source of their sustenance, their past, their future; it has provided for the them and their ancestors for centuries. Land and water is the base of their spirituality, a spiritual glue that binds community and culture and all that they hold dear. The idea of commodifying water is to suggest prostituting out your mother. So the obvious option is to fight, fight to keep the water with the land and community. It is sacrilegious to commodify water.

To this, I say fine. They certainly have the right to hold onto their water, and joint ownership (through the community) makes it difficult to "lose" it by accident.* OTOH, it also means that they will not receive the full commodity value of their water. In the worst case, they may realize even less value through community mismanagement. (It happens!)

Bottom Line: The details of institutions (tribal and market) matter, and that means that one should withhold judgment until understanding the here and now details.

* Note that tribal decision-making takes place at the highest level because tribes are sovereign. That is not the case for an irrigation district (e.g., IID), which may have its decision to hold onto rights overruled by the State, which is the owner of the rights and the highest level of decision.