Dr Paul Trawick

Senior Lecturer in Environmental Anthropology
Location: Building 42a, Cranfield campus
E: p.trawick@cranfield.ac.uk
T: +44 (0)1234 750111 x2744
Natural Resources

Current activities

Dr Paul Trawick has recently done research for Defra and the UK government on “Sustainable Development as a ‘Collective-choice’ Problem”, a contribution to their Sustainable Development Strategy and its publication series, Behaviour Change: A Series of Practical Guides for Policy-Makers and Practitioners. He is now involved in two research projects funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) in their programme on Rural Economy and Land Use (RELU), as well as a related project assessing the impact of the extreme flood events of the summer of 2007 on rural communities in England. He is also contributing to the Water Abstractor Groups project (WAGS), funded by the Environment Agency and EEDAS, which is attempting to promote an ongoing process of self-organisation of local irrigator associations in the UK, a spontaneous effort that has recently emerged among farmers, primarily in south-east England, as a response to the growing threat of water scarcity. This work on successful collective-action and adaptive water management in the UK is highly compatible with his ongoing research and writing on sustainable farmer-managed irrigation systems in other parts of the globe.

Paul is one of the first social scientists to carry out comparative ethnographic research on successful farmer-managed irrigation systems in different parts of the world, work that employs the same methods and asks the same questions to reveal how such systems operate and why they are so effective from the farmer’s own point-of-view. This comparative cross-cultural study has made it possible to test and confirm a controversial hypothesis in nineteen systems of very different scales and levels of complexity in three regions—southern Peru, the Mediterranean coast of Spain, and northern Chile—whose hydraulic traditions are known to have evolved independently of each other. The systems, which provide for the equitable sharing of a water scarcity, are based on a highly similar if not identical set of institutions which create a pervasive proportionality and transparency among farmers’ ‘individual’ (ie. household) water rights. Paul calls the kind of tradition created by these institutions “the moral economy of water”, arguing that it can serve as a model, not only for improving local irrigation but also for reforming water policy, writing better national water laws, and achieving more sustainable livelihoods in countries that will be hit increasingly by aridity and water scarcity as the planet continues to warm.

Clients

UK’s Department for Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs (Defra)
Environment Agency
Economic and Social Research Council
East of England Development Association (EEDAS).

Background

Dr Paul Trawick took his PhD in Socio-cultural Anthropology at Yale University (with Distinction) after doing an MA in Prehistory and Social Anthropology at the University of Texas and a BSc at Reed College and the University of Oregon in the United States. Prior to coming to Cranfield in 2005 he had been an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Kentucky for several years and had taught for a year as a Visiting Assistant Professor at Johns Hopkins University. He began his professional career doing several consultancies on water law reform for the World Bank and the InterAmerican Development Bank in Washington DC. He is an active member of the American Anthropological Association (AAA), a Fellow of the Society for Applied Anthropology (SfAA), a member of the International Association for the Study of the Commons (IASC), and is a founding member of the newly-formed UK Committee on the Human Dimensions of Global Environmental Change.

Selected publications

Trawick, Paul, (2008) “Reading History in an Irrigated Landscape: The Drama of the Commons in the Andes”; in L. Cliggett and C. Pool, Eds, Economies and the Transformation of Landscape. Society for Economic Anthropology Monograph Series. Altamira Press, Pp 47-76.
Trawick, Paul (in press, 2008) “Scarcity, Equity, and Transparency: General Principles for Successfully Governing the Water Commons”, in E. Wiegandt, Ed., Mountains: Sources of Water, Sources of Knowledge, in the Springer series Advances in Global Change Research, Pp. 43-61.
Trawick, Paul (2007) “Trickle Down Theory, Andean Style: Traditional Irrigation Practices Provide a Lesson in Sharing”, in Faces of Anthropology: A Reader for the 21^st Century, 5^th Edition. New York: Prentice-Hall.
Trawick, Paul (2005) “Going with the Flow: The State of Contemporary Studies of Water Management in Latin American”, invited essay for the Latin American Research Review, Vol 40(3): 443-456.
Trawick, Paul (2003a) The Struggle for Water in Peru: Comedy and Tragedy in the Andean Commons. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press.
Trawick, Paul (2003b) “Against the Privatization of Water: An Indigenous Model for Improving Existing Laws and Successfully Governing the Commons”, World Development, Vol. 31 (6): pp. 977-996 (2003).
Trawick, Paul (2002) “Trickle-down Theory, Andean-style: Traditional Irrigation Practices Provide a Lesson in Sharing. Natural History 11(8): 60-65 (invited article, October 2002 issue)
Trawick,Paul (2001a) “The Moral Economy of Water: Equity and Antiquity in the Andean Commons”, American Anthropologist 103 (2):361-379.
Trawick, Paul (2001b) “Successfully Governing the Commons: Principles of Social Organization in an Andean Irrigation System”, Human Ecology 29 (1): 1-25.