Self-Organizing Coordination and Cooperative Path in Water Right Transfer: A Case of Xinjiang Autonomous Region
水权转让中自主协调与合作路径分析——以新疆地区为例

Most studies regarding water right transfer are focused on its economic attribute. The means of water right transfer involves administrative measure, economic measure, and combination of administrative and economic measures which are all taken as external control or compensation mechanisms. However, those measures tend to cause high implementation costs or invalid transfers. Specifically, there are two intractable issues in water management and water allocation. First, because of deficiencies in communication and interest sharing in the tradition mean of water transfer, interest conflicts between the supplier and the demander often arise during the water transfer. Second, the tradition mean of water transfer often results in high costs for building a cooperative relationship and supervising the whole process of water transfer. It is therefore of importance to develop a new measure to ensure the water use for society and the environment. Firstly, this study summarizes achievements of previous studies associated with water management, natural resource management, and institutional economics. Second, the most important problems in the water transfer of Xinjiang Autonomous Region were summarized. After that, this paper presents an inclusive group consisting of stakeholders and collective selection rules from the perspective of collective action. Results show that the new method appears to be able to greatly improve the economic efficiency and the effect of water resources management in Xinjiang. Three conclusions were drawn. 1) The interests of respective agents could be increased by collective action and self-organizing coordination; 2) Conflicts in water transfer could be reduced by self-organizing coordination; 3) The interest mechanism becomes more reasonable and efficient by the rule of benefits and cost sharing in the new method. In summary, the self-organizing coordination and the collective action of cooperation in water transfer are considered as one of the most vital ways of water reallocation. Meanwhile, results of this study would be useful in other natural resources management.