Valencia's Water Tribunal and Elinor Ostrom: accountability without a central state

Every Thursday, when the Micalet bell strikes twelve, eight farmers sit down in front of the Apostles' Door of Valencia Cathedral. They are the síndicos of the eight main canals that water the Vega, the farmland around the city, and together they form the Tribunal de las Aguas. Somebody has taken water out of turn, or broken a channel bank, or flooded a neighbour's field. The guard of the canal has reported it, the accused has been summoned, and the case is heard on the spot, out loud, in Valencian.

Tourists film it as folklore. It is also one of the best working answers in Europe to a question this week keeps returning to: how do you make people with power over a shared resource answer for what they do with it, quickly and cheaply, without waiting for a ministry?

How the tribunal works

The Tribunal's own description is worth reading in full. Each irrigation community elects its board and its síndico, who must be a farmer working his or her own land and known as an honest person. The síndicos of the eight canals, from Quart and Favara on the right bank of the Turia to Tormos, Mestalla and Rascanya on the left, make up the court. UNESCO, which inscribed the Tribunal in 2009 together with the Council of Good Men of the Plain of Murcia, counts 11,691 irrigators behind them.

The rules of procedure are a lesson in themselves. There are no lawyers and no written pleadings. Witnesses can be heard and the court can go and look at the field. The síndico of the parties' own canal does not take part in the deliberation, so nobody judges their own neighbours. If someone ignores three summonses, they are judged in absence. The ruling admits no appeal and is carried out directly by the síndico of the canal concerned. The síndicos are unpaid, and the judgments are entered in a register. After the public hearing the same people meet in private to manage the distribution of water.

This is a court, and the Spanish state says so. Article 125 of the Constitution lets citizens take part in justice through customary and traditional courts, and Article 19 of the Organic Law of the Judiciary names the Tribunal de las Aguas de la Vega Valenciana as one, alongside Murcia's council and, since 2021, two smaller water courts in Orihuela and Aldaia.

What Ostrom saw in it

Elinor Ostrom put the huertas of Valencia, Murcia, Orihuela and Alicante at the centre of Governing the Commons (Cambridge University Press, 1990), the book we explained last week. She wanted to show that the users of a common resource can avoid the tragedy of the commons without handing it either to the state or to private owners. Working from the histories of Thomas Glick and of Arthur Maass and Raymond Anderson, she treated the Spanish irrigation communities as near-ideal cases: institutions that had lasted centuries and, in her reading, settled conflicts, allocated water predictably and kept order among farmers with every reason to cheat.

Her eight design principles, as Michael Cox and colleagues list them in a 2010 review in Ecology and Society, read like a description of Thursday morning in Valencia. The people affected by the rules take part in changing them. Monitoring is done by the users or by guards accountable to them. Sanctions are graduated. There is a cheap, local place to resolve conflicts. The state recognises the users' right to organise. And the whole thing sits in nested layers, from the field turn to the canal community to the court to the river basin.

The Valencian historian Tomàs Peris-Albentosa, writing in 2015, thinks the core of Ostrom's thesis still holds. He also questions some of the history she relied on, such as the idea that the communities were purely peasant affairs running unchanged since Islamic times. That is a useful caution. The tribunal has survived because it kept adapting, which is a point in Ostrom's favour.

Accountability built from below

Our week on institutions has mostly looked at top-down controls: watchdogs without politicians, specialised courts, a prosecution service answerable to Parliament. The Water Tribunal adds the other direction. Here the people who use a resource elect the judges, see every hearing in public and watch each other's behaviour through a guard who answers to them.

Each political tradition can recognise something here. The left sees a shared resource governed collectively by the people who work it, with equal access secured by rotation and with judges elected by the users. The right and the market-liberal tradition see clear rights attached to land and quick, almost free enforcement, with no central bureaucracy; rules that bite fast are what make cooperation pay. The idea that belongs to neither is Ostrom's polycentric governance: users monitor and judge themselves, inside a state that recognises their institutions and steps in where they cannot cope.

Spain's water law already has that shape. The consolidated Water Act obliges users of a common intake to form user communities, which write their own statutes, are public-law corporations attached to the basin authority, and hold at least a third of the seats on its governing board. The October 2024 floods showed why the upper layer matters. In December 2024 the Valencian government's Decree 182/2024 set aside €20 million in aid for irrigation communities, whose canals had been filled with sediment; the farmers' federation and the regional irrigation service estimated the damage to off-farm infrastructure at €100 million. No canal community could absorb that alone.

The radical-centre lesson is concrete. Where a resource is shared and local, such as an aquifer, a neighbourhood's public space, a school's budget or a fishing ground, Spain should give its users the Valencian package: an elected body, a public hearing, a guard answerable to them, a fast route to settle disputes, and legal recognition by the state, which keeps the money and the powers for disasters no community can face alone. It is old, it is cheap, and every Thursday at noon it still works.