Community, Common-Pool Resources and Socio-Ecological Systems: Water Management and Community Building in Southern Spain

Community is understood to be one of the main conditioning factors in the management of common-pool resources (CPRs): its attributes, understood as the context for collective action, largely determine the communal management of natural resources. This article proposes a recursive relationship between CPR management and the community building process. A case study carried out in La Alpujarra (Andalusia, Spain) shows how the social interaction developed in order to manage a specific resource -irrigation water- has a significant impact on the community building process within a heterogeneous, polarised and vulnerable local society. Therefore, not only does community "produce" collective management, but also the collective management of a CPR can "produce" community. This perspective helps to provide a more in-depth understanding of socio-ecological phenomena and re-examines the very notion of community from a praxeological and processual perspective, which is more useful to environmental studies.