摘要：Mounting evidence suggests that ethnic interactions damage cooperation in the provision of public goods, yetvery few studies of collective action in common pool resource management have found strong evidence for the effects of ethnicdiversity. Research on both public goods and common pool resource management that does find negative ethnic effects oncooperation tend to ignore the importance of interethnic relationships, particularly ethnic inequality, stratification, or dominance.This study presents data from agricultural villages in Tamil Nadu's Palani Hills to test the importance of a range of ethnic effectsusing caste interactions in a traditional irrigation system. I provide corroborating evidence of a negative cooperative effect ofethnic diversity, but also demonstrate that factors of ethnic dominance such as hierarchical stratification and demographicdominance strongly determine outcomes in collective irrigation management. I argue that the most important measure of equity,irrigation access, is socially, technologically, and institutionally embedded, and demonstrate that the distribution of irrigationchannels is explained by measures of inequality, such as wealth inequality, Dalit status, and demographic dominance.
关键词：cooperation; irrigation; ethnic diversity; ethnic dominance; India
