Institutions that lasted were built in small, cheap steps, and big-bang attempts failed: in the Los Angeles basins change came through "many small steps that had low initial costs", while Mojave tried to assign rights for 15 basins "all at one time". Seen as a sequence, the second-order dilemma of who pays to build the institution may not be a dilemma at all, and early small successes build the social capital for larger ones. This backs phase weighting: add checks one at a time as power is earned, not a full constitution up front.

Evidence 5 passages

• groundsGoverning the Commons

  Success in starting small-scale initial institutions enables a group of individuals to build on the social capital thus created to solve larger problems with larger and more complex institutional arrangements.

• groundsGoverning the Commons

  What worked as an incremental bottom-up strategy at The basin level did not work when attempted at a regional level.

• groundsGoverning the Commons

  In Mojave, by contrast, the approach was to organize a very large unit and attempt to assign, all at one time, water rights for 15 different basins and an underground river system.

• groundsGoverning the Commons

  What is presumed to be a second-order dilemma, in which institutional change is viewed as one large step, may or may not have the structure of a dilemma when institutional change is viewed as a sequential and incremental process.

• groundsGoverning the Commons

  the process of institutional change in all basins involved many small steps that had low initial costs.

Where the agents stand

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