How Needs Shape Water Allocation Decisions

Juliane Koch has been presenting new research from the SURCO project, co-authored with César Mantilla, Andrés Palacio, and Sebastián Suárez Lee, on how scarcity and inequality shape water-allocation decisions in Indigenous communities in La Guajira, Colombia.

Using a lab-in-the-field experiment, the study finds that while participants initially favor equal sharing, water scarcity shifts preferences toward needs-based allocation, particularly when inequalities arise from differences in water needs.

The paper, How Needs Shape Water Allocation Decisions – Experimental Evidence from La Guajira, Colombia, has been presented at the IFRO Seminar, University of Copenhagen; the 2026 European Meeting of the Economic Science Association (ESA), Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona; the 2026 Advances with Field Experiments (AFE) Conference, University of Chicago; and the World Bank Development Research Group Lightning Seminar.