The publication presents a detailed comparative study of six irrigation districts in Spain and the United States: Valencia, Murcia, Alicante, Kings River, Northeastern Colorado, and the Utah Valley. The scale alone distinguishes the work from most water and irrigation studies which are typically more narrowly focused. The authors are interested primarily in the institutional arrangements which have been established in the various regions to develop, allocate, and enforce use rights to irrigation water. They center their comparisons of the districts around three points which they assert reflect the goals of the community members: popular participation and local control, efficiency and economic growth, and equity.

"...and the desert shall rejoice and blossom as the rose," prophesied Isaiah (35:1), and so it came to pass through the irrigation of arid lands, the diversion of waters, the damming of great rivers. The fruits of the earth have been brought forth in great abundance well beyond the regions known to Isaiah: This book examines irrigation communities in southeastern Spain and in the western United States. The authors' investigation covers past and present water resource institutions and procedures in the huertas of Valencia, Murcia-Orihuela, and Alicante in Spain; and in the Kings River service area of the Central Valley of California, northeastern Colorado, and the Utah Valley of teh United States.