WORKING

STATE.problem: many independent competing extractors draw from one shared, slow-refilling reserve; no central owner; true stock hidden and expensive to measure; a one-way compaction threshold permanently destroys capacity if crossed; everything looks fine until too late; a regional body can set rules, fund measurement, and change knowledge/accountability but cannot cheaply meter every well or change the physics. Success = stay above the threshold AND keep extractors viable.

meta_model: N self-interested actors share a rivalrous, non-excludable, slowly-renewing stock with a hidden state, a hard irreversible tipping threshold, delayed feedback, and a governor who controls information/incentives but not actions directly.

VERBS RUN
- match (search_prime, meta-model): why — anchor to catalog. Top distinctive hits: tragedy_of_the_commons, scarcity-family, social_dilemma, mechanism_design.
- match (search_by_facets, 6 facets): why — oblique multi-structure problem; one blended vector would bury the load-bearing cores. Per-facet cleanly separated: irreversibility / threshold_and_criticality / reversibility_horizon (the irreversible-loss facet), observer_effect + measurement_uncertainty (hidden-state facet), mechanism_design + free_riding + social_dilemma (incentive facet), governance + accountability (governor facet), latency + feedback (delayed-feedback facet).
- salience-rank: why — order by load-bearing weight. Operative: (1) tragedy_of_the_commons = the spine; (2) irreversibility + threshold_and_criticality + reversibility_horizon = what makes this NOT an ordinary commons (no second chance; precaution multiplier; hysteresis); (3) observer_effect/measurement = hidden state must be made visible before any rule can bind; (4) mechanism_design/free_riding = align private incentive to collective survival; (5) latency/feedback = act before the visible signal.
- prune: drop herding, load_balancing, cognitive_resource_depletion, social_identity (peripheral / wrong neighborhood).
- get_prime x4: tragedy_of_the_commons, irreversibility, reversibility_horizon, threshold_and_criticality — extract structural signatures and design levers (Ostrom design principles; precaution as expected-harm multiplier; economic vs physical point-of-no-return; critical-slowing early-warning signals; hysteresis = reversal needs a bigger swing than the crossing).
- transport + get_archetype: commons_governance and tipping_point_prevention — carry their role-structures onto the farms. commons_governance supplies boundary/access/use-limit-tied-to-condition/monitoring/graduated-sanctions/replenishment/legitimacy/adaptation; tipping_point_prevention supplies named-irreversible-transition/early-warning/precommitted-intervention-window/stressor-reduction/feedback-damping/prevention-authority.
- evaluate-fit (gate): check anti-signatures. commons_governance: NOT fully private, NOT under-provision, central command not cheaply feasible (can't meter every well), not a 2-party dispute -> fits. tipping_point_prevention: transition is undesirable + hard-to-reverse + has leading signals + pre-threshold action exists -> fits. Gate passed; neither tripped.
- reconcile: fuse the two archetypes onto the concrete model. Key resolution — pure quota fails because state is hidden and metering is dear; so make the budget a function of the *observable* reserve condition, set the operating ceiling well inside the threshold (precaution multiplier for irreversibility), use a tradable shared budget (mechanism_design: aligns private gain with the cap), proxy-meter cheaply, and precommit graduated tightening on early-warning signals rather than waiting for the visible crisis.
- lower: instantiate as concrete mechanisms, thresholds, paths, and a final operating rule (below).
- STOP: model is complete, gate clean, recommendation grounded.

COST: ~9 operations, ~21000 tokens

===RECOMMENDATION_BEGIN===
Treat the reserve as a single jointly owned account whose balance no one can directly read, and build the whole scheme around two facts the farmers cannot see and cannot undo: the water still flows long after the danger has begun, and if the ground ever compacts the capacity is gone for good. Because the loss is permanent, do not aim at the true collapse line — aim at a generous safety margin well above it, and treat that margin as the real boundary.

Start by making the hidden state visible cheaply. The regional body should fund a small network of dedicated monitoring wells and periodic level surveys across the reserve, paid from a shared fund rather than by individual farms, so measurement is a public good and not a competitive cost. Between expensive direct readings, track cheap proxies that move early: how far pumps must drop to draw water, energy used per unit pumped, recovery time of water level after a heavy-draw season, and the spread of readings across wells. These proxies rise before the reserve nears trouble — slowing recovery and growing variability are the system's early warning that it is losing resilience. Publish a single shared dashboard of reserve condition that every farm can see, so no one can claim ignorance and so collective restraint becomes legible.

Convert that condition reading into a total annual draw budget for the whole region, set so the reserve stays comfortably inside the safety margin in a normal year. Crucially, tie the budget to the observed condition rather than fixing it once: when the monitoring shows the reserve healthy and recovering, the budget can be at its normal level; as the early-warning proxies climb, the budget steps down automatically on a published schedule. Precommit to these tightening steps now, before anyone is tempted to argue the signal away, because once the threshold is near there is no time and no second attempt.

Divide the total budget into shares the farms hold and can trade. Each farm receives an allocation reflecting its established use, and may buy or sell shares with others. This keeps the cap firm while letting water flow to its highest-value use, so efficient farms expand and marginal ones are paid to cut back rather than crushed — which protects farm viability while protecting the reserve. A farm that wants to grow must acquire shares from one that contracts; total draw never exceeds the budget regardless of individual ambition.

Enforce against the budget without metering every well. Estimate each farm's draw from a small number of cheap, hard-to-fake signals — pump energy records, irrigated acreage from imagery, crop water requirements — and audit a random sample directly each year, with heavier scrutiny on outliers. Make penalties graduated: a first overshoot draws a warning and a required correction; repeated or large overshoots draw escalating fines and reductions in next year's shares; persistent abuse loses access. Graduated, proportional, evidence-based consequences keep enforcement legitimate enough that farms accept it, which matters more than raw severity because compliance here rests on consent, not force.

Give the rules legitimacy and adaptability by running them through a council of the farms themselves alongside the regional body, with a transparent record, an appeals path for disputed estimates, and a fixed review cadence. Let the farms help set allocations and tighten triggers; people enforce and obey rules they helped write and can see applied evenly. Revise the budget formula and the proxy thresholds as the data accumulates and as drought or demand shifts, so the scheme does not ossify into something unfair or obsolete.

Finally, vest someone with the authority to act inside the warning window before the crisis is undeniable. Define explicitly that the unacceptable outcome is permanent compaction, name the safety margin as the line that must not be crossed, and grant the council a standing mandate to impose emergency cuts when the early-warning band is entered, subject to later review. The most useful moment to act arrives while everything still looks fine; waiting for visible failure means acting after the only chance is gone.

The final operating rule: keep the reserve above a safety margin set well inside the point of permanent loss; meter the reserve, not every well; turn the whole region's allowed draw into a shared, tradable budget pegged to the reserve's observed condition; and ratchet that budget down automatically and irreversibly-ahead-of-trouble whenever the early-warning signals rise — cutting back early and gently rather than late and catastrophically, because the reserve gives no refunds.
===RECOMMENDATION_END===
