A common pool without visible accounting is a leap of faith. Most people will not take it. This pattern describes how transparency transforms the act of contributing from a private sacrifice into a social one. It sits beneath Trust as Infrastructure and connects laterally to The History of the Pool and The Neighbour, Not the Rule.

When a shared fund is introduced into a water management community, the first question is rarely about the fund itself. It is about everyone else. Will my neighbours contribute? Will the money be spent wisely? Will I be the only one who gives while others wait and benefit? These questions are not expressions of selfishness. They are rational responses to uncertainty about collective commitment. And in the absence of visible accounting, they are unanswerable.

The act of contributing to a common pool carries a different meaning depending on whether others can see it.

This is the mechanism that transparency serves — not reporting, not audit, not accountability in the bureaucratic sense, but the transformation of a private financial decision into a legible social signal. A farmer who sees that her neighbours have already contributed faces a fundamentally different choice than one who contributes into opacity. In the first case, contributing is joining something. In the second, it is hoping something exists.

Visible accounting does not eliminate free-riding. A determined free-rider will free-ride regardless. But it changes the social cost of doing so. When contributions are visible, free-riding becomes a public position — one that neighbours can see, name, and respond to. This is what connects accounting to the pattern of social persuasion that sits alongside it. (The Neighbour, Not the Rule describes how that social response operates.)

The same logic applies to expenditure. A pool whose inflows are visible but whose outflows are opaque generates a different kind of uncertainty — not about whether others are contributing, but about whether the fund is being used for collective benefit or captured by those who manage it. In water management communities across South and Southeast Asia, the collapse of collective maintenance funds has frequently been traced not to unwillingness to contribute but to lost confidence in how money was being spent. Transparency of expenditure is not a check on corruption alone. It is the mechanism through which members can verify that the collective bargain is being kept.

In the Bangladesh delta game, the shared dashboard — showing contributions, investments, and outcomes in real time — was not a reporting tool added for administrative completeness. It was the architecture of collective visibility. Players who could see the state of the pool, and see each other's relationship to it, were playing a different game than players who could not. The dashboard was infrastructure in the same sense that a canal is infrastructure: it made something possible that was not possible without it.

The design implication is precise: accounting systems for common pools should be designed first for the members of the pool, not for external auditors or project managers. The primary audience for the numbers is the community itself. Formats that are legible to members — visible in a meeting, readable without specialist knowledge, updated frequently enough to reflect current reality — serve the governance function. Formats designed for donor reporting or bureaucratic compliance may satisfy external requirements while leaving the internal visibility problem entirely unsolved.

Design the accounting system of a common pool as governance infrastructure, not administrative procedure. Make contributions and expenditures visible to all members in formats they can read and discuss. Update accounts frequently enough that the current state of the pool is always known. Treat the moment when members can see each other's contributions not as a reporting milestone but as the point at which collective action becomes possible.

Connected patterns: The Common Pool As Phase Transition —Trust as Infrastructure — The History of the Pool — The Neighbour, Not the Rule — The Predicted Conflict