Both for its technological and institutional innovations and for its history of conflicts, California's water system has been one of the most observed in the world. This article and this Special Issue on the CALFED Bay-Delta Program continue in this tradition. CALFED is likely the most ambitious experiment in collaborative environmental policy and adaptive management the world has seen to date. This Issue moves beyond the celebratory tone of other analyses of collaborative, adaptive management and looks closer into how collaborative networks work to produce innovation, and more importantly to reflect also on their inherent contradictions, limitations and “dark sides”. While collaborative governance enhances mutual understandings and can be a source of innovation, it appears ill-suited to resolve alone the distributive dilemmas at the core of many water – and other environmental – conflicts. A lacuna in existing research concerns the institutional design of effective boundaries .
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Collaborative water governance (CWG) has emerged as a promising framework to tackle water management challenges. Simple identification of participants however is not enough to unravel the intricacies of stakeholders' interlinkages, roles and influences for robust CWG. A clear understanding of the stakeholders' landscape is therefore required to underpin CWG. In this work, we combine stakeholder analysis (SA), social network analysis (SNA) and participatory processes (PP) under a theoretical collaborative governance framework to advance CWG in the contentious Rapel River Basin (RRB), Chile. By combining these techniques, we identified a cohort of leading (and secondary) stakeholders, their relationships and critical roles on basin-wide CWG-enabling networks (collaborative ties, information flows and financial exchanges) and their influence to achieve a shared vision for water planning. The results show members of this cohort perform critical roles (bridging, connecting and gatekeeping) across the networks and in influencing explicit elements of the shared vision. Specific CWG-enabling networks properties indicate a weak adaptive capacity of stakeholders to deal with potential water management challenges and strong prospects for sharing innovative ideas/solutions and achieving long-term water planning goals. A major CWG implementation challenge in the RRB is the lack of a leading organisation. One way forward would be formally organising stakeholders of the identified cohort to advance CWG in the RRB. By implementing the methodological framework, we facilitated social learning, fostered trust among stakeholders and mobilised efforts towards implementing CWG in practice in the contentious RRB.
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San Francisco Estuary and Watershed Science
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Journal of Policy Analysis and Management
Public policymaking and implementation in the United States are increasingly handled through local, consensus-seeking partnerships involving most affected stakeholders. This paper formalizes the concept of a stakeholder partnership, and proposes techniques for using interviews, surveys, and documents to measure each of six evaluation criteria. Then the criteria are applied to 44 watershed partnerships in California and Washington. The data suggest that each criterion makes a unique contribution to the overall evaluation, and together the criteria reflect a range of partnership goals—both short-term and long-term, substantive and instrumental. Success takes time—frequently about 48 months to achieve major milestones, such as formal agreements and implementation of restoration, education, or monitoring projects. Stakeholders perceive that their partnerships have been most effective at addressing local problems and at addressing serious problems—not just uncontroversial issues, as prev.
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Environmental Science and Policy
Agriculture, environment, industry, and millions of households in the western US and northern Mexico depend on the Colorado River, which is facing increasing water shortages due to climate change and rising demand. Collaborative governance will likely be key to solving allocation issues and achieving sustainable water use but has recently faced multiple challenges. This research integrates concepts from institutional, adaptive govern-ance, and bargaining theories to analyze barriers and facilitators to collaborative governance in the drought contingency plan (DCP) process for the lower Colorado River basin from an Arizona stakeholder's perspective. The DCP is ultimately an effort to create a set of rules to prevent and address shortages in the basin. Through a content analysis of public meetings of the Central Arizona Project's governing board, we find a collective DCP or future related policy may be possible. But barriers to collaborative governance have intensified over time, hindering the process and making an agreement increasingly unlikely. The process is a perfect example of the interplay between rules and norms, and the issues that arise when norms underlying rules are interpreted differently. Our analysis provides insights for the design of collaborative water governance, including that conducting an analysis of power dynamics among the stakeholders would advance the DCP process. We ultimately argue that the Colorado River basin would benefit from a transition towards adaptive governance, and that our recommendations to improve collaboration are an important initial step. Additionally, our results reveal areas that require more empirical research, including understanding how to prepare for policy windows, rapid trust building among stakeholders, and theory building related to equity and marginalization in collaborative gov-ernance processes.
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Collaborative negotiation has been widely used for developing water policy. Nevertheless, a serious lacuna remains in the understanding of the factors that determine whether the negotiators in this bargaining process will be able to reach agreement. This paper argues that the literature has focused on the process that is followed in negotiations, to the virtual exclusion of the substance of the issues that are to be resolved. As a consensus can only be reached concerning a change in policy if each party receives compensation for the concessions that it makes, a precondition for collaborative negotiation is that each party must have control over some asset that it can “trade” with the other parties. When this condition is met, it can be said that the process has “substance.” The authors identify a number of situations in which negotiations over water policy may possess this characteristic. However, they also argue that there is a large set of cases in which positive net gains are available, but in which at least one party lacks control over an asset that can be exchanged. In these cases, a number of government policies are investigated that could provide stakeholders with the necessary tradable goods and, therefore, could impart substance to the process. Many situations still remain, however, in which collaboration will lack substance, and stakeholders can be expected either to seek alternative means for pursuing their goals or to waste their effort in endless bargaining.
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Environmental governance scholars argue that optimal environmental performance can be achieved by matching the scale of governance to the scale of the resource being managed. In the case of water, this means managing at the scale of the watershed. However, many watersheds lack a single watershed-scale organization with authority over all water resources and instead rely on cross-jurisdiction coordination or collaboration among diverse organizations. To understand what "watershed governance" looks like fully, this paper maps organizations with rights to use, regulate, or manage water in four subwatersheds in California (the American, Cosumnes, and Kings Rivers in the Sacramento-San Joaquin watershed and the Shasta River in the Klamath watershed). We assemble datasets of water organizations, water rights holders, and water management plans and use content analysis and social network analysis to explore what water management looks like in the absence of a single basin authority. We describe the institutional complexity that exists in each watershed, compare the physical and institutional interconnections between actors in the watersheds, and then ask to what extent these connections map onto watershed boundaries. We find that the ways in which water management is complex takes very different forms across the four watersheds, despite their being located in a similar political, social, and geographic context. Each watershed has drastically different numbers of actors and uses a very different mix of water sources. We also see very different levels of coordination between actors in each watershed. Given these differences, we then discuss how the institutional reforms needed to create watershed-scale management are unique for each watershed. By building a stronger comparative understanding of what watershed governance actually entails, this work aims to build more thoughtful recommendations for building institutional fit.
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This article proposes an analytical approach to conflicts and policy-making related to urban water management based on multi-level policy coalitions. This is necessary to articulate four main issues. First, the repositioning of social and political struggles for access to water, along with policy variables. Second, the analysis of the effects of ecological transition, including climate change. Third, the reincorporation of these struggles and challenges in a multi-level approach. Finally, the enquiry into the apparent contradiction, in contemporary policymaking. The article proposes a definition of multi-level coalitions as collective preference systems that influence the content of policies (ideas/advocacy, decisions, policy tools) and their implementation, groups of actors that arise from engagement in policy issues. In the first section, the article presents the objectives of research on urban water management in the Americas, within the framework of which this analytical approac.
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Society & Natural Resources
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