ABSTRACT. Inland flood risks are defined by a range of environmental and social factors, including land use and floodplain management. Shifting patterns of storm intensity and precipitation, attributed to climate change, are exacerbating flood risk in regions across North America. Strategies for adapting to growing flood risks and climate change must account for a community's specific vulnerabilities, and its local economic, environmental, and social conditions. Through a stakeholder-engaged methodology, we designed an interactive decision exercise to enable stakeholders to evaluate alternatives for addressing specific community flood vulnerabilities. We used a multicriteria framework to understand what drives stakeholder preferences for flood mitigation and adaptation alternatives, including ecosystem-based projects. Results indicated strong preferences for some ecosystem-based projects that utilize natural capital, generated a useful discussion on the role of individual values in driving decisions and a critique of local environmental and hazard planning procedure, and uncovered support for a river management alternative that had previously been considered socially infeasible. We conclude that a multicriteria decision framework may help ensure that the multiple benefit qualities of natural capital projects are considered by decision makers. Application of a utility function can demonstrate the role of individual decision-maker values in decision outcomes and help illustrate why one alternative may be a better choice than another. Although designing an efficient and accurate multicriteria exercise is quite challenging and often data intensive, we imagine that this method is applicable elsewhere. It may be especially suitable to group decisions that involve varying levels of expertise and competing values, as is often the case in planning for the ecological and human impacts of climate change.
Designing adaptive institutions for achieving sustainable groundwater use is a central challenge to local and state governments. This challenge is exacerbated by the growing impacts and uncertainty of climate change on water resources. Calls to reform water governance systems are often made in the context of these challenges, and reform efforts increasingly emphasize the need for solutions that are locally designed and administered. Such reforms often require fundamental institutional change that is difficult to achieve amid the myriad forces that stabilize and reproduce existing institutional structures and functions. In practice, governance change is instead overwhelmingly incremental and tends to be punctuated by periods of adjustment in response to social or environmental shocks and disturbances. We present a comparative study of four major Colorado river basins and examine how each has evolved distinct arrangements of groundwater governance in response to regulatory and drought disturbances over the past century. We interrogate concepts of path-dependence and apply a historical lens to understand why locally designed institutions for self-regulation emerge in some Colorado groundwater basins but not in others. We uncover a pattern of collective action by groundwater users that first seeks to oppose state regulation, followed by acceptance and efforts to comply, and eventual attempts to get ahead of state regulation by enacting local institutions for self-regulation. We report these findings and discuss the insights they offer for understanding how adaptive natural resources institutions are shaped through time by the constraints and opportunities of path-dependence and local contexts.
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