Frame Disputes in a Natural Resource Controversy: The Case of the Arbuckle Simpson Aquifer in South-Central Oklahoma

Framing Water Sustainability in an Environmental Decision Support System

“…These included scientific rationality (Hall and White 2008;Mercer 2002;Roth et al 2003), economic growth (Skillington 1997), social justice (Edwards 2006), and local knowledge (Brown 1992;Harrison et al 1998). Additional frame elements found in resource and sustainability literature included human-ecological systems integrity, resource maintenance and efficiency, interand intragenerational equity, precaution and adaptation, democratic governance, private property rights, social responsibility, ecosystem preservation, technological innovation, and supply-demand balance (Gibson et al 2005;Shriver and Peaden 2009). These frame elements served as deductive codes in the qualitative analysis as described later.…”

Characterizing the potential for drought action from combined hydrological and societal perspectives

“…The ASA provides water for municipal supply, ranching, and mining and is also the source of local springs and streams that support wildlife, recreation, and tourism. Drought is part of the region's history (Silvis et al, 2014), and the ASA is recharged by rainfall, thus making it susceptible to climate variability and change. The ASA has been the center of a water management dispute that arose in 2002 when landowners began negotiations to sell their groundwater to an area outside of the ASA, near Okla-homa City.…”

“…Drought feedbacks can be influenced by many factors, for example, through science and technology (Polsky and Cash, 2005), historical lessons learned (McLeman et al, 2014), and management strategies (Maggioni, 2015). Further, feedbacks may be positive (i.e., the drought is made worse) or negative (i.e., the drought condition is alleviated) (Pulwarty, 2003;Tijdeman et al, 2018). In addition, these interactions and feedbacks can result in changing the normal drought reference baseline (Van Loon et al, 2016b).…”

Social Science Contributions to Groundwater Governance

“…In part, the move towards governance reflects the need to establish better ways to reach and implement sound decisions. But groundwater governance has its own challenges, including those related to incomplete property rights, compliance with rules when the resource is largely invisible, lack of knowledge about the interconnections with surface and groundwater, the impact of groundwater use at considerable distance from where extraction occurs (Bolin et al 2008), and conflicting interpretations over sustainable use of groundwater (Shriver and Peaden 2009;Weber et al 2011) derived in part from the problematic construct of sustainable yield (Richardson et al 2011;Seward et al 2006).…”