Heritage, public trust and non-market values in water governance

Abstract

The concepts of public trust and heritage protection offer opportunities for refining discourses and practices surrounding governance of water resources for under-represented non-market values, particularly values that do not lend themselves readily to standard market-based economic analyses. Public trust in the United States, though far from a panacea, offers insights into how such values may be asserted within particular place-based contexts. Outside the U.S., heritage-based governance of water resources represents a similar effort for integrating such values. In both cases, changes in governance are linked to specific local conditions, history, and values. Examination of these two institutional frameworks suggests that experimentation drawing upon key concepts and mechanisms from both may facilitate better integration of non-market values (social, cultural, and ecological) into water and environmental governance.