Individual to collective adaptation through incremental change in Colorado groundwater governance

Abstract

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.

Combining and crafting institutional tools for groundwater governance

“…This includes not only technical and administrative capacity, but, most crucially, political leadership that is willing not just to enact but also to enforce new rules. That needs to be matched by a willingness of water users to comply, whether grudgingly or based on agreement about need for and value of changes (Loos et al 2022).…”

“…In other cases, change is introduced in a more top-down way, but then in some places may be taken up by local stakeholders. A comparison of four cases in Colorado found a pattern of collective action of first opposing regulation, then accepting it and trying to comply, and then in one case taking initiative to develop local regulations with a degree of success (Loos et al 2022). However, there may well be many possible pathways.…”

“…The idea that crises create opportunities is a maxim of water governance (Garrick 2016). Drought, flood, or other events draw attention, from the public and from leaders and officials, and may create a willingness to consider and implement changes that otherwise would not have been accepted (Loos et al 2022). The literature on environmental governance discusses punctuated equilibrium models (Repetto 2006) where periods of relative stability are interrupted by episodes of reform stimulated by shocks, such as extreme weather or political shifts.…”

Market-oriented solutions for groundwater commons through collective-action

“…Our research expands on Shalsi et al (2022), who interviewed local experts on groundwater rules in Australia to identify key factors-which they stress are contextual-that drive the rise and fall of collective action. The initial implementation of groundwater rules has been studied in NWKS and SLV, both for the factors explaining the collective action (Cody et al 2015, Perez-Quesada and Hendricks 2021, Loos et al 2022 and the subsequent effects of the rules (Golden 2018, Smith 2018, Deines et al 2019. We investigate why two areas that have successfully engaged in collective action arrived at distinct rules and provide empirical evidence on Weitzman's (1974) price vs. quantity discussion.…”

Assessing the Sustainability Impacts of the Xiaolangdi Dam: Land Use and Socioeconomic Change in the Middle and Lower Reaches of the Yellow River Basin

“…To address the temporal and spatial redistribution of runoff, to foster water resource development, and to enhance their adaptability to human requirements, human beings have undertaken the construction of dams, reservoirs, and water conservancy facilities along rivers. From a global perspective, the construction of dams assumes an increasingly significant role in flood control, sediment mitigation, navigation safety assurance, agricultural irrigation, and hydroelectric power generation [1,2]. For example, the United States built the Hoover Dam on the Colorado River, Brazil and Paraguay jointly constructed the Itaipu Dam on the Parana River, and Egypt constructed the Aswan High Dam on the Nile River, among others.…”