Problem Framing Influences Linkages Among Networks of Collective Action Situations for Water Provision, Wastewater, and Water Conservation in a Metropolitan Region

Abstract

Collective action problems are linked together when the outcomes of one collective action situation affect the working components of another. In San Diego, California, solutions to the collective action dilemmas of water provisioning, conservation, and wastewater were found to have influenced each other between 1990 and 2010. Building upon a database of water management-related action situation outcomes, developed from archival documents and interviews with water managers, environmental groups, and other participants, we used McGinnis' Network of Adjacent Action Situations framework and the Politicized IAD framework to analyze how the emergence of different problem frames affected linkages between these three collective action problems. Our research shows that newly introduced frames for thinking about these water management challenges as interconnected contributed to the progressive emergence of new governance strategies by different groups of actors.

Making Informal Water Distribution Work: Collective Agency and Self-Organization in Informal Areas of Xochimilco, Mexico City

“…Collective action and self-organization have been identified as a mechanism for alleviating water shortages in marginal urban areas around the globe (Enqvist et al 2016;Correa et al 2018;Streule et al 2020;Dennis and Brondizio 2020). Examples in urban contexts include movements that emerged in the 1980s in Mexico City, which demanded improvements in infrastructure and the quality of drinking water services (Castro 2012;Cabestany 2014), as well as new social movements for the human right to water (Becerra 2012).…”

Identifying leverage points for shifting Water-Energy-Food nexus cases towards sustainability through the Networks of Action Situations approach combined with systems thinking

“…Recent developments of the NAS approach have focused on cases of fisheries management, international development cooperation, and social welfare (McGinnis 2011b), coordination of water uses (Dennis and Brondizio 2020;Kellner and Brunner 2021), renewable energy policies and deployment (Grundmann and Ehlers 2016;Baldwin and Tang 2021), energy infrastructure policies (Gritsenko 2018), water and energy governance in irrigation systems (Kimmich 2013;Kimmich and Villamayor Tomas 2019), and telecoupled resource systems (Oberlack et al 2018;Boillat et al 2018). However, application of the NAS approach on WEF nexus cases are still rare: Villamayor-Tomas et al ( 2015) relate WEF nexus cases with value chain analyses; Möck et al (2019) layer action situations to integrate spatial scales, resource linkages, and change over time; Srigiri and Dombrowsky (2021) suggest that applying the NAS approach on WEF nexus cases may help to achieve WEF-related SDGs; and Srigiri et al (2021) identify multiple interlinked action situations that spread across operational, collective and constitutional choice levels in a case study of Ethiopian lower Awash River Basin.…”

Networks of action situations in point-source pollution: the case of winery wastewater in Aragon, Spain

“…This article proposes to explore the causes and processes of compliance failure through an analysis of governance in the Spanish context. Many authors have looked at water problems through the governance lenses and highlighted the importance of, e.g., administrative fit between EU and national regulations (Borzel 2000;Ptak et al 2020), coordination gaps across governance levels (Zikos and Bithas 2006;Vinke-de Kruijf et al 2009), or local collective action challenges (Villamayor-Tomas et al 2019;Dennis and Brondizio 2020). In this paper, we explore the extent to which incentives to comply with discharge regulations depend on strategic decisions made by both polluters and public authorities about wastewater production and treatment.…”