SLIDES: The Columbia River Basin

Presenter: Barbara Cosens, Professor and Associate Dean of Faculty, University of Idaho College of Law, Waters of the West Interdisciplinary Program 16 slide

Reconciliation of Development and Ecosystems: The Ecology of Governance in the International Columbia River Basin

This article explores the emergence of formal and informal bridging organizations to facilitate solutions to water conflict at the scale of the water resource. This new approach to governance is of particular importance on rivers within or shared by countries in which water management is fragmented among national and sub-national levels of government as well as among governmental sectors. This article focuses on the Columbia River Basin, in the United States and Canada. Review of the Columbia River Treaty governing shared management of the river has opened a public dialogue on river governance. Treaty review coincides with change in both the biophysical setting and the values and capacity of basin residents. Climate change is altering the timing of flow relied on by the management of developed river infrastructure and the annual runs of the basins’ salmonid species. River development increased economic development in the basin, but at the cost of ecosystem function. Assertion of legal rights by indigenous communities has brought an alternative world view to the review—one that seeks to maintain the benefits of river development while reconciling that development with ecosystem function. This article identifies the governance mechanisms needed to achieve reconciliation and describes their emergence in the Columbia River Basin through an analytical framework focused on local capacity building and network formation across jurisdictions, sectors, and scales of governance. Both countries fragment water management authority among jurisdictions and sectors, but bridging organizations have emerged to link interests and government at the watershed and basin scale. Emergence of new governance is facilitated by increases in local, regional, and indigenous governance capacity. This networked governance emerging at the biophysical scale while embedded in and linked to a hierarchy of formal international, national, state, and local government is characterized as the ecology of governance

A Decade of Adaptive Governance Scholarship: Synthesis and Future Directions

Adaptive governance is an emergent form of environmental governance that is increasingly called upon by scholars and practitioners to coordinate resource management regimes in the face of the complexity and uncertainty associated with rapid environmental change. Although the term “adaptive governance” is not exclusively applied to the governance of social-ecological systems, related research represents a significant outgrowth of literature on resilience, social-ecological systems, and environmental governance. We present a chronology of major scholarship on adaptive governance, synthesizing efforts to define the concept and identifying the array of governance concepts associated with transformation toward adaptive governance. Based on this synthesis, we define adaptive governance as a range of interactions between actors, networks, organizations, and institutions emerging in pursuit of a desired state for social-ecological systems. In addition, we identify and discuss ambiguities in adaptive governance scholarship such as the roles of adaptive management, crisis, and a desired state for governance of social-ecological systems. Finally, we outline a research agenda to examine whether an adaptive governance approach can become institutionalized under current legal frameworks and political contexts. We suggest a further investigation of the relationship between adaptive governance and the principles of good governance; the roles of power and politics in the emergence of adaptive governance; and potential interventions such as legal reform that may catalyze or enhance governance adaptations or transformation toward adaptive governance

Five Ways to Support Interdisciplinary Work Before Tenure

Academic institutions often claim to promote interdisciplinary teaching and research. Prescriptions for successfully engaging in interdisciplinary efforts, however, are usually directed at the individuals doing the work rather than the institutions evaluating them for the purpose of tenure and promotion. Where institutional recommendations do exist, they are often general in nature and lacking concrete guidance. Here, we draw on our experiences as students and faculty participating in three interdisciplinary water resource management programs in the USA to propose five practices that academic institutions can adopt to effectively support interdisciplinary work. We focus on reforms that will support pre-tenure faculty because we believe that an investment in interdisciplinary work early in one’s career is both particularly challenging and seldom rewarded. Recommended reforms include (1) creating metrics that reward interdisciplinary scholarship, (2) allowing faculty to “count” teaching and advising loads in interdisciplinary programs, (3) creating a “safe fail” for interdisciplinary research proposals and projects, (4) creating appropriate academic homes for interdisciplinary programs, and (5) rethinking “advancement of the discipline” as a basis for promotion and tenure

Resolving Conflict in Non-Ideal, Complex Systems: Solutions for the Law-Science Breakdown in Environmental and Natural Resource Law

In 2006, the U.S. Supreme Court decided a consolidated case concerning the scope of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers\u27 jurisdiction to require permits for dredge and fill of wetlands under section 404 of the Clean Water Act, issuing a plurality, two concurrences, and two dissents. Each opinion has a solid legal foundation, yet none truly makes sense if the science of the resource in question is considered. The opinions in Rapanos v. United States illuminate the struggle at the law-science interface. The problem is not due to either a failure in legal reasoning or a failure in scientific methodology if each is viewed in isolation. Instead, the difficulty lies in the complexity that results when the human system is overlain on the environment and in our failure to account for that complexity in the methods that govern natural resources dispute resolution. The primary purpose of this article is to shift the dialogue from its current bifurcated focus on better science or better laws to a focus on the need for a new, integrated approach at the law-science interface. The article concludes by recommending one such approach, based on the experience of the Colorado water courts, that would involve the designation of specialized federal district courts with scientists on staff