Tribute to Peter deLeon

Peter deLeon stood on the shoulders of a giant, Harold Lasswell, one of the truly great political scientists of the 20th century. In turn, Peter was a giant, and supported the work of many graduate students and scholars, not to mention making major conceptual and theoretical contributions to a discipline. Thus, I thought it appropriate to begin this tribute with Harold Lasswell, who argued for a science of policy whereby its practitioners would provide sound knowledge in and of policy making...

Resolving Common Pool Resource Dilemmas and Heterogeneities Among Resource Users

Heterogeneities among resource users are commonly viewed as anathema to resolving common pool resource dilemmas. Ostrom (1990:211) states that resource users are more likely to adopt a set of rules that improves joint welfare if 'appropriators will be affected in similar ways by the proposed rule change', which is only possible if appropriators are homogeneous in all important respects. While heterogeneities may, in many cases, confound attempts to resolve common-pool resource dilemmas, they are ubiquitous. As the IAD framework demonstrates, there are numerous dimensions on which resource users may differ. Furthermore, most attention to heterogeneities has focused on attempting to reach agreements for solving shared problems. As both Ostrom (1990) and Scharpf (1997) argue, reaching an agreement is only one step in resolving shared problems, attention must be paid to implementation, including commitment and monitoring. Heterogeneities may effect resource users' willingness to follow as well as enforce rules. "Even though in many instances heterogeneities present substantial challenges to users of a shared resource, they nevertheless surmount such obstacles and devise and implement institutional arrangements. The issue then is how those arrangements address and overcome the obstacles presented by differences among resource users. In general, most institutional arrangements devised to address common-pool resource dilemmas also address heterogeneities by separating resource users into homogenous groups, forcing resource users to work together, or removing groups of users from the resource. Thus, in evaluating institutional arrangements for managing common pool resources, attention must be paid not only to their efficiency, effectiveness, and fairness, but also to how the resolve resource user heterogeneity

Prescribed by law and therefore realized? Analyzing rules and their implied actor interactions as networks

Managing environmental problems requires cross-sectoral and cross-level collaboration among actors. Scholars of institutional arrangements investigate how rules shape such collaboration. Scholars of the Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF) look for explanations for collaboration in actors' values and beliefs. Rarely have these two factors been considered together when studying collaborative behavior. This paper considers institutional arrangements and actor values to examine the structure and potential drivers of actor collaboration. The study combines the Institutional Analysis and Development framework and the ACF, applying social network analysis to explore an interaction network prescribed by rules and a surveyed collaboration network. It tests the influence of actor beliefs, reputation, and institutional arrangements on collaboration investigating water management in the German Ruhr catchment. The study finds that perceived power and actor beliefs explain actor collaboration better than institutional arrangements and that perceived interactions are more diverse and denser than hierarchically structured networks of prescribed interactions

Local Communities, Policy Prescriptions, and Watershed Management in Arizona, California, and Colorado

For the past 25 years, since the National Water Commission published its final report, 'Water Policies for the Future,' prescriptions of the water policy literature have centered upon two themes: 1) 'the watershed' is the appropriate scale for organizing water resource management--although watersheds are regions to which political jurisdictions almost never correspond--because all water sources and uses within a watershed are interrelated; and 2) since watershed-scale decision-making structures do not exist to begin with, they should be created as soon as possible to bring together all 'stakeholders' and produce integrated watershed management plans that can be implemented efficiently, preferably through some form of watershed management authority. Despite the consistency of the message over the last quarter-century, the gap between prescription and practice is wide. On the other hand, our observation of water resource management activities in the western states has revealed that the development of regional watershed management is in fact occurring in several places, but in an altogether different manner--watershed-scale decision-making arrangements and management activities are being assembled in a variety of decentralized and polycentric forms that involve both linked and nested relationships among smaller organizations. Drawing upon political economy and institutional analysis literature, the paper provides a straightforward conceptual and analytical presentation to account for incremental and decentralized approaches to the development of regional-scale institutions as represented in four watersheds in California and Colorado

Watershed Management from the Ground Up: Political Science and the Explanation of Regional Governance Arrangements

This paper responds to the meeting organizers' call to address the connection between political science and the challenges of problem solving in the 'real world,' and especially the relevance of political science knowledge to actual puzzles faced by policy makers. The context of the paper is water resources management in the western United States, which is both acutely 'real' and intensely political. "For at least the past 25 years (since the publication of the National Water Commission's final report, Water Policies for the Future) and perhaps longer, prescriptions of the water policy literature have centered upon two themes. Political scientists and public administration scholars have contributed to both themes, as they did to the commission study and report. The first theme is that 'the watershed' is the appropriate scale for organizing water resource management, because all water sources and uses within a watershed are interrelated. The second is that since watersheds are regions to which political jurisdictions almost never correspond, and watershed-scale decision making structures do not usually exist, they should be created. Watershed-scale decision making organizations would bring together all 'stakeholders' and produce integrated watershed management policies that can be implemented efficiently, preferably through some form of watershed authority

Property Rights, Political Power, and the Management of Ground and Surface Water

Among the more popular contemporary recommendations for improved watershed use and protection is conjunctive use of surface and underground water resources. Conjunctive use involves the coordination of surface water supplies and storage with groundwater supplies and storage, for purposes of sustainable watershed use and enhanced watershed protection. Among the several potential benefits that have been promoted by advocates of greater conjunctive use are: improved security of usable water supplies, lessened exposure to extreme events such as droughts and floods, reduced reliance on costly and environmentally disruptive surface water impoundments and distribution systems, and enhanced protection of aquatic life and habitat

Conjunctive Groundwater Management as a Response to Social Ecological Disturbances: A Comparison of Four Western U.S. States

Recent severe droughts in U.S. western and Great Plains states have highlighted the challenges that socio-ecological disturbances can pose for governing groundwater resources, as well as the interconnections between groundwater and surface water and the need to manage the 2 in an integrated way. Conjunctive management recognizes these interconnections and can be used to mitigate disturbances and achieve a variety of water management goals. However, comparative studies of how and to what extent various states have implemented conjunctive management strategies are few. Here we compare and assess the use of conjunctive management practices in 4 western state —Arizona, California, Nebraska, and Texas—with a particular focus on groundwater. Special attention is paid to factors of geography and infrastructure, degree of administrative (de)centralization, and monitoring and modeling in relation to conjunctive management. Despite the commonality of bifurcated regimes for groundwater and surface water, all 4 states have responded to disturbances with conjunctive management strategies in various ways. Although it has groundwater management challenges similar to those in the other 3 states, Texas has overall been slower to adopt conjunctive management strategies

Building the Agenda for Institutional Research in Water Resource Management

This paper pursues more specifically the recommendations of a recent National Research Council report recommending greater attention to research on institutions in the field of water resource management. The important challenge for the future in institutional research lies in going beyond the observation that institutions are important and in explaining instead how institutions actually affect management options and outcomes. It is possible to illuminate the relationships between institutional features and water management through comparative institutional research. This paper offers recommendations for studying water institutions in a comparative context, including methodological recommendations concerning approaches to comparative institutional research, and topics for comparative institutional research that appear especially fruitful at this time. The example of conjunctive management is used to illustrate the importance of institutional factors in water management, drawing to some extent on the authors’ recent experience with a comparative study of conjunctive management institutions

All CPR's Are Not Created Equal: Two Important Physical Characteristics and Their Relation to the Resolution of Commons Dilemmas

Workshop Abstract: "Policy prescriptions offered in the now-voluminous literature on common-pool resources (CPRs) frequently focus upon the strategic situation of resource users, paying relatively less attention (or none at all) to the characteristics of the common-pool resources themselves. In short, most contributions to the policy literature presume that all CPRs are alike. Based on our reconsideration of the strategic situations users face, and our empirical observation of three kinds of CPRs fisheries, irrigation systems, and groundwater basins we conclude that two physical characteristics of CPRs have vital implications for the likelihood of successful resolution of difficulties over resource use, and for the types of resolutions users develop. Those physical characteristics are the degree of stationarity of flow units and the existence of storage capacity. Speaking generally, fisheries are CPRs with fugitive flow units and without storage capacity, irrigation systems have fugitive flow units but possible availability of storage, and groundwater basins have relatively stationary flow units and storage capacity. Using comparisons among these types of CPRs, we analyze the effects of these physical characteristics upon the. prospects for the emergence- of successful cooperation in resource use.