Fluid Institutions: Three Essays In Freshwater Governance

Abstract

Freshwater governance describes the variety of interdependent policy institutions used to manage inland lakes, streams, wetlands and aquifers. The three essays of my dissertation contribute to how we understand the value, emergence, and evolution of policy in this domain by addressing three distinct but related research gaps. Clean drinking water is a fundamentally important value, but analyses of pollution mitigation policies struggle to show that benefits exceed their costs. My first chapter strengthens a leading explanation – that key benefits remain undercounted – by providing cost estimates of health damages plausibly associated with legally- permissible, elevated drinking-water nitrate contamination. Groundwater is another ubiquitous freshwater resource, but one whose governance is significantly understudied, especially outside arid regions. My second chapter, a detailed case study of groundwater governance in the Great Lakes region of the United States, contributes to the small body of evidence from which theories of groundwater social-ecological systems are being developed. Intergovernmental collaboration in urban regions and within watersheds both have attracted a large amount of research attention, but major questions remain open. We still know little about how such collaborations evolve over time or what function mandates to collaborate play. My third chapter provides a longitudinal study of intergovernmental collaboration at the watershed scale, where I show how a mandate can trigger collaborative activity while differential fiscal capacity shapes how the network of collaborative organizations evolves over time. Taken together, my papers help explain why freshwater governance is needed, how it accumulates even when we don’t give it focused attention, and how its evolution is shaped by our inheritance of public institutions and their interconnections.