In the western United States, climate change is likely to bring greater uncertainty and extreme events outside the range for which water infrastructure, governance, and allocation mechanisms have been designed. In addition, many water systems already struggle with issues of institutional fragmentation, ineffective governance, and unsustainable management practices. Adaptive capacity,...
The concept of "adaptive governance" represents a spectrum of hybrid approaches to environmental governance employed to guide management of complex social-ecological systems under conditions of high uncertainty. While the concept of adaptive governance has benefited from over a decade of theoretical development, empirical examples of transitions towards adaptive governance are...
Irrigated agriculture accounts for 90 percent of consumptive use of freshwater in the western US and is considered the largest contributor to nonpoint source water pollution. The diffuse nature of most water quality and quantity challenges necessitates institutions that can more effectively engage agricultural producers in strategic, integrated, watershed-scale approaches...
Academics and practitioners agree that in water governance, the quality of a decision making process should influence the quality of the outcome and the degree to which it is accepted by interested parties. However, finding a feasible way to evaluate and then improve the quality of a decision making process...