William Blomquist

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https://hdl.handle.net/1805/25231

Water Policy Resource

Professor William Blomquist is an IUPUI School of Liberal Arts faculty member within the Department of Political Science. He teaches American politics, constitutional law, public policy, and research methodology. He is the associate editor of the Water Resource Research Journal and a member of the Policy Studies Journal editorial board.

Professor Blomquist has collaborated with local governments, state and federal agencies, and nongovernmental organizations in the United States and elsewhere on decisions about how to organize policy making and implementation in water resource management, how to allocate water resources among competing uses, and how to involve multiple stakeholders and communities in those processes. He has led workshops and provided consultation for government agencies and nongovernmental organizations, and conducted collaborative research with local governments and nongovernmental organizations.

Professor Blomquist's translation of research into water policy resource solutions is another excellent example of how IUPUI's faculty members are TRANSLATING RESEARCH INTO PRACTICE.

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    Diverse stakeholders create collaborative, multilevel basin governance for groundwater sustainability
    (University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources, 2018-03-13) Conrad, Esther; Moran, Tara; DuPraw, Marcelle E.; Ceppos, David; Martinez, Janet; Blomquist, William; Political Science, School of Liberal Arts
    The Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA) is introducing significant changes in the way groundwater is governed for agricultural use. It requires the formation of groundwater sustainability agencies (GSAs) to manage groundwater basins for sustainability with the engagement of all users. That presents opportunities for collaboration, as well as challenges, particularly in basins with large numbers of agricultural water users who have longstanding private pumping rights. The GSA formation process has resulted in the creation of multiple GSAs in many such basins, particularly in the Central Valley. In case studies of three basins, we examine agricultural stakeholders' concerns about SGMA, and how these are being addressed in collaborative approaches to groundwater basin governance. We find that many water districts and private pumpers share a strong interest in maintaining local autonomy, but they have distinct concerns and different options for forming and participating in GSAs. Multilevel collaborative governance structures may help meet SGMA's requirements for broad stakeholder engagement, our studies suggest, while also addressing concerns about autonomy and including agricultural water users in decision-making.
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    Policy, politics, and water management in the Guadalquivir River Basin, Spain
    (AGU, 2004-07-16) Bhat, Anjali; Blomquist, William
    Among countries with river basin organizations to manage their water resources, Spain's experience is one of the longest. One of the first basin agencies established in Spain was for the Guadalquivir River in the south. A case study of that river basin and its management indicates how basin management is shaped by political economy factors such as the historical path of the agency's evolution, the basin agency's relationships with central government and with regional or local governments, the patterns of water user representation within the agency, and developments in water law and policy external to the basin agency. The case raises questions about whether and how integrated water resources management at the river basin scale is implemented, even in locations where basin agencies already exist. It also suggests that the politics of management at the river basin level will affect the implementation of national water policies intended to promote integrated management.
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    Institutional Capacity And The Resolution Of A Commons Dilemma
    (Review of Policy Research, 1985) Blomquist, William; Ostrom, Elinor
    This article concerns the dynamic process of resolving a commons dilemma without an externally imposed solution. We focus on two approaches: a model by Lewis and Cowens (1983) that yields a cooperative private arranghent that incorporates voluntarily chosen public institutions as instruments facilitating a resolution of the commons dilemma. The conditions necessary to Lewis and Cowen's result–a Itresolution without institutions–are contrasted with Ilinstitutional capacity” conditions treated as variables that may take on values enhancing the possibility of resolution. This latter approach yields certain advantages: less extreme assumptions, greater descriptive relevance, and the possibility of a variety of actual resolutions. A description of the case of West Basin in Southern California offers an example of the interaction of institutional capacity with participants' actions to produce a successful resolution of a commons dilemma.
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    All CPR's Are Not Created Equal: Two Important Physical Characteristics and Their Relation to the Resolution of Commons Dilemmas
    (International Association for the Study of Common Property, 1991) Blomquist, William; Schlager, Edella; Tang, Shui-Yan
    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."
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    Getting Out of the Commons Trap: Variables, Process, and Results in Four Groundwater Basins
    (Social Science Perspectives Journal, 1987) Blomquist, William
    "Jointly-accessible resources used by multiple individuals are often endangered. Indeed, we call the supposedly inevitable destruction of such resources 'the tragedy of the commons'. Commons problems have been classified with other 'social traps' such as the collective action problem and the Prisoner's Dilemma game. Reasoning by analogy and metaphor from these other 'traps' has yielded a general prognosis of doom for the commons, escapable only via privatization of the resource or centralized public management. In fact, alternative organizations of resource use exist, and have led to resource preservation and even to resource enhancement. The question is how, and under what conditions, users of a common resource might collectively coordinate their behavior to avoid impending doom and enhance resource use without resort to either of the forms prescribed in the prevailing literature. Drawing upon the methods of institutional analysis and the experience of actual cases of commons management, this paper presents descriptive and quantitative evidence on: (a) the relevant characteristics of the settings in which resource users operate, (b) the steps taken in a process of resolution of a commons dilemma, and (c) the results obtained thus far by the users of groundwater basins in arid and heavily populated portions of southern California. The likelihood of successful resolution is compared across different settings, and the efficiency and equity of different public/private organizational form mixes are compared, as well."
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    The Local Groundwater Economy in Los Angeles County, California
    (Indiana University, 1994) Blomquist, William
    "The governance and management of water use in the United States generally, and in southern California in particular, are not organized as an ideal legal-rational centralized administration or as a perfectly competitive private market. This fact poses challenges to analysis that the local public economies (LPE) framework developed at the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis helps to resolve. "The LPE framework enlarges the possibilities for descriptive and prescriptive analysis of interorganizational relations. It is based on the idea that an understanding of current arrangements is an important prerequisite to the issuance of prescriptions for reform. That view, which has informed work on metropolitan area governmental organization (e.g., ACIR, 1987), suggests that analysts 'begin to search for the nature of the order which exists in the complex of relationships among governmental units and abandon the assumption that all of these relationships are unique or random.' By searching for 'the nature of the order which exists' and 'an analysis of how the system works,' (Ostrom and Ostrom, 1965: 138) one can arrive at descriptions of current arrangements. Discussion of shortcomings and recommendations for improvements can follow, while the ultimate evaluations of the performance of public officials and governmental structures are left to citizens."
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    Property Rights, Political Power, and the Management of Ground and Surface Water
    (Western Political Science Association, 1997) Blomquist, William; Schlager, Edella
    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.
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    Common Property's Role in Water Resource Management
    (Second International Conference on Property Rights, Economics and Environment, 1998) Blomquist, William
    Since I was invited to speak about common-property arrangements in the management of water resources, I shall begin with a description of common-property arrangements. I will then turn to the relationship between the common property and regulatory-agency approaches to water resource management, addressing both its empirical manifestations and some theoretical bases for understanding them. Then I will consider the relationship between common-property and private-property or market arrangements, again analyzing that relationship from empirical and theoretical perspectives. When I use examples or illustrations in this brief presentation, they will have to do with groundwater basins in the United States since those are the empirical cases with which I am familiar. And throughout my remarks, I will be applying the analytical approach of institutional rational-choice analysis, and restating the work of many scholars who have worked in the field of common-property resources.
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    Watershed Management from the Ground Up: Political Science and the Explanation of Regional Governance Arrangements
    (American Political Science Association, 1999) Blomquist, William; Schlager, Edella
    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.
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    Building the Agenda for Institutional Research in Water Resource Management
    (JAWRA Journal of the American Water Resources Association, 2004) Blomquist, William; Heikkila, Tanya; Schlager, Edella
    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.