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

Abstract

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.