Evaluating the Effectiveness of Collaboration in Water Resource Planning in California: A Case Study of CALFED

University Of California-Berkeley, Berkeley CA

Investigators

Abstract

This project will evaluate the effectiveness of collaboration in the contentious water-resource planning arena in California, through an in-depth study of CALFED, a large-scale effort to decide the guiding policies and management strategies for the largest estuary on North America's west coast. CALFED brings together federal, state and local agencies, as well as stakeholders, to develop a comprehensive and long-term program for restoring and managing this critical environmental and economic resource. Despite the deep tensions between these aspects of California's water system, the effort has already produced significant outcomes that are changing the way California's water resources are discussed and managed by fostering constructive dialogue among participants. The principal objective of this study is to test three related hypotheses about collaborative policy dialogues. First, the better a dialogue meets certain collaboration conditions, the more likely it is to produce innovations, shared understandings, long term working relationships and politically acceptable solutions. Second, participants in collaborative dialogues change their views of the problem and of their own interests and options. Lastly, new norms, practices, and patterns of interaction emerge in some instances which spread beyond the individuals involved and persist over time. The research methods include in-depth interviews of CALFED participants, observation of meetings, and review of documents recording the debates and actions and providing supporting analysis for the discussions. The analysis will compare the more and less collaborative dialogues within CALFED in terms of their outcomes and effects on participants and on the practices and relationships among players. The researchers will also update the historical account of water policy and water issues in California prior to CALFED and will document the changes since CALFED. The underlying developmental pressures evident in the CALFED case are increasingly common and apply to water sharing situations throughout the US and to other multi-jurisdictional resource issues in many locations. Decision-makers, planners, and managers routinely must incorporate both environmental and economic concerns in their activities. The proposed research will build basic theory on these practices and on the conditions under which they do and do not work.