Abstract
Despite decades of political commitments, laws and agreements and significant policy effort, the governance system in the Rio Grande/Bravo basin is not able to meet the water demands ...generated by a growing region. Long stretches of the river are completely dry for much of the year, and water managers cannot meet full allocations to water users, let alone ensure water quality and quantity for environmental services and sustainability. Both academic scholarship and policy analysis attribute failures such as this to the inability of current water governance regimes to respond to rapidly changing circumstances – to ‘adapt’. The adaptive governance literature calls for resource management regimes that are distributed yet coordinated through polycentric arrangements, as well as flexible; that promote broader engagement and that generate and disseminate knowledge as well as stimulate learning in the face of complexity and uncertainty. This paper reports on the results of qualitative empirical research which applies the OECD's water governance indicators as a diagnostic tool in order to identify the most significant adaptive governance gaps in the transboundary Rio Grande/Bravo basin.
Environmental policy in North America Healy, Robert G; VanNijnatten, Debora; López-Vallejo, Marcela
Environmental policy in North America,
2014, 2014, 2014-01-20
eBook
"This comprehensive analysis of key issues in North American environmental policy provides an overview of how the US, Mexico, and Canada differ in their environmental management approaches and ...capacity levels, and how these differences play into cross-border cooperation on environmental problems. The book offers insights into transboundary cooperation both before and after NAFTA, and presents a framework for making environmental interaction more effective in the future"--back cover.
For the past few decades, jurisdictions have been using ecosystem and human health indicators to report on progress in achieving environmental policy goals. However, scholarship and practice indicate ...there is increasing need for governance indicators to identify gaps in policy, management and adaptive capacity. There has been significant growth in the use of governance indicators in hopes of improving outcomes in multi-level, multi-jurisdictional, multi-actor governance systems. This paper applies the OECD’s water governance indicators in two complex transboundary water governance systems in North America: the Great Lakes and Rio Grande-Bravo basins. The paper provides insights into how governance can be assessed and evaluated using water governance indicators, and highlights some of the challenges of applying governance indicators to transboundary water systems. Further, the paper reflects on how governance indicators connected to comparative and contextual analysis may serve as a foundation for a better integration of scholarship and practice.
This comprehensive analysis of key issues in North American environmental policy provides an overview of how the US, Mexico, and Canada differ in their environmental management approaches and ...capacity levels, and how these differences play into cross-border cooperation on environmental problems.
Climate change policy in North America VanNijnatten, Debora; Craik, Neil; Studer, Isabel
Climate change policy in North America,
2014, 20131211, 2017, 2013, 2013-12-11
eBook
Climate Change Policy in North Americais the first book to examine how cooperation respecting climate change can emerge within decentralized governance arrangements.
•This paper provides a fresh perspective on the “desired end state” (DES) for adaptive water governance, proposing that the concept include three aspects: the nature and significance of contextual ...constraints, the current status of policy outputs, and the outcomes achieved by the system to date.•The paper provides means to clarify methodological challenges associated with studying the DES, including its relationship to adaptive governance institutions and how normative conceptualizations of DES might be avoided.•The possibilities for comparative analysis are demonstrated through illustrative investigation of DES in the Great Lakes and Rio Grande-Bravo basins.
Scholars from diverse fields of inquiry agree on the need to redesign institutions for governance of complex transboundary water systems to become more ‘adaptive’, and they assume that this will lead to a ‘desired end state.’ However, the exact features of the desired end state are often not clearly delineated, and the relationship between attributes of adaptive governance and the desired end state is difficult to empirically assess. We advocate for shifting the research focus instead to investigating the ‘proximity’ of a complex water system to desired ends, by assessing three aspects: the nature and significance of contextual constraints operating on a policy regime, the current status of policy outputs, and the outcomes achieved by the system to date. Taken together, these can provide us with a broader and deeper picture of what we want to achieve with adaptive governance and how close we are to achieving it. Methodologically, it then becomes easier to assess the impact of changes to governance institutions in subsequent research. We demonstrate these arguments through an illustrative comparison of two complex water governance systems in North America: Great Lakes Basin and Rio Grande-Bravo River Basin.
Scholars and practitioners must increasingly embrace complexity in policy implementation research and practice. This article presents findings from in-depth comparative qualitative analysis of two ...complex transboundary water policy cases, the North American Great Lakes and Rio Grande/Bravo Basin, to highlight the value of focusing on four sets of factors (contextual, institutional, engagement, and knowledge factors) to understand why complex policy regimes continue to face limited policy implementation success in achieving policy goals decades after initiating implementation efforts. The findings outline the value of focusing on critical sets of factors in comparative policy implementation research that embraces complexity.
Abstract
Uncertainty is inherent in transboundary water governance, yet climate change is deepening the uncertainties faced by those who manage shared water resources. This paper identifies and ...assesses uncertainties in the transboundary water governance context by applying an analytical framework which integrates insights from the uncertainty, adaptive governance, and public policy literatures to analyze policy documents in two complex transboundary cases: the Great Lakes and Rio Grande/Bravo basins. Findings from the analysis indicate that: first, deep uncertainties exist in both cases but the two basins face different combinations of, and interactions between, uncertainties; second, the system of scarcity assessed in this analysis (the Rio Grande/Bravo Basin) indicates more conflict-based uncertainties which aggravate natural and technical system uncertainties; and third, the governance system itself is a significant source of uncertainty, or exacerbates existing uncertainties, in both basins. The case studies reveal that governance systems need to focus on different sources, types and levels of uncertainty, and that policy responses need to be designed to move to a ‘monitor-and-adapt’ governance approach to reflect different uncertainties across systems of abundance and scarcity. An analysis of the preparedness of governance systems to respond and adapt to uncertainties is also needed and highly recommended.
Scholars and practitioners around the globe are grappling with how to improve the effectiveness of complex, transboundary, and multilevel environmental regimes. International environmental agreements ...(IEAs) have been around for decades yet achievements and outcomes have not met expectations. While international relations scholars have primarily focused on the effectiveness of agreements between states, public policy scholars have been interested in outcomes at a variety of scales including international, national, sub-national, and local across various environmental policy domains and at the instrument and program levels. This article presents findings from a case study of environmental regime effectiveness that uses a modified version of the Oslo-Postdam solution to assess the effectiveness of the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement, a long-standing, bilateral international environmental agreement between Canada and the USA. The findings indicate that there is a need to more broadly define international environmental agreements in complex transboundary systems to include both formal and informal regime features and multilevel governance efforts and to focus on specific policy goals and ecological outcomes associated with IEAs. This case also illustrates the potential to modify the Oslo-Postdam approach by combining expert assessment and data collection methods with traditional policy analysis and program evaluation methods in assessments of environmental regime effectiveness.
As a consequence, environmental interoperability has increasingly become the primary focus of interactions. The term "interoperability" is used by the information technology and defense policy ...communities to encapsulate efforts at "joined-up thinking," ensuring that different information and operating systems are able to operate in conjunction.' It has also been applied to government agencies, as in the recent call for "Joined-Up Government" through interoperability in the United Kingdom.4 Daniel Schwanen has employed interoperability outside the domestic realm to "the need for different countries to be able to cooperate effectively on an ongoing basis in areas where their interdependence means that a lack of cooperation could entail serious losses."5 It is important to note that the deepening of environmental interoperability in the Canada-U.S. relationship has also contributed to a de-politicization of that relationship. As has long been the case, almost all problems are quietly solved by mid-level officials, beneath political and diplomatic radar. In addition, the broadening of scientific collaboration and consensus means that there are far fewer readily available "hooks" on which to launch a cross-border environmental dispute; governments now find it difficult to disagree on the basis of what "their'" science is telling them because scientists on both sides of the border are saying the same thing. Furthermore, as the locus of activity gravitates to the subnational and cross-border regional level, this also situates the environmental relationship ever further away from bilateral political dynamics and, indeed, from bilateral (and more politicized) institutions such as the International Joint Commission. If national-level political dynamics do have an immediate impact, it is likely to encourage subnational governments to take on more responsibility for cross-border environmental issues, stateside because of the federal government's environmental failures and, in Canada, because of perennial provincial aggressiveness with regard to jurisdiction over natural resources and the environment. In any case, it is more appropriate at the present time to analyze the Canada-U.S. environmental relationship at the level of its "constituent regions" rather than to restrict one's focus to the bilateralpolitical relationship. 2. Barry G. Rabe and Janet B. Zimmerman, "Beyond Regulatory Fragmentation: Signs of Integration in the Case of the Great Lakes Basin," Governance 8, no. 1 (January 1995): 58-77; John Hartig, "Great Lakes Remedial Action Plans: Fostering Ecosytem Management in the Great Lakes Basin," The American Review of Canadian Studies: Red, White, and Green: Canada-U.S. Environmental Relations 27, no. 3 (Autumn 1997): 437-458; D. Peter Stonehouse, C. Giraldez, and W. van Vuuren, "Holistic Policy Approaches to Natural Resource Management and Environmental Care," Journal of Soil and Water Conservation (January-February 1997): 22-25; R.D. Margerum, "Integrated Environmental Management: Tlie Foundations for Successful Practice," Ent'mmmentoi Management 24, no. 2 ( 1999): 151-166.
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