Sustaining the Commons: The Coercive to Cooperative, Resilient, and Adaptive Nature of State Comprehensive Water Planning Legislation

Abstract

Problem, research strategy, and findings: States need guidance to adopt comprehensive water planning legislation that can affect urban planning and built form. Current state legislation, however, may not yet incorporate emerging water resource paradigms that promote sustainable water management at the state and substate levels. Planners can improve existing state legislation, but need guidance on incorporating the latest thinking on resilience, adaptive capacity, and sustainable commons management. I identify the 26 states with comprehensive water planning legislation, and analyze that legislation using a new assessment tool that builds on the coercive versus cooperative metric (CvCA). I determine where each state's water planning legislation falls on a coercive versus cooperative spectrum, and the extent to which each state's legislation incorporates sustainable commons management (SCM) and social–ecological resilience (SER) mechanisms and attributes. Most of the 26 states with comprehensive water planning legislation balance coercive and cooperative approaches to achieve state and substate water plans, although research suggests that planning is most effective when legislation is more cooperative. Moreover, most have not codified SCM and SER mechanisms into state water planning legislation, suggesting that the plans that follow may lack the adaptive capacity to increase the resilience of the water system. Research limitations include the single data source and potential interpretive coding bias.

Takeaway for practice: Planners can advocate for new or improved state water legislation that incorporates integral adaptive and resiliency concepts, encouraging states to include the fundamental features of the social–ecological system that lead to better water management.

Keywords:

• state comprehensive water planning legislation
• social–ecological resilience
• sustainable commons management

Acknowledgments

I wish to thank Dr. John M. Dyckman for tireless editing and New York Times Science audience insights that honed this article. I am also grateful for the excellent suggestions and feedback from Elizabeth Deakin (-University of California, Berkeley), W. Michael Hanemann (Arizona State University and University of California, Berkeley), Kurt Paulsen (University of Wisconsin, Madison), Richard Norton (University of Michigan), Timothy Green (Clemson University), the Georgia Tech Planning Colloquium (PhD students and faculty), and the ACSP-AESOP 2013 Dublin Conference attendees on previous versions of this work. I would like to thank the three anonymous peer reviewers for their discerning and valuable input, and Joseph G. Waldron III for his unwavering support and impeccably timed, wry sense of humor. I am solely responsible for any remaining errors and omissions.

Color versions of one or more of the figures in the article can be found online at www.tandfonline.com/rjpa.

Supplemental Material

Supplemental data for this article can be found on the publisher's website.

Notes

1. SCM is a generalized depiction of the fundamental components of collaborative watershed management, including the collective actions, actors, policies/laws, and institutions needed to sustainably manage common pool resources. The widely accepted institutional analysis and development (IAD) framework is one of several more specified methods to conduct “institutional analysis of environmental management and conservation” and it is explained through a “metatheoretical conceptual map that identifies an action situation, patterns of interactions, outcomes and an evaluation of these outcomes” (Ostrom & Cox, 2010, p. 455). Please see Ostrom & Cox (2010) for more discussion of IAD and its relationship to SES.

2. All references to the coercive versus cooperative analysis (CvCA) metric throughout this article originate primarily from Berke and French (1994), Burby and May (1997), and May (1993), augmented by additional work from May et al. (1996), May and Burby (1996), and Dalton and Burby (1994).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Caitlin S. Dyckman

Caitlin S. Dyckman ([email protected]) is an associate professor of city and regional planning at Clemson University; her research focuses on national and international water management issues, particularly larger watershed and water policy issues.