“Good Luck Fixing the Problem”: Small Low-Income Community Participation in Collaborative Groundwater Governance and Implications for Drinking Water Source Protection

Abstract

There is increasing interest in the potential of source water protection to address chronic challenges with small systems and rural drinking water provision. Such a planning and management approach to increasing safe drinking water access, however, will likely require leveraging multi-stakeholder collaborative governance venues to this effect. This paper investigates the prospects of doing so using the case of California’s groundwater reform process known as the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act or SGMA. Interviews with drinking water stakeholders from small low-income communities in the San Joaquin Valley show how existing power and resource disparities limit the prospects of integrating rural drinking water priorities into regional planning. Long-term, more fundamental changes will be needed to meaningfully transform water management in this direction. Short-term state intervention is needed to protect equity and public good goals, raising potential contradictions between devolved water management and improved drinking water access that need to be addressed.

Keywords:

• Collaborative governance
• drinking water
• environmental justice
• equity
• governance
• groundwater
• small water systems
• source water protection
• rural
• water resources

Acknowledgements

Three anonymous reviewers, Dr. Amanda Fencl and Dr. Julie Sze provided invaluable comments and feedback on this paper. Thank you to research assistants Jessica Mendoza and Michael Kuo and to all of the rural community water managers and other participants who contributed their time and expertise to this project. Any errors are mine alone.

Notes

1 For more about the GSA formation process under SGMA (see Milman et al. 2018).

2 The other eight beneficial uses and users listed in the legislation are agricultural users, municipal well operators, local land use planning agencies, environmental users, surface water users (where there is a hydrologic connection), the federal government, California Native American Tribes, and entities monitoring and reporting groundwater elevations in the boundaries.

3 As opposed to census tracts or blocks, census places are the most appropriate geographic boundary to use here because they correspond to socially and geographically identifiable residential locations, typically associated with a specific place name. They are also more aligned with public water system boundaries, where applicable, which is the primary form of representation for rural communities in the SGMA process.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship.