Concurrent Governance Processes of California’s Sustainable Groundwater Management Act

Abstract

California’s Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA) is a landmark policy that requires achievement of sustainability at the groundwater basin level. In this policy review and analysis, we describe the horizontal, vertical, and network governance processes occurring under SGMA and discuss how they interact with one another. In doing so, we review existing governance theories that can help to shed light on how each governance process may unfold. Depicting SGMA as a complex system of simultaneous and interacting governance processes provides a useful platform for future evaluations of SGMA successes and failures as well as for transferring lessons learned from California’s implementation of SGMA to groundwater governance in other locations.

Keywords:

• California
• governance
• groundwater
• implementation
• institutional collective action
• networks
• Sustainable Groundwater Management Act

Acknowledgments

The authors are grateful for the input from anonymous reviewers. Alula Shields and Nell Green Nylen provided graphical design assistance. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this paper are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the funding entities.

Notes

1 Governance refers to full set of organizations, structures, rules, and processes through expectations, decisions, and actions are collectively decided and acted upon. Management refers to the specific policies and decisions that guide actions as well as day-to-day actions influencing water. Governance is a predecessor to and sets up the framework through which management is decided and acted upon (Lemos and Agrawal 2006).

2 Local public agencies could choose to join together to form a GSA either through a Memorandum of Agreement or a Joint Powers Agreement. These two legal mechanisms differ in the structure of the legal entity they create and responsibilities assigned to the agencies entering into the agreement. For more details see Kincaid, V., and Stager, R., (2015) “Know your options: A guide for formation of groundwater sustainability agencies” California Water Education Foundation: Sacramento. http://www.stancounty.com/er/pdf/groundwater/gsa-guide.pdf.

3 This statement is based on structured and semi-structured interviews about GSP development conducted by the authors with representatives from over 40 GSAs in the critically over-drafted basins between January and November 2019.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported in part by the National Science Foundation under [Grant no. 1824066], by UC Water [University of California Office of the President Grant no. 13941], by the United States Department of Agriculture and Food Research Initiative under its National Institute of Food and Agriculture [Grant no. 2017-67026-26315], and by the Water Foundation [https://waterfdn.org].