“The choice of boundaries for governing bodies for the management and protection of water, or any other natural resources, and the choice of organizational structures, decision rules, and so forth are political choices—unavoidably, inescapably, and essentially political choices” (p. 192). So conclude Edella Schlager and William Blomquist in their analysis of governing arrangements for watersheds in the United States.
Although this might seem an obvious point to political scientists, as the authors note throughout the book, the management of watersheds is not done by political scientists. Indeed, as they report, biologists, engineers, hydrologists, and others deeply involved in water management (wistfully) seek to design administrative systems purged of politics. More recently, there has also been a flowering of collaborative watershed partnership groups, with a raft of scholarly supporters that seeks to downplay conflictual politics in water management. The main themes of the book are that politics are an essential component of managing watersheds, that efforts to create integrated watershed management authorities are unlikely to ameliorate significantly the problems of politics, and that federalist, polycentric approaches are the best management systems for complex watersheds.
Schlager and Blomquist begin with a useful overview of the literature on watershed and ecosystem management. This literature, typically unfamiliar to political scientists not engaged in watershed or natural resources management, helps to underscore the problem with “politics” that they discuss. This review is followed by a historical survey of their three eras of watershed governance: 1) river basin development, 2) river basin commissions, and 3) the watershed movement. The authors, in turn, evaluate each of these governance approaches in terms of motivation for integrated management, scale of organization, organizational basics, and goals and values of integration. To demonstrate that watershed management is unavoidably political, they focus on three sets of questions—setting watershed boundaries, creating decision-making procedures, and determining accountability arrangements.
In order to help sort out their thinking about watershed governance, Schlager and Blomquist use political economy theory, primarily related to bounded rationality and transaction costs. Their analysis leads them to conclude that political complexity, like natural complexity, needs to be recognized and even embraced in our thinking about watershed governance. This, in turn, leads them to embrace federal and polycentric governance systems for watersheds. This approach allows for making political decisions on different scales, with different decision rules, on different subject matter simultaneously within single watersheds or nested within larger watersheds. “Between the ideal of the integrated authority and the ideal of the collaborative partnership, what remains?” they ask. “The polycentric structures of federal systems and politics” (p. 193).
The strength of the book is that the authors move the politics of choices and the recognition of trade-offs in organizational styles unabashedly to the center of the discussion of watershed governance. It is not something that can simply be eliminated through better science or through collaboration among stakeholders. A further strength is Schlager and Blomquist's use of case studies ranging across the nation (with maps) to illustrate their theoretical concerns and points.
There are, however, a number of shortcomings to the book. First, the authors endorse a federalist approach to watershed governance without discussing the challenges of federalism on environmental (or other) issues. For instance, how do states and the federal government negotiate differences on climate change policy or on wolf management in the northern Rockies or the management of water in the California Bay Delta? The last several decades have seen hundreds of lawsuits between state and federal governments on a host of environmental issues, augmented by more lawsuits over recently enacted federal health-care legislation. Furthermore, what of the erosion of state power on environmental issues over the last several decades? Schlager and Blomquist write of the importance of mutual consent in federal governance, yet in many of the case studies it is lawsuits that serve as the catalyst for action, hardly a venue of mutual consent.
A second, and related, point is that the authors' focus is on organizations and institutional design. They embrace a politics of a particular kind. But what of the significance of the politics taking place outside the strictures of watershed governance that serve to significantly shape and reshape watershed governance? In many of the cases they discuss, lawsuits and courts play a central role for altering watershed governance. What might this tell us of existing systems? For instance, is it not important that an environmental group seeking change in watershed management sues the federal government using the Endangered Species Act or the National Environmental Policy Act, rather than working through an existing compact or set of organizations and agreements? In other words, watershed governance takes place in a political setting far broader than the institutions of watershed governance, and this point is not fully discussed in the book.
Third, the authors could have made even better use of their case studies. Generally, the cases are too centered on illuminating points raised in a chapter, rather than the overall functioning of watershed governance. Is the system working? How do we know? Do boundaries or decision-making regimes matter if the overall system is not working due to lawsuits or declining wildlife or water supplies? In other cases, the authors fail to sufficiently connect the theoretical points they seek to make to the story they tell. For instance, it is unclear how the Delaware River Basin case demonstrates the virtues of federalist, polycentric governance.
Fourth, I think some discussion of the literature of historical institutionalism would have deepened our understanding of watershed politics. Many of the problems that have arisen in watershed management since the 1960s have revolved around the addition of new ecological and environmental management goals to the prior hydraulic engineering goals. In the language of Karen Orren and Stephen Skowronek, this has led to a layering of new societal rules and arrangements on top of existing laws and institutions (in this case, ecological and recreational goals atop irrigation, hydroelectric production, navigation, and drinking water supply), leading to a particular type of conflict—intercurrence (The Search for American Political Development, 2004). Schlager and Blomquist make several references to such issues, for example: “Each era does not represent a sweeping away of previous management approaches as much as a grafting of new strategies and policies to old ones” (p. 29). Yet they never really discuss what becomes of these prior laws, agencies, and values. What happens when the new laws, agencies, and values are placed on top of the old, creating the likelihood for significant conflict? This connects to the previous point about broader politics. Courts are often avenues used to pry open existing governance systems to admit new goals and interests. Supporters of new interests frequently search through “the green state” for laws, such as the Endangered Species Act, that can allow them to disrupt existing watershed governance. The case study of the Platte River Basin offers just such an illustration.
In closing, Schlager and Blomquist provide a great service by focusing attention on the centrality of politics in watershed governance and demonstrating the weaknesses of governance models based wholly on integration or collaboration of stakeholders. In light of these findings, they write that “[in] the uncertain world of complex social and ecological systems, institutional richness may be preferable to institutional neatness,” (p. 20), and make the case for polycentric federalism. But the next step of thinking about watershed governance needs to address a set of even more difficult political questions: How do we coordinate different agencies and different societal goals? Through courtrooms? Through policy train wrecks like the northern spotted owl in the Pacific Northwest? Can any institutional designs solve fundamental political differences embedded over time?
