Suchergebnisse

The Southern Nevada Water Authority (SNWA) plans to build a 300-mile pipeline to transfer groundwater from five rural basins in north-eastern Nevada south to the greater Las Vegas metropolitan area. Relying on the path dependence literature, we trace the policy choices and legal battles that have led to southern Nevada's proposed Groundwater Development Project. We find that policy decisions over time, often initiated by powerful water policy entrepreneurs, have fuelled southern Nevada's rapid growth and development. After emphasising water demand management for more than two decades, SNWA has revived its controversial plans to increase water supplies by importing water from rural areas. Using semi-structured key-informant interviews and document analysis of water right hearing transcripts, public comments, and hearing rulings, we examine the risks and uncertainties involved in SNWA's Groundwater Development Project. SNWA and the protestors of the project experience different aspects of risk and uncertainty. SNWA believes the Groundwater Development Project is an essential addition to its current water strategy to reduce the political and economic risks from Colorado River shortages that could endanger southern Nevada's longer-term economic survival. Protestors believe the uncertainty of SNWA's mitigation and management plans are inadequate to protect rural basins from the long-term ecological and hydrological risks and uncertainties associated with SNWA's pumping and export of groundwater from their areas. Our analysis reveals a much deeper and longer path dependence trajectory in the USA West of overpopulating an arid region, subsidising decades of infrastructure development to promote economic development, and creating dependencies on increasingly scarce water supplies. A paradigm shift much larger than water demand management is required to reverse this trajectory and deal with the dilemmas of unabated growth in desert metropolitan areas dependent on distant water sources.

The promotion of increased community participation in natural resource management and conservation by international and state natural resource agencies rests on the assumption that local communities that have connections to, knowledge about, and interests in proximate resources should participate in the management of those resources. By using a political ecology approach, three case studies of natural resource management are analyzed which span industrialized and developing world contexts—agro-ecological zoning in the western Amazon, a social forestry project in the southern Philippines, and a forest plan revision process in southern Utah. We suggest the need for more attention to how communities are defined and how participation is formalized by institutions, as well as to contested meanings of conservation. We find that, despite espousing agendas of community-based conservation, international and state agencies retain authority over key decisions about natural resource management, use, and allocation.

Utah legislators currently are wrestling with how to address problems regarding forest practices on nonfederal lands within the state. They have before them the findings and recommendations of the Utah Forest Practices Task Force which studied the issue in 1996. The Task Force report contains an integrated set of recommendations which include the suggestion that the state legislature pass a forest practices act. Proposing legislation to enable the state to exercise administrative oversight of forest practices on nonfederal lands is controversial in Utah because of the state's generally conservative composition, support for private property rights, and aversion to government regulation. Yet, a bill containing a forest practices act will likely be introduced in the 1997 session. This article explores the practical realities that are leading some Utah legislators to consider taking the political risks involved in supporting such legislation. The findings, recommendations, and rationale of the Utah Forest Practices Task Force are presented here in an effort to explain what the Task Force feels is necessary to address the current situation. This approach is then analyzed within the current political context.

The current debate over subsistence rights is presently one of Alaska's most volatile unresolved public policy issues. Preference has been given to subsistence uses of wild resources, but debate has raged over how to define subsistence users. The special rights of Alaskan Native communities to harvest resources have been eroded through political and legal battles that have extended subsistence harvesting rights to all rural residents (federal law) and to all state residents (state law) and that seek to individualize the eligibility criteria. This study demonstrates that there are significant behavioral differences between the subsistence activities of Native, part‐Native, and non‐Native households in Bristol Bay, Alaska. These differences are cultural in nature and are rooted in different systems for organizing relationships between people and the natural world. These differences need to be taken into account in the legal and political debates over subsistence and in resource management decisions that affect subsistence users.

AbstractThe Bear River Basin, which includes portions of Idaho, Utah, and Wyoming in the United States, has a dynamic history of human hydrologic adaptations in relation to a highly variable water supply. These adaptations are embedded in a geographical setting highly influenced by the legal, policy, and institutional contexts that govern allocation of water in this generally arid region. In response to several years of drought and a historically low water year in 2004, water users in the Bear River Basin tested the efficacy of the "law of the river" and innovative agreements that they had negotiated in recent years to help mitigate impacts related to water shortages. Three innovations were identified as being key to a successful response to the 2004 drought: 1) a precedent-setting voluntary settlement agreement, 2) technical work in river modeling and instrumentation, and 3) extraordinary communication strategies employed throughout the drought. Based on case study research and utilizing a "ways of knowing" theoretical framework, the authors report on an unfolding contemporary history of how people in the Bear River Basin have learned to deal with uncertainties and risks associated with both droughts and floods. Their story has important implications for the understanding of conflict and cooperation in water systems, management of transboundary waters, and the promotion of sustainable water resource governance.

In the Wasatch Range Metropolitan Area of Northern Utah, water management decision makers confront multiple forms of uncertainty and risk. Adapting to these uncertainties and risks is critical for maintaining the long‐term sustainability of the region's water supply. This study draws on interview data to assess the major challenges climatic and social changes pose to Utah's water future, as well as potential solutions. The study identifies the water management adaptation decision‐making space shaped by the interacting institutional, social, economic, political, and biophysical processes that enable and constrain sustainable water management. The study finds water managers and other water actors see challenges related to reallocating water, including equitable water transfers and stakeholder cooperation, addressing population growth, and locating additional water supplies, as more problematic than the challenges posed by climate change. Furthermore, there is significant disagreement between water actors over how to best adapt to both climatic and social changes. This study concludes with a discussion of the path dependencies that present challenges to adaptive water management decision making, as well as opportunities for the pursuit of a new water management paradigm based on soft‐path solutions. Such knowledge is useful for understanding the institutional and social adaptations needed for water management to successfully address future uncertainties and risks.

The Bear River is driven by a highly variable, snow-driven montane ecosystem and flows through a drought-prone arid region of the western United States. It traverses three states, is diverted to store water in an ecologically unique natural lake, Bear Lake, and empties into the Great Salt Lake at the Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge. People in the Bear River Basin have come to anticipate droughts, building a legal, institutional, and engineered infrastructure to adapt to the watershed's hydrologic realities and historical legacies. Their ways of understanding linked vulnerabilities has led to what might appear as paradoxical outcomes: farmers with the most legally secure water rights are the most vulnerable to severe drought; managers at the federal Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge engage in wetland farming and make unlikely political alliances; and, increased agricultural irrigation efficiency in the Basin actually threatens the water supply of some wetlands. The rationality of locality is the key to understanding how people in the Bear River Basin have increased their adaptive capacity to droughts by recognizing their interdependencies. As the effects of climate change unfold, understanding social-ecological system linkages will be important for guiding future adaptations and enhancing resilience in ways that appropriately integrate localized ecosystem capacity and human needs.

We propose a framework for understanding the role that the social sciences should play in ecosystem management. Most of the ecosystem management literature assumes that scientific understanding of ecosystems is solely the purview of natural scientists. While the evolving principles of ecosystem management recognize that people play an important role, social considerations are usually limited to political and decision-making processes and to development of environmental education. This view is incomplete. The social science aspect of ecosystem management has two distinct components: one that concerns greater public involvement in the ecosystem management decision-making process, and one that concerns integrating social considerations into the science of understanding ecosystems. Ecosystem management decisions based primarily on biophysical factors can polarize people, making policy processes more divisive than usual. Ecological data must be supplemented with scientific analysis of the key social factors relevant to a particular ecosystem. Objective social science analysis should be included on an equal basis with ecological science inquiry and with data from public involvement. A conceptual framework is presented to communicate to ecological scientists the potential array of social science contributions to ecosystem management. http://www.esajournals.org/doi/abs/10.1890/1051-0761%281998%29008%5B0891%3AAFFUSS%5D2.0.CO%3B2 http://www.esajournals.org/doi/abs/10.1890/1051-0761%281998%29008%5B0891%3AAFFUSS%5D2.0.CO%3B2