How much collaboration is enough? Examining the links between mechanisms to facilitate interagency coordination and collective action outcomes

Keywords: groundwater governance, institutional mechanisms, collaboration, mandated collective action, interorganizational coordination
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Sunday
Session Start / End Time: 2/27/2022 02:00 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/27/2022 03:20 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 26

Abstract

Government mandates are increasingly being used to compel local-level responses to address what many researchers and practitioners are calling a global crisis in groundwater governance. In this paper, we examine one such effort in the U.S. state of California. In 2014, the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA) was passed, which mandated that local government agencies within 18 critically overdraft basins either coordinate to develop basin-wide groundwater sustainability plans by 2020 or risk state intervention. SGMA granted agencies discretion to develop institutional mechanisms to coordinate groundwater management plan(s). We use a comparative case study approach to examine how the mechanisms adopted by 18 critically overdraft basins influenced the levels of coordination in their final plans. Sixty semi-structured interviews with agency representatives, along with participant observation of organizational processes, and collection of secondary data were used to identify six primary mechanisms agencies used to coordinate. Forty-three groundwater management plans were coded and ranked according to level of coordination across five plan components. A systematic analysis was performed to compare how different combinations of the six institutional mechanisms influenced levels of coordination in each of the five plan components. Our results indicate multiple pathways can achieve high levels of coordination. Moreover, while achieving higher levels of coordination in policy development requires deeper levels of collaboration, not all planning activities need to be highly collaborative. These results add much needed clarity to the debate over how the confluence of mechanisms interact to influence the outcomes of interagency coordination.