Water resource governance in California is characterized by complex jurisdictional relationships and overlap between agencies tasked with specific mandates. This is exemplified in the California Delta, where critical needs such as flood control do not fall exclusively within the purview of any one entity and therefore must be addressed through coordination and collaboration at multiple scales. Yet CALFED, recent effort to produce integrated, collaborative governance in the Delta, has had mixed results. In this paper, we examine accountability within the existing governance system in the Delta. As a thought experiment we ask how accountability would function in a hypothetical governance system that incorporates principles from the European Water Framework Directive (WFD) into the context of the Delta. Network-based governance approaches such as CALFED blur the lines between public and private authority. They challenge traditional notions of vertical, top-down / down-up accountability by instead adopting a logic of accountability that is more horizontal, relationship-oriented, and diffused among multiple actors and organizations.

We use the case of the Dutch Slough salt marsh restoration project in the Delta to understand the fragmented institutional landscape in which such projects are embedded, to ask how this landscape shapes the pathways of accountability in governance, and to reflect on the rise of alternative models in the European Union may offer lessons for California. The case study reveals the need for governance efforts to more effectively embed both vertical and horizontal accountability. To understand the applicability of the WFD to California, we compare the European and American social and political contexts as they relate to water. We suggest that different views the roles of the state and non-state actors, property rights, and values associated water ultimately shape the unique contexts in which European and American water policy can proceed. We conclude with suggestions for crafting governance institutions with effective linkages across organizations and multiple scales of government.

This research project situates a long-term collaborative effort to restore headwaters meadows within the political, institutional, and historical contexts that have shaped relations of power over watershed resources in the Feather River region. The study addresses a need in the literature for more nuanced studies of the ways that collaborative environmental governance takes shape within and engages these contexts and what the implications are for resource control and access. Using a grounded approach, informed by several bodies of theory from governance, political ecology, and science and technology studies, the project first locates collaboration as part of an ongoing history of resource politics in the United States and then identifies three key loci where collaboration catalyzed renegotiations of politics and power in the Feather River case. These loci are 1) the collaborative production of restoration knowledge and practice in response to both biophysical and social conditions of the watershed, 2) the development of new policy frames that enabled members of the headwaters community to challenge the invisibility of watersheds in California water supply policy and make new political claims against historically powerful downstream interests, and 3) the participation of the U.S. Forest Service, which facilitated collaborative restoration projects and efforts to increase the visibility of headwaters but declined to take on more controversial policy changes. Taken together, these findings portray a complex relationship between collaboration, power, and politics. Knowledge production and policy reframing were important sources of power that grew from collaboration. Although limited by the durability of long-standing relations of resource control in wider institutional and political contexts, collaboration created power for headwaters actors to effect innovative restoration solutions and motivate wider policy changes with benefits to headwaters communities and ecosystems.

The Problem: Metropolitan areas in the U.S. are increasingly growing together into megaregions with many linkages and interdependencies in their economies, infrastructure, and natural resources, but they are not linked well in terms of governance. Hundreds of jurisdictions, federal and state sectoral agencies, and regulatory bodies make independent and conflicting decisions with no entity focusing on the region’s overall welfare.

The Purpose of the Research: To investigate potential governance strategies for such megaregions. As we have noted elsewhere, collaborative and networked processes can do many of the needed tasks for regional governance, as they fill gaps where government fails to operate, cross jurisdictional and functional boundaries, engage public and private sector actors on common tasks, and focus on the collective welfare of a region. Our goal is to identify strategies that allowed such processes to have some success in planning and managing resources, in adapting to unique conditions, and in mobilizing key players in joint action.

Methodology: We rely on our own in-depth research in California on two major water planning cases, CALFED and the Sacramento Water Forum, and on two cases of regional civic voluntary organizations known as Collaborative Regional Initiatives. We use two interrelated analytical perspectives, complexity theory and network analysis, to develop our findings.

Results and Conclusions: These largely successful cases shared the following features: diverse, interdependent players; collaborative dialogue; joint knowledge development; creation of networks and social and political capital; and boundary spanning. They were largely self organizing, building capacity and altering norms and practices to focus on questions beyond the parochial interests of players. They created new and often long term working relationships and a collective ability to respond constructively to changes and stresses on the system.

Takeaway for Practice: Planners have important roles to play in megaregion governance in designing processes, creating, supporting and managing networks, creating arenas for strategy formation, nourishing strategic understanding and a vigorous public realm. Some can be visionaries, others advocates, providers of technical assistance, or skilled facilitators. Without the potential for traditional hierarchical government planners, cannot hope to control outcomes, but they can help to create self-organizing sustainability. The biggest challenge will be to design institutional settings where planners can do these tasks.