Greater sustainability is one of the main goals of agricultural and natural resource policy in California and worldwide. “Diffusion networks,” which consist mainly of connections among producers, local outreach and education agencies and agricultural organizations, provide critical pathways for achieving sustainability. We analyzed the role of diffusion networks in the context of agricultural water-quality management in the Sacramento River Valley. Data from a survey of more than 1,200 agricultural producers demonstrates the role of diffusion networks in increasing satisfaction with environmental policies, participation in water-quality management programs and the implementation of sustainable agricultural practices.

This dissertation examines the intersection of equity, gender, and social differentiation in agricultural innovation systems. The first chapter, through a comprehensive literature review, highlights the unique gender considerations when scaling agricultural innovations and calls for tools and methodologies that address these issues. The second chapter introduces "GenderUp", a new method designed to make scaling initiatives more inclusive, anticipatory, and responsive to socially differentiated effects. Evaluation of GenderUp suggests more socially responsible scaling strategies. The final chapter critically analyzes commonly used Agricultural Innovation System (AIS) frameworks for their overlooking of social heterogeneity and upstream power dynamics. It proposes a set of Equity Principles for Transformative Innovation to guide socially-inclusive innovation and scaling. Collectively, this dissertation underscores the need for integrating equity considerations into agricultural innovation systems, offering both practical tools and theoretical frameworks to promote sustainable development.

The challenges facing agricultural systems – biodiversity loss, climate change, and corporate consolidation of food production, to name a few – demand transitions to more environmentally and socially sustainable agricultural systems. To investigate the processes supporting these transitions, the three chapters of this dissertation combine theories and methods from environmental policy and governance, innovation systems, and social networks to analyze the empirical case of the organic seed system – the actors, institutions, and socio-technical innovations involved in breeding, producing, processing, selling, and regulating seeds suitable for organic agricultural production.

Chapter 1 focuses on the so-called "organic seed loophole" in the United States' organic standards, whereby growers can use conventional seed if organic seed is not commercially available, and investigates the effects of this policy on organic growers' seed sourcing choices. By modeling survey data on US organic growers' seed sourcing practices from three cross-sections over the last 15 years, we find evidence for both the intended effects of the policy (helping organic growers who face seed sourcing barriers to maintain organic status) and for unintended effects, i.e. allowing growers to source non-organic seed even though organic seed is commercially available. Chapter 2 maps the spatial boundaries of the organic seed network to test the propositions of the Global Innovation Systems framework. Using survey data of organic seed stakeholders collected between 2020-2022, we operationalize the organic seed innovation system as a multi-functional network. This includes various knowledge and market-based relationships between organic seed producers, researchers, companies, and non-profit organizations. We analyze the network using inferential network analysis methods and find that the framework explains its structure well, as the organic seed network is built up by regionally embedded knowledge creation and product valuation systems. Finally, Chapter 3 analyzes the organic seed innovation system as an emergent system and investigates the role of different types of actors in explaining its formation. Using network analysis and the same data from Chapter 2, we test the resource-based theory of system building and the institutional logics of the multi-actor perspective. We find that the organic seed network is shaped primarily by "partner mode" structures, suggesting that cooperative and complementary resource-sharing relationships drive system formation. Furthermore, our models show how actor involvement varies along functional lines, where non-profit actors are generally more active in pre-competitive activities like knowledge creation, while for-profit actors are more active in market-based functions like value chain creation.

The findings of this dissertation research help guide policy recommendations for developing the organic seed system, a niche innovation system that plays a pivotal role in the transition towards sustainable agriculture. Furthermore, the research contributes to the field of innovation systems by empirically testing and extending networking-building theory using inferential network analyses. This approach contributes to a more generalizable understanding about the who, where, and how of innovation system formation, ultimately deepening our understanding of managing sustainability transitions.

ABSTRACT

How best to address so-called wicked problems that threaten the social and physical environment is a ubiquitous question in environmental governance scholarship. Lacking clear boundaries and straight-forward solutions, the sources and impacts of wicked problems are heterogeneously distributed across the landscape. Existing literature emphasizes the importance of myriad factors like knowledge, financial resources, and time, in catalyzing decision-maker response to these impacts. However, given the uneven distribution of impacts across the landscape, society translates their own experiences into valued environmental risks. It is up to decision-makers to assess these environmental risk valuations and determine how and when to respond and with whom to respond. To date, research into how environmental risk shapes decision-maker response is nascent. To fill this knowledge gap, this dissertation explores the role of environmental risk in shaping policy response across three cases: drinking water quality management and climate extremes in California, unconventional oil and gas drilling in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia, and harmful algal bloom governance in Lake Erie.

Each chapter in this dissertation relies on a different data set and case study to assess how science supply aligns with perceived environmental risk (Chapter 1), whether and how actual environmental risk shapes policy response (Chapter 2), and how environmental risk shapes planned collaborative approaches to addressing wicked problems (Chapter 3). Data types employed in this dissertation include survey instruments (Chapters 1 and 2), literature reviews (Chapters 1 and 2), and planning document analysis (Chapter 3). Utilizing quadratic assignment procedure (Chapter 1), logistic regressions (Chapter 2), and social-ecological network analysis (Chapter 3), results suggest that environmental risk does play a role in catalyzing and shaping policy response to wicked problems.

In recent decades, the search for more appropriate scales and effective methods to tackle complex environmental problems has reshaped the discourse and practice of environmental policy, leading to the widespread adoption of collaborative governance. In contrast to the command-and-control, top-down policies of the past, in collaborative governance multiple decision-makers and stakeholders engage with one another in a more horizontal fashion to develop and implement policy or management objectives that are mutually beneficial. Collaborative governance has been promoted for its utilitarian benefits including reducing conflict, leveraging local knowledge and increasing public acceptability/compliance. But collaborative governance’s popularity and widespread adoption also reflect strongly normative democratic. Collaborative governance promises to situate management in a consensus-oriented process with the involvement of diverse stakeholders promoting representation in decision-making, building trust and empowering local stakeholders.

Given this potential to expand participation and enhance democratic legitimacy, equity, and social fairness, collaborative governance seems well positioned to support another growing movement in water policy: Environmental justice. Grounded in a global grassroots movement, environmental justice scholarship has evolved to be a broad and transdisciplinary conversation concerned with distributional and procedural equity in environmental decision-making, regulation and enforcement. Both environmental justice and collaborative governance emphasize the importance of participation in decision-making for the legitimacy and equity of the resulting outcomes.

However, the extent to which collaborative governance and environmental justice are compatible and complementary, both in theory and in practice, should not be assumed. Many scholars have noted that the claims of collaborative governance and its benefits merit skepticism and collaborative governance theory and scholarship has been highly criticized for failing to engage with questions of power and equity Further, tensions between the state as a solution for inequality and the state as a perpetuator of inequality have led some environmental justice scholars to be pessimistic about the prospects of achieving meaningful change in the context of these type of formal policy venues.

This dissertation investigates the intersection of collaborative governance and environmental justice as a place of both challenges and opportunities, eschewing the promotion of governance panaceas in favor of critical appraisal. This is accomplished using California’s implementation of the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA) as a heuristic case. In doing so this dissertation seeks to contribute not only to the aforementioned literatures but also to California water policy wherein sustainable groundwater management and implementing the state’s human right to water declaration (AB685) passed in 2012 are both key priorities.

Chapter one employs novel data and generalized linear modeling to explore low-income community representation in Groundwater Sustainability Agencies. The findings illustrate that while collaborative institutions are more representative as predicted by the literature, these gains are not made evenly across communities, exacerbating representational disparities among them along the lines of income, population, race and incorporation status. Chapter two utilizes semi-structured interviews to surface environmental justice community perspectives on the groundwater reform process. Among the key findings is that the systematic exclusion of drinking water priorities in collaborative groundwater management both directly and indirectly discourages rural drinking water stakeholder participation. As a result, existing power and resource disparities limit the prospects of integrating rural drinking water priorities into regional water planning and leveraging collaborative groundwater governance for source water protection. Chapter three, in turn, draws on participatory action research as well as document analysis and interviews to describe environmental justice organizing around SGMA. In doing so I contribute an important case study on the formative role of social movements in common pool resource management, a topic that has been heretofore under explored. While confirming many of the challenges for advancing equitable drinking water access documented in the previous two chapters, this chapter posits that the SGMA process itself is contributing to the longer-term transformation of the San Joaquin Valley including through the growth of environmental justice movement, the production of commoners and shifting discourses, all of which constitute an important renegotiation of local socio-natural relations. The fourth and final chapter quantifies and then explores the drivers of (in)equity in Groundwater Sustainability Plans. Findings indicate that while collaborative governance does offer some opportunity to advance equity goals, the extent and type of effect is limited and the relationships between drivers and outputs are nuanced and complex.

This report analyzes the effectiveness of integrated regional water management (IRWM) in the San Francisco Bay-Area of California for decreasing fragmentation and increasing collaboration among water management stakeholders. The theory identifies the elements of traditional water management politics that lead to fragmentation and conflict. The water-politics-as-usual model is then compared to the collaborative model of integrated water management. The evolution of IRWM in California is briefly described. A survey of Bay Area stakeholders is used to assess whether participation in the Bay Area IRWM achieves the goals of collaboration and integration. The basic results suggest the Bay Area has made only incremental progress away from the fragmentation and conflict seen in the past.

The role of power, driving and shaping institutional change, is the central challenge in equity and sustainability governance reforms. Reforms aimed at fundamental change inherently question the status-quo, exposing who might win or lose with institutional change. As such, reform efforts are often met with various stabilizing mechanisms that oppose change, failing to meet their intended goals. While this has been consistently acknowledged by sustainability scholars, theory on institutional change has regularly ignored power, with a few exceptions. This dissertation aims at understanding the multi-directional relationship between power asymmetries among actors, governance processes, and their resulting institutional outputs and socio-ecological outcomes.

To further this goal, the dissertation tackles three fronts: theory, case study development, and statistical testing. The driving research question focuses on power asymmetry among actors and how it shapes, and is shaped by, fundamental governance reforms aimed at achieving sustainability. It draws on theoretical foundations within common-pool resource governance, environmental justice, and social network theory, and combines qualitative and quantitative methods including traditional and systematic literature reviews, in-depth interviews, surveys, and network analysis. The analysis focuses on i) defining how power could be integrated into institutional analysis, ii) examining how asymmetries among actors shape institutional outputs, and iii) investigating the relationship between power asymmetries in reform processes and governance performance. Overall, this dissertation finds that power is not only key in defining governance processes, outputs, and outcomes, but it can also be quantitatively measured and integrated into institutional analysis.