Tag: equity

Drivers of (In)equity in Collaborative Environmental Governance

by Kristin Babson Dobbin

In recent decades, collaborative governance has reshaped environmental policy by encouraging horizontal cooperation among stakeholders in an effort to create more mutually beneficial, locally appropriate policies. However, despite its potential advantages, there is a lack of empirical evaluation of the approach, particularly regarding equity. Our study focuses on California’s groundwater management overhaul, known as the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA), to examine the conditions under which equity is or is not promoted in collaborative processes.

The chronic groundwater management challenges in California, especially in the San Joaquin Valley, contribute to the state’s widespread drinking water inequities disproportionately affecting low-income rural communities. The severe drought from 2012 to 2016 exacerbated these issues, leading to the implementation of SGMA. Under SGMA, local agencies formed Groundwater Sustainability Agencies (GSAs) to manage groundwater and develop Groundwater Sustainability Plans (GSPs) addressing undesirable groundwater outcomes. Our study analyzes GSPs in critically overdrafted basins to assess their impact on vulnerable drinking water users and environmental justice communities.

We derive five hypotheses for factors influencing equity in collaborative governance derived from the existing literature— the extent of collaboration, representation, elite capture, stakeholder engagement, and problem severity/salience. We then test these hypotheses using Boosted Regression and Classification Trees (BRCT) comparing results across three models, each with a distinct measure of drinking water equity used as the dependent variable. 

Across all three models, our results support the hypotheses, underscoring the importance of collaboration, representation, elite capture, stakeholder engagement, and problem severity/salience in influencing the distribution of benefits, costs, and risks for vulnerable drinking water users in groundwater plans(see Figure 1). Nonetheless, the raw change in the dependent variables associated with these factors is in most cases quite limited. For example, when moving from zero to eighty percent representation for drinking water users on the GSA board of directors, we only predict a six-percentage point increase in environmental justice rubric score from 40.65 to 46.60. Thus, we assert additional interventions beyond the scope of the factors studied herein are likely essential if we are to increase social equity in decentralized collaborative decision making. 

Comparing the influence of these five factors within and among the models lends additional important insights. Among them, our findings suggest that it might be easier to improve equity in the distribution of collaborative governance benefits than in the distribution of risks or burdens. Also notable is that across equity measures, representation in decision-making roles is consistently more influential than traditional stakeholder engagement. Finally,  given that many of the estimated associations are nonlinear, our findings underscore the importance of addressing threshold effects and optima, rather than presence or absence, when seeking to advance specific collaborative outcomes.

Future research should focus on a nuanced understanding of local institutional design as well as the potential role of external linkages with outside organizations given that some research indicates they may increase accountability. Such work can help us understand the potential and limits of collaborative governance for ensuring positive environmental outcomes for all.

You can read the original article in Policy Studies Journal at

Dobbin, Kristin Babson, Kuo, Michael, Lubell, Mark, Bostic, Darcy, Mendoza, Jessica, and Echeveste, Ernest 2023. “ Drivers of (in)equity in collaborative environmental governance”. Policy Studies Journal 51, 375–395. https://doi-org.echo.louisville.edu/10.1111/psj.12483

About the Authors

Kristin Dobbin (she/her) is an assistant professor of cooperative extension in water justice policy and planning at UC Berkeley in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management. Her work focuses on understanding the causes of, and solutions to, drinking water inequities in California. Kristin holds a PhD from the University of California Davis and was a NSF Social, Behavior and Economic Sciences postdoctoral fellow at UCLA.

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Just and Equitable Citation

For many of us, the reference list we assemble at the end of a paper is one step above an afterthought: generated by citation management software, hopefully formatted correctly by the same. For me, the exception occurs if my paper exceeds the page or word limit for a journal I’m targeting. To avoid cutting precious text, I’ll comb through my citations, trying to find places where I could use one instead of three, getting rid of less-than-crucial examples, excising the “see also” and “e.g.” In a low moment a few years ago, wrestling with an unwieldy reference list, I actually tried to convince myself that nobody really needs their middle initial. That was when it dawned on me that citation is not a neutral practice. Collectively, our choices about who to include and exclude, and how and why, shapes our literature: who counts in it, and how much.

Other folks got the memo before me. A number of studies show that citations in political science journals tend to underrepresent female and minority scholars (Bruening and Sanders 2007; Dion et al. 2018; Dion and Mitchell 2020; Teele and Thelen 2017) as do journals in other disciplines (Bertolero et al. 2020; Caplar et al. 2017; Chatterjee and Werner 2021; Dworkin et al. 2020; Maliniak et al. 2013; Odic and Wojcik 2020; Roberts et al. 2020; Wang et al. 2021). This phenomenon appears to be driven by some combination of:

Building a diverse, equitable, and vibrant community of policy scholars requires that we try to mitigate these biases. But how? Fundamentally we need major changes in how we train, hire, and support scholars, so that academia welcomes rather than erects barriers for women, minorities, non-traditional and first-generation scholars, and other groups subject to discrimination and bias. This should be shared goal we all strive to achieve. A small but actionable step forward is to consider explicitly the composition of our reference lists and, to the extent we find gender or racial imbalances, make a conscious effort to cite more scholarship by women and underrepresented minorities. We encourage all PSJ authors to take this step. Some tools to help in that assessment include:

PSJ has taken another small but nonetheless important step. In 2021, we stopped counting reference lists in the overall word count for an article. Limiting reference lists may cause authors to sacrifice newer scholarship, which may be produced by diverse scholars, in favor of older, core scholarship produced by less diverse authors. Our continuing aim is to eliminate this incentive.

Are there other steps that you would like to see PSJ or other political science or policy science journals take to encourage diversity, equity, and inclusion in our scholarly community? Do you have recommendations for how we as individual scholars can tackle this charge, or how we should approach it when acting collectively? We’d love to hear your thoughts.

-Gwen Arnold, Associate Editor

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