water governance – Policy Studies Journal Blog

by Tomás Olivier & Sechindra Vallury

Water governance is a critical challenge that demands locally tailored solutions to address diverse social and ecological conditions. Our new paper explores this through Nebraska’s Natural Resources Districts (NRDs)—a basin-level governance arrangement created to manage groundwater resources. We investigated how well NRDs design policies to fit their local social-ecological contexts and the influence of broader institutional mandates on those policies.

The overarching goal of our research was to bridge the gap between institutional fit and policy design literature. To do this, we aim to better understand the drivers behind institutional fit—how well governing arrangements address local resource challenges—and the mechanisms shaping policy design in decentralized governance systems like Nebraska’s NRDs. Our research question was: how do actors in governing arrangements design policy outputs to fit to their social, ecological, and institutional environment?

Figure 1. Nebraska’s Natural Resource Districts and the status of their Integrated Management Plans. The map was generated using data provided by the Nebraska Department of Natural Resources.

Nebraska’s NRDs are an ideal case for examining institutional fit. Established in 1972, these districts are defined by river basins and tasked with managing shared resources like water, soil, and land. Each NRD develops its own management plans and groundwater rules, which vary widely due to differing local conditions such as precipitation, population, and agricultural needs. This setting allows for a comparative study of how context influences policy design across NRDs.

Using topic modeling, k-means clustering, and fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA), we analyzed Integrated Management Plans (IMPs) and Groundwater Management Rules and Regulations (GMRRs) produced by 23 NRDs. We found evidence that the design of NRD outputs (plans and rules) aligned with local biophysical conditions. NRDs in areas with higher precipitation or greater groundwater demand tended to emphasize water management priorities tailored to those conditions. For instance, NRDs in drier western Nebraska prioritized policies addressing groundwater scarcity, as illustrated by their IMPs’ focus on water quantity controls (see Figure 2).

Figure 2. Topic model of stemmed text from Integrated Management Plans of 23 Natural Resource Districts.

Our results also suggested that NRDs with a state mandate to develop Integrated Management Plans (IMPs) produced more distinct, context-sensitive policy outputs than those without mandates. NRDs with state-mandated IMPs showed lower textual similarity across their policy outputs, indicating more tailored responses to local conditions. Voluntary IMPs, on the other hand, often relied on boilerplate language, reflecting less contextual customization.

The fsQCA analysis identified multiple pathways for achieving institutional fit, involving combinations of factors like population size, precipitation, and state mandates. For example, NRDs with large populations and high precipitation but no state mandate tended to produce outputs with less focus on enforcement mechanisms, highlighting how context shapes policy emphasis (see Table 2).

This study underscores the importance of institutional fit in natural resource governance. It shows that decentralized systems like Nebraska’s NRDs can successfully tailor policies to local contexts, particularly when supported by state-level guidance. However, the reliance on voluntary planning can lead to inconsistent levels of customization, raising questions about equity and effectiveness across districts.

You can read the original article in Policy Studies Journal at

Olivier, Tomás and Sechindra Vallury. 2024. “ Institutional Fit and Policy Design in Water Governance: Nebraska’s Natural Resources Districts.” Policy Studies Journal 52 (4): 809–832. https://doi.org/10.1111/psj.12550.

About the Authors

Tomás Olivier is an Assistant Professor of Public Administration and the Assistant Director of the Center for Policy Design and Governance at the Maxwell School of Citizenship & Public Affairs at Syracuse University.

Follow him on Bluesky: @tomasolivier.bsky.social

Sechindra Vallury is an Assistant Professor of Environmental Policy at the Odum School of Ecology and the Director for Policy at the River Basin Center, University of Georgia.

Follow him on Bluesky: @sechindra.bsky.social

institutional fit, Policy Design, text analysis, water governance

by Tomás Olivier & Ramiro Berardo

Policy forums play a crucial role in polycentric governance because they can facilitate collective action among diverse actors who are invested in a policy domain. Many of these arguments assume that forums are stable over time and that they attract actors with different ideas or interests. But, what happens in unstable policy settings where forums operate in a context of periodic rule change and limited enforcement? To answer this question, we look at how policy forums can facilitate interactions among actors with different perceptions about collective action challenges regarding water governance in Patagonia, Argentina.

Forums can facilitate collective action by attracting actors with different perceptions about policy problems. This fosters interactions among actors who would otherwise not interact, potentially facilitating collaboration and the generation of new insights about how to solve joint problems.

We study water governance in the Lower Valley of the Chubut River, located in Argentina’s Patagonia region. In 2017 and 2018, we surveyed 58 individuals from 34 different stakeholder groups, including government entities, private companies, and researchers. Our survey presented stakeholders with various scenarios regarding water governance in the Lower Valley and asked them to rate the extent to which they saw the scenarios as accurate or inaccurate. We also asked them about their perceptions of the forums overseeing water governance in the Lower Valley (e.g., whether they were fair, effective, etc.) and environmental conditions in the basin.

We found that out of the 31 active forums in the Lower Valley, many were attended by just one stakeholder. Furthermore, we observed that government entities do not appear to be very active in these forums, preferring to operate outside of them as needed. Part of the reason for low participation is that the forums in the Lower Valley tend to be short-lived, formed to tackle a specific problem or crisis and then dissolved shortly thereafter.

Most importantly, we found that actors who participate in the same forums tend to have similar perceptions about the dominant collective action problem in the region. This finding is meaningful from a governance perspective: in a context of high transaction costs, forums may serve as the first space where actors with similar perceptions may build the necessary commitments to engage in collective action. These forums can be problematic, as the range of views represented in them on how to solve a problem are limited. However, a silver lining is that they can also foster collaboration among actors who would otherwise may be distrustful of one another.

Our study deepens our understanding of how actors may organize to address complex policy problems in a context of weak institutions, and argues that the stability of forums in time is key to maintaining consistent stakeholder participation, a necessary condition for the solution of system-wide environmental problems.

You can read the original article in Policy Studies Journal at

Olivier, Tomas and Ramiro Berardo. 2022. “Birds of a Feather Fight Together: Forum Involvement in a Weakly Institutionalized Ecology of Policy Games.” Policy Studies Journal, 50(1): 176-198. https://doi.org/10.1111/psj.12418

About the Authors

Tomás Olivier is an Assistant Professor of Public Administration at the Maxwell School of Citizenship & Public Affairs at Syracuse University.

Follow him on X/Twitter: @tolivier9

Ramiro Berardo is a Professor of Environmental and Natural Resource Policy at the School of Environment and Natural Resources at The Ohio State University.

Follow him on X/Twitter: @BerardoRamiro

Argentina, Ecology of Games, water governance