Tag: water policy

Whose Water Crisis? How Policy Responses to Acute Environmental Change Widen Inequality

by Olivia David & Sara Hughes

People experience environmental and climate change in different, uneven ways, shaped largely by how governments respond to these changes. Policy responses to acute environmental events like droughts, floods, and wildfires are important for mitigating environmental and social harm, but can also reveal structural biases and entrenched power dynamics. Such events therefore offer opportunities to evaluate the mechanisms by which policy decisions affect existing socioeconomic inequality, and relatedly, how policy choices may either contribute to or stifle environmental justice.

In our paper, we address these questions by examining policy responses to severe drought events in California, USA (2012-2016) and the Western Cape Province, South Africa (2015-2018). Both regions received significant public and media attention for their respective water crises and the policies that determined how populations experienced and perceived them. The regions share other common features that make drought policy responses particularly consequential including high contributions to their respective national GDPs through agricultural production, and high socioeconomic inequality.

In our examination of these drought events, we ask what constitutes a “water crisis” – who experiences “crisis” and how – and how policy responses mediate those experiences. Some of our key findings are:

  • Californians living in cities largely felt distanced from the effects of drought, while rural populations reliant on domestic wells felt acute impacts. The state’s policy decisions around drastically reducing water deliveries for agriculture contributed to these disparate impacts, as agricultural users shifted to withdrawing more groundwater – producing scarcity and water quality issues for the communities normally reliant on that same resource.
  • California’s poorest communities were forced to spend additional money on bottled water in addition to paying for chronically toxic tap water, deepening water unaffordability conditions.  
  • In Cape Town – the Western Cape’s only large city, and water crisis epicenter – many wealthy households invested in expensive off-grid water supply infrastructure, such as construction of backyard boreholes and installation of rainwater catchment tanks, enabled by lax policies around licensing for private groundwater extraction.
  • The City of Cape Town’s new water pricing structures intending to incentivize conservation not only targeted high-consumption households, but also impacted many poor households with already-low water use.

Based on our findings, we proposed two main causal mechanisms linking policy response and widened inequality in both cases: “values reinforcement” and “strategic communication.” Put differently, we identified how both governments made policy decisions that 1) reinforced dominant political-economic priority values of their respective contexts – mainly, the agricultural economy in California and the status quo of racialized distribution of wealth and power in the Western Cape, and 2) generated and communicated information that leveraged content, framing, and targeting to instill particular populations with a sense of responsibility for mitigating drought crises.

Identifying these two mechanisms leads us to suggest that in contexts of drought and other severe environmental events anticipated under climate change, governments should pay particular attention to how their policy responses perform “values reinforcement” and “strategic communication,” and the outcomes these responses are designed to pursue. Understanding these mechanisms helps clarify how policy choices shape social outcomes of environmental events and raises questions about how policy design might narrow inequalities. As droughts and other environmental events become increasingly frequent and severe, we hope these insights can guide policymaking toward responding in ways that consider and even advance environmental justice, rather than exacerbating inequalities.

You can read the original article in Policy Studies Journal at

David, Olivia and Sara Hughes. 2024. “Whose Water Crisis? How Policy Responses to Acute Environmental Change Widen Inequality.” Policy Studies Journal 52 (2): 425–450. https://doi.org/10.1111/psj.12524.

About the Authors

Olivia David is a doctoral student at the School for Environment and Sustainability at the University of Michigan. Her current research focuses on the politics of water policy and infrastructures, and activism around water injustice as a potential lever of policy change.



E-Mail: odavid@umich.edu
Twitter: @Olivia_David_ 
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0412-9795

Sara Hughes is an associate professor at the School for Environment and Sustainability at the University of Michigan. She studies policy agendas, policy analysis, and governance processes, focusing on decisions about water resources and climate change mitigation and adaptation.



E-Mail: shughes@rand.org
Twitter: @Prof_Shughes
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1282-6235

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Mitigating conflict with collaboration: Reaching negotiated agreement amidst belief divergence in environmental governance

by Elizabeth A. Koebele & Deserai Anderson Crow

Conflict is a natural part of democratic processes. However, understanding what drives conflict – and how it can be mitigated to a level where negotiation can occur – is essential for fostering productive policy making.

The Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF) argues that policy conflict is fundamentally driven by belief divergence among coalitions, or groups of policy actors who share beliefs about a policy subsystem and coordinate to achieve their goals. It makes sense, then, that bringing coalitions’ beliefs closer together may also reduce conflict. However, the ACF warns that beliefs are hard to change, especially in high-conflict settings where actors are prone to biased assimilation of information, the devil-shift, and other tendencies that exacerbate conflict.

Collaborative governance is touted as a way to reduce policy conflict under such circumstances by encouraging diverse policy actors to engage in sustained, consensus-oriented deliberation around a shared problem. While collaborative governance may foster some level of belief convergence through information sharing and collective learning, it may also encourage opposing coalitions to negotiate through other mechanisms. For example, as they participate in a collaborative process, coalitions may come to better understand one another’s needs over time, build trust and mutual respect, and support collaborative institutions they perceive to be fair, even as they maintain unique beliefs.

To better understand the relationship between beliefs, conflict, and negotiation, we empirically analyze how two adversarial coalitions’ beliefs changed as they participated in a collaborative water governance process in Colorado, U.S., over the course of a decade. While the collaborative process ended in negotiated agreement, our analyses of longitudinal survey and interview data show that the coalitions’ beliefs actually diverged more at the end of the process than they did at the start – a finding contrary to what we would expect if negotiation was driven primarily by belief convergence.

We then identify several other aspects of the collaborative process and broader policy context that facilitated negotiation among the coalitions. Most importantly, societal value shifts, process norms that institutionalized actor roles and encouraged “multi-purpose” solutions, and the development of respect and social capital among actors appear to have promoted successful negotiation amidst belief divergence. We also found that the trend toward greater belief divergence was primarily attributed to one coalition strengthening their own unique beliefs over time while the other coalition’s beliefs remained fairly stable throughout the process.

Our results demonstrate that while belief divergence was likely a driver of conflict in this policy process, collaborative governance helped adversarial policy actors identify places where they could agree on, or at least consent to, common solutions over time. These findings have important implications for how collaborative processes can be designed to mitigate conflict among opposing coalitions and encourage future research on who changes their beliefs, how, and why while participating in a collaborative process. Scholars should also examine how collaborative governance affects different policy beliefs in different ways, which can help support the development of a more robust typology of beliefs in the ACF literature.

You can read the original article in Policy Studies Journal at

Koebele, Elizabeth A., and Deserai A., Crow. 2023. “ Mitigating conflict with collaboration: Reaching negotiated agreement amidst belief divergence in environmental governance.” Policy Studies Journal, 51, 439–458. https://doi.org/10.1111/psj.12496.

About the Authors

Elizabeth A. Koebele, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor of Political Science and Associate Director of the Graduate Program of Hydrologic Sciences at the University of Nevada, Reno. She holds a Ph.D. and M.S. in Environmental Studies from the University of Colorado-Boulder, and B.A.s in English and Education from Arizona State University. Dr. Koebele researches and teaches about water policy and management in the western United States, with a focus on understanding the impacts of collaborative policy-making processes on governance and environmental outcomes in the Colorado River Basin. She also co-edits the scholarly journal Policy & Politics.

Dr. Deserai Anderson Crow is a Professor in the School of Public Affairs at the University of Colorado Denver. Her work focuses on environmental policy as well as crisis and disaster recovery, risk mitigation in local communities, and stakeholder involvement in decision-making processes. She earned her PhD from Duke University, and her B.S. and MPA from the University of Colorado.

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