Elucidating cultural norms driving Water Resources management in the Upper Colorado River Basin
Abstract
Water resource management in the western United States is built on the rule of prior appropriation; an idea developed during the Gold Rush of 49. Water, being essential for separating gold from soil, gave miners that arrived in the region first a vested interest in maintaining access to sufficient quantities of water as newcomers rolled in. The rule of Prior Appropriation was developed based on cultural values and norms around fairness, individualism, and industriousness that dominated the culture of western pioneers at the time and persists today. This rule was also a response to a dry climate where the availability of water could not always be guaranteed. Prior appropriation is a great example of how water management depends on both the climate of a region as well as the cultural norms and values of the society. Western water law is still premised on the doctrine of prior appropriation but as an unprecedented mega-drought engulfs the Colorado River Basin current rules may undergo change. To better understand the cultural values and norms that may drive water management decision-making in the Upper Colorado River Basin, natural language processing techniques were applied to public documents pertaining to water-related activities in the basin. Documents produced by this subset of stakeholder groups and the Upper Colorado River Basin Commission were gathered from published reports and web pages. Topics were identified by analyzing the documents from all groups using structural topic modeling, a natural language processing technique using the R computing language. This allowed for a comparison of topics representing cultural norms (e.g. environmentalism, recreation, etc.) between stakeholder and management groups. Topics that overlapped between stakeholder documents and Upper Colorado River Basin Commission documents were quantified and changes over time were identified. This work is part of a broader study seeking to identify the human factors of water availability, identifying the driving forces behind water management decisions including evolving or influential cultural norms - particularly in times of extremes, is important as even when decisions are said to be guided by objective knowledge they are made and implemented through political institutions and relationships (Mendez, 2020).
- Publication:
-
AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2021
- Bibcode:
- 2021AGUFMSY33A..01H