Contested Flows: A Systems Modeling Approach to Understanding Influence and Narratives of Water Governance in the San Joaquin Valley
Abstract
Managing water systems in ways that are both equitable and sustainable requires understanding how the structure of water governance affects system-level qualities, as well as differentiates outcomes and experiences of governance for different groups. This study aims to bring together complex systems approaches that allow for understanding how different system structures and feedback determine long-term behavior, and qualitative analysis that allows for understanding how different groups understand, experience, and navigate water governance. This feedback between system structure and individual agency and experiences is explored in the context of water governance in the San Joaquin Valley, where a complex and multi-level water infrastructure and governance system in the process of a potentially critical transition and vast disparities in ability to access and benefit from water intersect. Through interviews and focus groups with small and large growers, residents of disadvantaged communities, and members of community groups and advocacy organizations, this study explores different actors' narratives of water issues and the role of water governance in perpetuating or solving these issues, as well as their goals or desires for how water governance should change. These interviews and focus groups also produce system mappings that are used to construct a dynamical systems model of how different groups interact with and influence governance. Their understanding of the current system and their envisioned changes to governance are used to parameterize different realizations of the model to understand the implications of different governance structures for different groups abilities to influence long term system outcomes. By combining an in-depth qualitative understanding with system dynamics modeling, this study offers a systematic approach to understanding the implications of different governance structures for how different groups navigate and benefit from them.
- Publication:
-
AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2022
- Bibcode:
- 2022AGUFM.H26G..06M