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Abstract Urban water supply systems in the United States are designed to be robust to a wide range of historical hydrological conditions in both their physical infrastructure and in the institutional arrangements that govern their use. However, these systems vary greatly in their capacity to respond to new and evolving stressors on water supplies, such as those associated with climate change. Developing a more precise understanding of the complexity of interactions between the environmental and human components of urban water systems, specifically via their institutions, has the potential to help identify institutional design choices that can foster proactive transitions to more sustainable operating states. This article adapts the Institutional Grammar (IG) within the Robustness of Coupled Infrastructure Systems Framework to assess how a heavily engineered system's institutional configuration may impact its ability to transition to more sustainable management practices. While use of the IG has historically been limited in larger‐N studies, our application demonstrates its flexibility in revealing variation in specific components across cases. The analysis finds the structure of formal institutions shape the interactions between actors differently, and that institutional diversity exists across environmental contexts. The extent to which this institutional diversity drives transitions remains an open question. The results highlight both the importance of and challenges involved with developing longitudinal data on social and natural system interactions.
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Socio-hydrological modeling of the tradeoff between flood control and hydropower provided by the Columbia River Treaty
Abstract. The Columbia River Treaty (CRT) signed between the United States and Canada in 1961 is known as one of the most successful transboundary watertreaties. Under continued cooperation, both countries equitably share collective responsibilities of reservoir operations and flood control andhydropower benefits from treaty dams. As the balance of benefits is the key factor of cooperation, future cooperation could be challenged byexternal social and environmental factors which were not originally anticipated or change in the social preferences of the two actors. To understandthe robustness of cooperation dynamics, we address two research questions. (i) How does social and environmental change influence cooperationdynamics? (ii) How do social preferences influence the probability of cooperation for both actors? We analyzed infrastructural, hydrological,economic, social, and environmental data to inform the development of a socio-hydrological system dynamics model. The model simulates the dynamicsof flood control and hydropower benefit sharing as a function of the probability to cooperate, which in turn is affected by the share ofbenefits. The model is used to evaluate scenarios that represent environmental and institutional change and changes in political characteristicsbased on social preferences. Our findings show that stronger institutional capacity ensures equitable sharing of benefits over the long term. Under the current CRT, the utility of cooperation is always higher for Canada than non-cooperation, which is in contrast to the United States. The probability tocooperate for each country is lowest when they are self-interested but fluctuates in other social preference scenarios.
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- PAR ID:
- 10422419
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Hydrology and Earth System Sciences
- Volume:
- 26
- Issue:
- 19
- ISSN:
- 1607-7938
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 4893 to 4917
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-26-4893-2022
