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California’s Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA) is a landmark policy that requires achievement of sustainability at the groundwater basin level. In this policy review and analysis, we describe the horizontal, vertical, and network governance processes occurring under SGMA and discuss how they interact with one another. In doing so, we review existing governance theories that can help to shed light on how each governance process may unfold. Depicting SGMA as a complex system of simultaneous and interacting governance processes provides a useful platform for future evaluations of SGMA successes and failures as well as for transferring lessons learned from California’s implementation of SGMA to groundwater governance in other locations.
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This content will become publicly available on May 14, 2026
Do governance platforms achieve the aims of the platform sponsor? Principal-agent tension in environmental governance reforms
State and federal governments use governance platforms to achieve central policy goals through distributed action at the local level. For example, California’s 2014 Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA) mandates local policy actors to work together to create new groundwater management institutions and plans. We argue that governance platforms entail a principal-agent problem where local decisions may deviate from central goals. We apply this argument to SGMA implementation, where local plans may respond more to local political economic conditions rather than address the groundwater problems prioritized by the state. Using a Structured Topic Model (STM) to analyze the content of 117 basin management plans, we regress each plan’s focus on core management reform priorities on local socio-economic and social-ecological indicators expected to shape how different communities respond to state requirements. Our results suggest that the focus of local plans diverges from problem conditions on issues like environmental justice and drinking water quality. This highlights how principal-agent logics of divergent preferences and information asymmetry can affect the design and implementation of governance platforms.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2205239
- PAR ID:
- 10635921
- Publisher / Repository:
- Oxford University Press
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory
- Volume:
- 35
- Issue:
- 3
- ISSN:
- 1053-1858
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 292 to 308
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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