Water Governance Project

The Water Governance Project is a research effort funded by the National Science Foundation (SES-0519459). The research team includes scholars and graduates and undergraduate students of Political Science from Florida State University and the University of Arizona.

Our previous NSF-funded research established the importance of local policy networks in enhancing the positive impacts of federal regulations and in developing coordinated policy agreements in local watersheds. A study of environmental policies in 22 U. S. estuaries found that extensive policy networks linking diverse agencies and stakeholders in the estuary play the most critical role in developing joint projects to protect water resources.

Our current research explores the role of policy networks in enhancing the success of collaborative efforts among governmental authorities and other political actors. The research focuses on water governance in southwest Florida, an area subjected to the increasing environmental stress produced by a rapidly growing population. In 2006 we released a survey to participants in the Cooperative Funding Initiative, a program sponsored by one of Florida's five Water Management Districts: the Southwest Florida Water Management District (SWFWMD). In that survey, we analyzed how stakeholders in southwest Florida create projects to ensure water supply, improve water quality, prevent flooding, and enhance habitat conservation. We explored how the partners in each project deal with the issues of management, funding, regulatory and permit requirements, and securing public acceptance and political support for their projects. We also investigated which agencies and stakeholders deal with these issues, and how important are the relationships among the project's partners in attracting funds and ensuring successful implementation of the projects.

In June 2007, we will proceed with the second stage of our study, identifying new projects and interviewing their managers, to focus our analysis in two other dimensions of interest: how the projects obtain assistance by organizations that are not formal partners in them, and how their success is determined -or not- by the partners' participation in policy-making venues where the project can gather both supporters and opponents.

The overall goal of our research is to understand factors that enhance the success of projects, and not to evaluate any particular projects. We are not affiliated with any government agency, although we hope that our results will help all agencies and stakeholders work together more successfully. Results from this research will be published, presented to interested groups, and provided to all participants who request the analyses.