Effectiveness of Municipal Collaboration for Watershed Management in the Southern Colorado River Basin

<p>There are mixed arguments about the best scale of government for providing various public goods and services. Specifically, the management of a watershed, which can be categorized as a common pool resource, is generally implemented at the local government scale via National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (NPDES) Municipal Separate Storm Sewer Systems (MS4) permits as issued by the United States Environmental Protection Agency (US EPA). A large body of literature argues for rethinking this scale because this does not match natural watershed boundaries.In this paper, I explore the question: Does collaboration, and type of collaboration, among jurisdictions within a watershed have an impact on the outcome of effectively managing and meeting the jurisdictions’ watershed goals, controlling for budget, population density, development, education level, precipitation, average depth from which water samples are taken, soil type, and presidential party? The watershed goals focused upon in this paper are measured by stormwater runoff and water quality samples. Therefore, these become proxy measures for effective watershed management. From there, I formulate an Index. I hypothesize that greater collaboration between jurisdictions within a watershed will positively affect their ability to reach their individual watershed goals. I collected the data to test this question, focusing on watersheds and the permitted jurisdictions within them in the Southern Colorado River Basin, where water is scarce, from their stormwater Annual Reports, as well as from USGS, NOAA, and Census data, and used pooled ordinary least squares regression to analyze the relationship of municipal cooperation from a period of roughly 2010 to 2019. The findings from this research indicate that collaboration does in fact have a positive relationship with municipalities meeting their watershed goals. The Index is on a scale from 0 to 100%. Based on the available data collected, simply opting to collaborate with fellow jurisdictions compared to not has a roughly 10 percentage point increase on the Index, holding all else constant. Furthermore, if these jurisdictions’ permits require collaboration in the form of self-organizing with fellow permittees or collaborating universally with all agencies named in the permit, these each have a roughly 28 percentage point increase on the Index compared to no collaboration required via their permits, holding all else constant. The requirement of self-assigned or self-organizing collaboration is statistically significant at the 0.05 level, while the requirement of universal collaboration is statistically significant at the 0.001 level. The available data for this analysis was ultimately limited, though. So, while a strong policy recommendation cannot be made yet, even based on these results where the findings show a positive indication between collaboration and watershed quality, another finding emerges. That is of value for what more data could validate to enable more confidence in an assertive policy recommendation. There is an important need for more data and reporting consistency in this field, and this analysis highlights this need.</p>

Name thesis:degree_name

Political Science, PhD

Level thesis:degree_level

Open Access Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

School of Social Science, Politics, and Evaluation

Year dc:date.available

2024

Author dc:creator

• Geschwind, Sasha

Contributors dc:contributor

• Melissa Rogers

• Collaboration
• Colorado River Basin
• Municipal
• Stormwater
• Climate
• Public Administration
• Public Policy

Repository record dc:identifier

https://scholarship.claremont.edu/cgu_etd/888

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:scholarship.claremont.edu:cgu_etd-1910