Partnerships and Collaboration in Water Governance

Abstract

Water issues around the globe range from aging and inadequate water infrastructure to lack of access to basic water and sanitation to rivers polluted by industry and cut off from communities by roads and buildings. Water challenges are multi-dimensional and involve and impact a wide range of stakeholders. Water is essential for life. Whether visible as surface rivers, or buried deep underground in aquifers, water is a shared resource with multiple uses. Water is used for industry, agriculture, energy, domestic use, transportation, recreation, and supporting humans and wildlife. How one person uses water or treats a waterway may conflict with other uses and impacts its ability to be used by others. As such, water has both a physical and a social aspect that involves diverse actors at multiple scales. In response to complex, shared water challenges that cannot be solved by a single entity, partnerships of diverse actors are forming across scales from the local to the global. Drawing from the scholarship on water governance, collaboration, sense of place, and environmental justice, this dissertation aims to better understand transformations in water governance over time and the roles of diverse actors involved in water governance across scales. This scholarship also helps with understanding the role of partnerships in addressing complex water challenges. This dissertation in particular looks at the often unconventional ways that different actors exhibit authority in water governance. Specifically, this dissertation examines the potential of foregrounding a sense of place and environmental justice mission in the design of partnerships around water. This dissertation uses document analysis of the gray and academic literature on water public private partnerships globally to understand who the actors are in water PPPs, how they contribute to water PPPs globally, and what motivates their engagement. It then uses a combination of document analysis of websites, reports, meeting notes, program updates, partnership work plans, published background information, videos, ArcGIS StoryMaps, blogs, podcasts, newspaper articles and 38 expert interviews from program leadership for a case study of the United States Environmental Protection Agency’s Urban Waters Federal Partnership (UWFP). It uses these methods to understand how the genesis and trajectory of the UWFP impacts the role of sense of place and environmental justice in the program as well as the perceived successes and challenges of the UWFP and the role of ambassadors in urban waters partnerships. Each of the 21 UWFP sites has an ambassador to help coordinate partners and connect communities with federal resources. This dissertation begins with an examination of diverse actor involvement in water public private partnerships (PPPs). Globally, PPPs have been emphasized as solutions for addressing water challenges such as aging water infrastructure and utilities management. The first paper specifically focuses on how and why different actors contribute to and benefit from engagement with water PPPs. For the next two papers, I zoom in from a global scale to examine water partnerships at the national, regional and local levels through a case study of the UWFP. At the national and local scale, more collaborative approaches are being taken to include addressing environmental justice issues within water governance challenges. These issues go beyond water access and quality issues to include access to water-adjacent amenities such as clean, safe greenspace with hiking and biking trails and fishable and swimmable rivers. As a federal, place-based program in 21 sites across the US and Puerto Rico, the UWFP is working to restore rivers in cities and reconnect disadvantaged communities with their waterways. Taken together, these three papers reveal the diversity of water challenges facing our world and ways collaboration and partnership are being utilized to address those challenges. This research centers the roles and contributions of different actors in water governance across scales, identifies successes, challenges, and recommendations moving forward, and illustrates the importance of place and environmental justice considerations for water partnerships and collaboration.