News
ISPE Faculty Spotlight
Edella Schlager: taking a new look at an old problem, water wars in the West
May 2, 2006
By Stephanie Doster
Edella Schager
States have been feuding for decades over the region’s most precious resource, despite river compacts, or agreements, that are designed to promote interstate harmony by governing the allocation of water from rivers that cross state lines.
Schlager, an associate professor of public policy and administration at the University of Arizona, has received a three-year grant from the National Science Foundation to explore why some compacts are bogged down in turmoil, with states regularly taking more than their allocated share of water, while others flow smoothly. Studying the conflict resolution methods, like forms of arbitration and mediation that are written into the compacts, will help save taxpayers’ dollars and empower people to solve their own water problems, Schlager said.
“We’re going to evaluate how well these compacts perform because there are lots of claims made about them in the literature, that they are inflexible, they create conflict, they don’t solve conflict, and they aren’t doing a very good job,” Schlager said. “No one really has looked at compacts across the board to see how they perform in general and why some perform better than others. There are a lot of applied policy implications to this project.”
Schlager and her colleague Tanya Heikkila, an assistant professor in the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University, are studying 14 river compacts: the Arkansas, Bear, Belle Fourche, Big Blue, Costilla Creek, Klamath, La Plata, Pecos, Republican, Rio Grande, Snake, South Platte, Upper Niobrara, and Yellowstone.
Examining the compacts is important, Schlager said, because squabbles among states over water resources they share have spawned protracted legal battles, some of which ultimately landed before the U.S. Supreme Court, and cost taxpayers tens of millions of dollars.
“So there is the dollar-and-cents type cost taxpayers pay, but there are also economic effects of these compacts,” Schlager said.
Those effects stem from threats made by the federal government to cut funding for large, expensive surface water projects if the states didn’t hammer out their differences over water from rivers and streams.
“The states saw resolving their differences as a way to get the federal government to build water projects for them,” Schlager said. “Getting that kind of water then allowed for economic growth and expansion in these states. The foundation of every economy in the West really is water.”
Schlager is on sabbatical until the fall, culling annual reports by the various compacts and piles of other documents for data for the interstate river project. She typically teaches an undergraduate and graduate environmental policy course and a PhD seminar on public policy. She also developed and team-taught a 300-student freshman course on the relationship between business and government, concentrating on criminal justice, social welfare, and environmental policies, she said.
Schlager plunged into her latest research just months after publishing the book, Common Waters, Diverging Streams: Linking Institutions and Water Management in Arizona, California, and Colorado, with Heikkila and William Blomquist, a political scientist at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis. The book was the first to research the practice of conjunctive water management—the integrated use of surface water and groundwater to make resources go further—and was the top-selling book for publisher Resources for the Future Press in early 2005, according to the Eller Times, of the UA Eller College of Management.
Schlager’s research weaves together a number of disciplines, including law, political science, anthropology, economics, and global change, and centers on local community management of natural resources, such as watersheds in the West and coastal fisheries. When conflicts erupt over natural resources between states, cities, towns, or even farmers or fishers, the inclination is to think that someone from the outside has to step in and solve the problems, Schlager said.“Fundamentally, what my research does is it shows that there are other alternatives than having some bully with a stick come in and beat on people,” she said. “There are different institutional arrangements we can use to resolve conflicts and to figure out how to use natural resources in a sustainable way without killing one another or the resources.”