How Institutions Enable Policy Design: Climate Resilience in Urban Water Systems

• In Event: Building Cities through Crises: Resilience, Resources, and Infrastructure

Abstract

Climate change is forcing many urban water supply systems to adapt to relatively slow-moving, yet permanent changes in environmental conditions, while simultaneously responding to increasingly frequent and punctuated extreme events. Both types of changes threaten system performance, albeit on different timescales and with different levels of intensity, adding new complexity to urban water management. While the need to augment built infrastructure to cope with changing conditions is well-recognized, a growing body of social research highlights the critical importance of institutions and policy designs that can promote resilience by being proactive and providing greater response diversity. Critically, however, some systems appear better positioned to take on this task than others. This study integrates theories of cognition and collective action to examine how policymakers address chaotic problems like the climate crisis through policy design. Situated within the Coupled Infrastructure Systems (CIS) framework, we ask: What characteristics of urban water management institutions enable or constrain the design of proactive policies to enhance climate resilience? To answer this question, we analyze how the institutional configurations of two urban water governance systems in California shape perceptions of risk and the selection of climate policy instruments. First, we use the Institutional Grammar Tool to map their formal, multilevel institutional arrangements. We then trace their climate policy design processes over a 20-year period, using a range of hydrological, administrative, media, interview and institutional data, to understand if and how institutional arrangements motivate 1) more accurate collective processing of future threats, and 2) the selection of a broader array of policy tools which enhances response diversity. This allows for a rigorous comparison of climate resilience policy design efforts in two similarly situated but institutionally distinct systems. The findings provide new insight into how institutional arrangements shape policy design efforts and suggest ways such arrangements may be altered to better enable the development of policies that promote resilience in the face of environmental uncertainty.

Authors

• Aaron Deslatte, Indiana University Bloomington

• Elizabeth Koebele, University of Nevada, Reno

• Jesse L Barnes, University of Nevada, Reno

• Faisal S Cheema, Indiana University School of Public and Environmental Affairs