Dissertation Research: Dividing the Waters: Data, Models, and Environmental Policy in the American Southwest and U.S.-Mexico Border Region

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This Science and Technology Studies Dissertation Improvement Grant explores the changing place of large-scale computer simulations within regimes of environmental governance in the American Southwest and U.S.-Mexico border region. Since the early 1990s, changes in model design (a shift towards software-based and object-oriented strategies) and scale (a secular increase in funding and expansion to new geographic locales) have pushed computer simulations closer to the heart of environmental management, policy and controversy. This has produced contradictory effects: on one hand, models enjoy a new and growing prominence in the practice and politics of regional water management; on the other, their very success has provoked widespread debate among planners, policymakers and various environmental publics over their fundamental nature and epistemic status: What sort of knowledge do models produce, and how are we to credit this knowledge? How are relations of uncertainty, credibility and trust expressed, managed and adjudicated at the level of model design and use? What work can and should models do in mediating public environmental controversies? This study traces a particular art of environmental fact-making through its wider institutional and social context, exploring the infrastructural work of model builders, users and publics operating under the frequently intense spotlight of regional water politics. The study methodology is comparative and ethnographic, drawing on original fieldwork into three primary cases: the CALSIM II process undertaken by the California Department of Water Resources and the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, originally designed to model the interaction of the State Water and Central Valley Projects, but increasingly being deployed as a general predictive model for the state-wide system as a whole; RiverWare, a modeling environment developed by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation and the Tennessee Valley Authority for decision support on the Colorado, Tennessee and other heavily-managed basins; and Border+20, a group-based modeling exercise sponsored by the Congressionally-funded Southwest Center for Environmental Research and Policy that attempts to establish credible 20-year futures as a basis for binational environmental policy and cooperation along the U.S.-Mexico border. Funds will be used primarily to support travel to conduct interviews, ethnographic observation and archival research with model developers and users in California, Colorado, and Northern Mexico. Within the field of STS, the study will contribute to emerging research on the role of distributed and computer-based data systems in the mutual construction of the earth sciences and public policy. Beyond its relevance for STS scholars, the study will speak to pressing concerns faced by earth scientists, policy makers and environmental publics as new data and information technologies and new modes of practice are deployed throughout the environmental field. Most concretely, the study will suggest empirically-grounded lessons concerning the appropriate design and use of large-scale computer simulations in their ecological, institutional, and political contexts.