Doctoral Dissertation Research in DRMS: Looking Upstream: Governance of the Forest-Water Interface in California

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Interactions of U.S. federal public lands agencies with non-government actors such as businesses, non-profit organizations, universities, and citizens have evolved in recent decades towards a network-based governance model for managing public lands and natural resources. This trend is also occurring in many other areas of public policy, changing how society makes decisions about public issues and altering the roles and responsibilities of government agencies. Although this has important implications for democracy and accountability, there is little research on how government agencies have adapted to network-based governance, for example in how they build and shape their networks. This research project asks how a critical natural resource agency, the U.S. Forest Service, pursues network-based approaches for managing public lands and resources. As the demand for network-based governance increases, with whom does the agency choose to work, and why? How might these choices reflect political constraints or organizational logics? How do resulting governance networks change power dynamics and shape public access to decision-making? And how are local-level networks embedded in, and shaped by, broader political contexts such as state and federal natural resource politics? In our study, we address these issues by focusing on how the U.S. Forest Service uses network approaches to manage national forests for downstream water supply in California, where national forests in the Sierra Nevada mountain range produce half of the state?s water supply. The management of these watersheds is increasingly a concern of downstream water stakeholders and decision makers in light of recurrent droughts and predictions that climate change will adversely affect water timing and yields. The research project combines network analysis with comparative case studies in three national forests and their watersheds.