Journals
Spring 2001 Vol. 41, No. 2
Emerging Markets in Water: A Comparative Institutional Analysis of the Central Valley and Colorado-Big Thompson Projects
Janis M. Carey & David L. Sunding
Water trading is a potential means to improve the productivity of developed water supplies and reconcile competing uses. Economic theory suggests that markets evolve in response to changes in supply and demand. This prediction is at odds with observed disparities in the pace of market development in regions facing similar pressures on scarce water resources. A dramatic example of this disparity is found in the regions served by the California Central Valley Project and the Colorado-Big Thompson Project. This article argues that the differences in market activity in the two areas can be explained largely by the underlying water allocation institutions. The article identifies key institutional features that affect the transaction costs of water trading and examines the roots of the institutional differences. The institutions governing market transactions today are largely a function of pre-existing property rights and political battles to build consensus and obtain federal financing for the projects. The article highlights the path-dependent nature of water allocation institutions and trading, but also suggests that complex inter-regional markets could still develop in California given ever-increasing competition for scarce water resources and advances in information technology that lower market transaction costs.
Marketing Western Water: Can a Process Based Geographic Information System Improve Reallocation Decisions?
Olen Paul Matthews, Louis Scuderi, David Brookshire, Kirk Gregory, Seth Snell, Kate Krause, Janie Chermak, Bradley Cullen, & Michael Campana
Reallocating water is a politically sensitive issue in the western United States. Changes from agricultural uses to urban or environmental uses are occurring, but the process tends to polarize competing water users, thus creating barriers to reallocation. Other barriers are inherent in the appropriation doctrine, and some barriers exist because of poor data or inadequate science. These barriers could be more easily overcome and the process made less political if the impacts of change were better known. Water users frequently resist change because of the uncertainty change brings. The biophysical and behavioral models currently used to predict the impacts of change do not account for spatial complexity or information uncertainty in ways that overcome legal and other barriers to reallocation. An integrated approach that couples a spatial and temporal framework to biophysical, institutional, and behavioral science can reduce uncertainty. Process based geographic information systems can fill that role by allowing impacts to be assessed more accurately. A better understanding of impacts will potentially facilitate reallocation decisions in a water market setting.
Conservation Easements and the Public Good: Preserving the Environment on Private Lands
Peter M. Morrisette
This article underscores the importance of privately held lands in protecting ecosystems and biodiversity and demonstrates the power of conservation easements to protect such lands by encouraging landowners to act in ways that further both their own self-interest and the public good. This article explores how land trusts use conservation easements to preserve the natural environment on private lands through five case studies—the Montana Land Reliance in Montana, the Jackson Hole Land Trust in Wyoming, the Marin Agricultural Land Trust in California, The Nature Conservancy’s land conservation efforts in California, and the Asphepoo, Combahee, and Edisto Basin project in South Carolina. These case studies demonstrate the critical role that private lands play in preserving larger regional ecosystems and illustrate how conservation easements protect the environment on private lands and enhance ecosystems on public lands.
Transfer of Development Rights as an Option for Land Preservation in a Historic New Mexico Community: La Cienega Valley, Santa Fe County, New Mexico
W. Fleming; J. Rivera; C. Ageton, A. Jandacek, J. Marmon, R. Messenger, S. Moeller, D. Myers-Taylor, M. Santelli, & L. Vitela
Transfer of development rights (TDR) is an option for preserving agricultural land and open space in the villages of La Cienega Valley, New Mexico, an area with an estimated population of approximately 3,000 people. Although no development rights have yet been transferred in New Mexico, the village residents and Santa Fe county officials consider the procedure to be a viable method to preserve traditional values and landscapes. The villages invited the Community and Regional Planning Program at the University of New Mexico to outline a TDR program as part of a larger planning effort to address development pressures in the community. The project, carried out in the fall of 2000, was a collaborative effort with village residents, Santa Fe County, and the La Cienega Valley Association.
A TDR program makes it possible for landowners to voluntarily separate their development rights from their land and to sell them. It allows development to be moved from properties where development would be detrimental (sending areas) to other properties where development could be beneficial (receiving areas). While most development pressures originate outside of Santa Fe in the form of subdivisions, La Cienega area residents are concerned about local small-scale development in the form of manufactured homes, rapid development, and unregulated growth. Community surveys indicated that while irrigated land and acequias are important to preserve, residents responded that they also value a rural landscape that includes trees, streams, hillsides, wildlife, and open areas. There is a strong desire within the community to preserve open space and agricultural lands through mechanisms such as TDRs, which encourage planned development. Residents support the concept of selling development rights to protect land and want to preserve landscape and cultural characteristics including streams, trees and wooded areas, acequias, irrigated farmlands, and archeological sites. Of 986 properties evaluated in the planning area, 15 percent are potentially irrigable and are considered priority TDR sending sites. This article reports the project and its results.
Learning from the Limits of an Adjudicatory Strategy for Resolving United States–Canada Fisheries Conflicts: Lessons from the Gulf of Maine
Lawrence J. Prelli & Mimi Larsen-Becker
Growing concern about the world’s fisheries and the capacity of international institutions to sustain them led us to reexamine the use of a World Court Chamber to resolve a boundary conflict between the United States and Canada in the Gulf of Maine. Among that case’s unique features was an unprecedented argument, mounted by the United States, that turned fisheries conservation and management into a legal principle for boundary delimitation. We raise the question of whether the World Court is an appropriate institution for addressing problems of managing and conserving fisheries. To test its appropriateness, we examine the rhetorical practices associated with that institution as manifested in the Gulf of Maine case. Those practices include (1) framing the natural resource problem primarily as a political problem, (2) use of strategically designed, linear arguments on behalf of pre-established claims that conceal systemic features of the fisheries problem, (3) use of evaluative standards based on politics and equity but without regard to ecological concerns, and (4) selective use of science to support predetermined claims rather than selecting claims based on an understanding of the problem’s ecological dimensions. These practices indicate that the fisheries conflict did not belong in the adjudicatory process, especially since an important alternative was then and is still available. We argue that institutional arrangements modeled after the Convention on Great Lakes Fisheries and the Great Lakes Fishery Commission have greater capacity to induce rhetorical practices more conducive to addressing the fisheries problems in the Gulf of Maine.
Contractual Discretion and the Endangered Species Act: Can the Bureau of Reclamation Reallocate Federal Project Water for Endangered Species in the Middle Rio Grande?
Joan E. Drake
The San Juan-Chama Project provides water to municipalities and irrigation interests in the Middle Rio Grande Valley of New Mexico under contracts entered into with the Bureau of Reclamation. Interests representing an endangered fish are now asserting claims for a share of this water. This article addresses the question of whether the terms of the San Juan-Chama contracts provide the Bureau of Reclamation the authority to reallocate contracted San Juan-Chama water for the Rio Grande silvery minnow in light of that agency’s obligations under the Endangered Species Act. The article examines the terms of the contracts themselves and concludes that contract language can be construed to provide sufficient authority for reallocation of project water. This conclusion is strengthened if the Endangered Species Act is held to amend the project’s authorizing statutes and the contracts. The Ninth Circuit case law supporting this conclusion is examined in the context of the Middle Rio Grande. The implications of the fractured Winstar opinions on the application of the unmistakable-terms canon of government contract construction are also analyzed. If parties sue to enjoin the government from reallocating water to the silvery minnow and the Ninth Circuit reasoning is adopted, the Endangered Species Act will be held to amend the contracts and permit reallocation. If not, the parties will likely be afforded damages if the government elects to reallocate water for the minnow.
