Embracing Watershed Politics By Edella Schlager, William Blomquist
Publisher: University Press of Colorado2008-06-30 | 220 Pages | ISBN:0870819097 | PDF | 2 MB



As Americans try to better manage and protect the natural resources ofour watersheds, is politics getting in the way? Why does watershedmanagement end up being so political?

In Embracing Watershed Politics, political scientists Edella Schlagerand William Blomquist provide timely illustrations andthought-provoking explanations of why political considerations areessential, unavoidable, and in some ways even desirable elements ofdecision making about water and watersheds. With decades of combinedstudy of water management in the United States, they focus on the manycontending interests and communities found in America's watersheds, thefundamental dimensions of decision making, and the impacts of science,complexity, and uncertainty on watershed management.

Enriched by case studies of the organizations and decision makingprocesses in several major U.S. watersheds (the Delaware River Basin,San Gabriel River, Platte River, and the Columbia River Basin),Embracing Watershed Politics presents a reasoned explanation of whythere are so few watershed-scale integrated management agencies and howthe more diverse multi-organizational arrangements found in the vastmajorities of watersheds work. Although the presence of multipleorganizations representing a multitude of communities of interestcomplicates watershed management, these institutional arrangementscan--under certain conditions--suit the complexity and uncertaintyassociated with watershed management in the twenty-first century.