Guidelines for Groundwater Governance in California: A Framework for Evaluation of Local Options

Abstract:

The importance of California’s historic Sustainable Groundwater Management Act for the future of California’s water is difficult to overstate, but its implementation raises new questions. Governance refers to structures and processes that enable policy decisions to be made and implemented, and is one key unresolved topic. Local governments will need to decide, quickly and with great latitude, how to create novel agencies with novel structures and challenging mandates. Sustainability is defined in physical terms in the Act, but because governance plays such a critical role in the potential for GSAs to achieve their goals, we argue that governance itself should also be viewed as an essential element of sustainability, and that it needs to be considered with nuance and rigor. We propose a framework to inform decisions about local groundwater governance. We suggest that local stakeholders and state agencies should evaluate plans and proposals from GSAs based on specific criteria that are necessary for the effective governance of such a complex, interconnected resource. These criteria include scale, capacity, funding, authority, independence, representation, participation, accountability, and transparency, each of which supports the overarching themes of fairness and efficacy. We discuss these concepts within the legal, regulatory, and geophysical contexts in which they must be explicitly situated for effective governance.