California has one of the highest water stress levels in the world (FAO and UN Water, 2021). Particularly, the California Central Valley Aquifer System is one of the three groundwater resource systems with the highest depletion rates (Richey et al., 2015). In other words, water stress and use are high and regularly challenged by multi-year droughts, leading to unsustainability. In 2015, at the height of California's 2011-2016 drought, the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act, commonly known as SGMA, was enacted. Pervasive groundwater overdraft, which occurs when average annual extraction incurs unacceptable social or environmental consequences, threatened the state's long-term groundwater sustainability (Harter, 2012; DWR, 2016).
SGMA established a framework to manage groundwater resources, effectively breaking with open-access (i.e., no management), and substituting it with local common-pool resource management (i.e., collective management). The institutional change process consisted of two main phases: first, it required local actors to self-organize to develop new groundwater sustainability agencies (GSAs) by 2017 and second, once organized, those actors had to develop groundwater sustainability plans (GSPs) by 2022. SGMA granted local management authority, established minimum management standards, and allowed for state oversight and intervention if locals failed to act[1] (Groundwater Management Act, 2014). While it provided a framework to guide the implementation of groundwater reform, it left room for local actors to decide what type of governance structures they wanted to develop and what types of rules they wanted to pursue to achieve sustainable groundwater management over a period extending up to 2042. SGMA broadly defined sustainability as "the management and use of groundwater in a manner that can be maintained during the planning and implementation horizon without causing undesirable results". SGMA defined these undesirable results as one or more negative conditions, such as the chronic lowering of groundwater levels.
"Managed depletion" and "business as usual" at best
Seven years since the law was enacted, preliminary analysis on the proposed sustainability targets in SGMA's GSPs show that they put forward two management strategies: a "business as usual" strategy that set sustainability targets close to current (2019) groundwater elevations, and a "managed depletion" strategy that set targets at an average of 100 feet below current elevations. If these plans are accepted by central water authorities and their governance choices implemented, analysis shows that thousands of communities will face groundwater well failures (Bostic et al., n.d.).
Various institutional factors, integral to the design and implementation of SGMA, explain the development of these targets. First, SGMA designated existing public agencies –- often agricultural and urban surface water districts -- as the implementation vehicles for the reform. Effectively, this institutional design automatically empowered local surface water users who have historically controlled water rights and infrastructure, while relegating groundwater-dependent users to having diminished access, such as farmers without district affiliations and unincorporated disadvantaged communities (Méndez-Barrientos et al., 2020). Effectively, those most dependent on groundwater have limited representation in the new groundwater agencies and plans. Only 12% of new GSAs included disadvantaged communities, tribes, or other groundwater users unaffiliated to existing public agencies (Méndez-Barrientos, Bostic, and Lubell, 2019).
Second, most new groundwater agencies were constituted from existing public agencies that merely reconstituted themselves as groundwater agencies, extending their control from surface water to groundwater, without reshuffling their governance structures, membership, or amplifying their decision-making boards (Milman et al., 2018). A minority (about 35%) decided to integrate various groundwater users, forming collective agencies that increased representation of diverse actors (Dobbin and Lubell, 2021). However, representation asymmetries have been documented even in those cases where a collaborative governance approach was sought (Dobbin and Lubell, 2021; Dobbin et al., 2022).
Third, fragmented management -- when more than one agency manages a groundwater basin – pervades 80% of groundwater basins (Méndez-Barrientos, Bostic, and Lubell, 2019). In other words, there are multiple agencies responsible for the management of a single hydrological unit, amplifying coordination efforts among the multiple actors, resulting in added complexity and diminished accountability. This may regrettably be one of the biggest oversights of the law, which provided a lot of flexibility to local actors to choose among various governance options.
Fourth and finally, analyses of the new GSPs demonstrated that they did not adequately consider vulnerable communities, such as domestic and public supply wells, in groundwater-well monitoring networks that are used to define sustainability targets (Bostic et al., n.d.). these communities rely on shallow wells for their water supply, yet their wells were not adequately included in analysis that helped define sustainability targets. It is therefore not surprising that GSPs' groundwater elevation targets are set deeper than many domestic and public supply wells. The new definitions of sustainability put forward by the various plans are more appropriate for agricultural districts, which are overwhelmingly represented in the new GSAs and GSPs and are more likely to own deeper wells (Perrone and Jasechko, 2019). Moreover, given the "loose" definitions of sustainability provided by the law, despite central authorities' efforts to provide best management practices and other resources to guide GSP development, this local response from newly created agencies seems underwhelming.
SGMA: too little, too late, and too slow
SGMA is a reform that aimed to marry a top-down with a bottom-up approach, providing local actors with the flexibility to organize themselves in diverse agencies and design sustainability plans, while allowing for central government intervention if necessary. However, the proliferation of depletion rather than sustainability targets has exposed the inability of the reform to reorganize groundwater governance. Authors have documented the institutional capture that pervaded GSA formation processes (Méndez-Barrientos et al., 2020). The lack of inclusion of diverse groundwater users in new agencies has been subsequently reproduced in new plans (Dobbin et al., 2022; Bostic et al., n.d.).
At this point in time, it remains to be seen whether central state agencies will intervene, using the "backstop" powers defined in the law, if plans are unlikely to achieve sustainability. Whether they decide to intervene or not, it is clear that SGMA's failure to integrate groundwater-dependent communities at different stages of implementation has resulted in inequitable and unsustainable outcomes.
Linda Mendez-Barrientos and Darcy Bostic
[1] SGMA authorizes the State Water Resource Control Board (SWRCB) to intervene to manage a basin under certain circumstances, including if 1) a high or medium-priority basin is not completely covered by GSAs by June 30, 2017, 2) one or more GSPs has not been prepared within the specified timeframe or 3) DWR determines that a GSP is inadequate, or its implementation is unlikely to achieve its sustainability goal.
Photo By Lance Cheung (USDA)
References
Bostic, D. et al. No date. Thousands of domestic and public supply wells face failure despite of groundwater sustainability reform. Draft paper submitted to a journal.
Dobbin, K. B., & Lubell, M. 2021. Collaborative governance and environmental justice: Disadvantaged community representation in California sustainable groundwater management. Policy Stud. J. 49, 562–590.
Dobbin, K. B. et al. 2022. Drivers of (in) equity in collaborative environmental governance. Policy Stud J..
DWR. 2016. California groundwater. Retrieved from: http://water.ca.gov/groundwater/
FAO and UN Water. 2021. Progress on level of water stress: Global status and acceleration needs for SDG Indicator 6.4.2, 2021. Rome. https://doi.org/10.4060/cb6241en
Groundwater Management Act. 2014. [And Related Statutory Provisions from SB1168 (Pavley), AB1739 (Dickinson), and SB1319 (Pavley) as Chaptered]. (2014).
Harter, T. 2012. Addressing nitrate in California's drinking water: With a focus on Tulare Lake Basin and Salinas Valley groundwater: Report for the State Water Resources Control Board report to the Legislature. Center for Watershed Sciences, University of California, Davis.
Méndez-Barrientos, L. E., Bostic, D., & Lubell, M. 2019. Implementing SGMA: Results from a stakeholder survey. Center for Environmental Policy and Behavior, University of California Davis.
Méndez-Barrientos, L. E. et al. 2020. Farmer participation and institutional capture in common-pool resource governance reforms. The case of groundwater management in California. Soc. & Nat. Resour. 33, 1486–1507.
Milman, A.; Galindo, L.; Blomquist, W. and Conrad, E. 2018. Establishment of agencies for local groundwater governance under California's Sustainable Groundwater Management Act. Water Alternatives 11(3): 458-480.
Perrone, D., & Jasechko, S. 2019. Deeper well drilling an unsustainable stopgap to groundwater depletion. Nature Sustainability, 2(8), 773-782.
Richey, A. S., et al. 2015. Quantifying renewable groundwater stress with GRACE. Water Resources Research, 51(7), 5217-5238.
Additional Material of Interest
Méndez-Barrientos, L.E. no. date. Water and power. A California heist, A review. https://www.water-alternatives.org/index.php/cwd/item/160-heist
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