Assessing the proximity to the desired End State in complex Water systems: Comparing the Great Lakes and Rio Grande transboundary basins

Abstract

Scholars from diverse fields of inquiry agree on the need to redesign institutions for governance of complex transboundary water systems to become more ‘adaptive’, and they assume that this will lead to a ‘desired end state.’ However, the exact features of the desired end state are often not clearly delineated, and the relationship between attributes of adaptive governance and the desired end state is difficult to empirically assess. We advocate for shifting the research focus instead to investigating the ‘proximity’ of a complex water system to desired ends, by assessing three aspects: the nature and significance of contextual constraints operating on a policy regime, the current status of policy outputs, and the outcomes achieved by the system to date. Taken together, these can provide us with a broader and deeper picture of what we want to achieve with adaptive governance and how close we are to achieving it. Methodologically, it then becomes easier to assess the impact of changes to governance institutions in subsequent research. We demonstrate these arguments through an illustrative comparison of two complex water governance systems in North America: Great Lakes Basin and Rio Grande-Bravo River Basin.