Over Water

Abstract

The preceding chapters have emphasized the often unappreciated extent to which subnational jurisdictions engage in behaviors that resemble those of sovereign nation-states with respect to shared water resources. The United States, the world’s first modern federation, provides perhaps the clearest illustration of how institutional arrangements create the conditions for such behavior to be exercised. Even in comparison to other federal systems, the U.S. Constitution grants an unusual degree of power to state governments. This asymmetry is codified in the Constitution’s Tenth Amendment, which assigns all powers not specifically granted to the federal government to the states instead. The greater power of American states, even relative to their counterparts in other federal systems, is also reflected in the fact that they maintain not only independent executive and legislative bodies but also judiciaries, a feature that has resulted in the uniquely complicated American legal system wherein different states recognize different bodies of law, especially in the case of water rights (Watts 2008). Despite this fundamental asymmetry, the power of the federal government relative to the states has grown over time, especially following the expansion of federal authority during the New Deal era (Sharansky 1970; Elazar 1984; Zimmerman 2011). The United States also lacks several of the mechanisms that ensure a greater degree of coordination and cooperation between states in other federal systems. In particular, the United States lacks the prominent intergovernmental organizations, like the Council of Australian Governments, that are a feature of many other federal systems and that help to address interjurisdictional issues like water resource management. Hydropolitics in the United States presents a twofold puzzle. First, unlike the other countries examined in this book, the United States features a notable diversity of institutional models for governing its river basins. While many American river basins, including the Colorado, are governed either by a patchwork of institutions or by none at all, organizations like the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) and the Delaware River Basin Commission (DRBC) represent some of the most powerful river basin governance institutions in the world (Delli Priscoli 2007).