Click the link to read the article on the InkStain.net website (John Fleck):
September 4, 2024
Lorelei Cloud and John Berggren had a really important piece on Colorado River governance in the Colorado Sun last month that has not received sufficient attention.
The challenge, they argue, is the lack of the institutional framework we need to address evolving societal values around the river’s management in a changing world.
Cloud is Vice-Chairman of the Southern Ute Tribe and has become a major voice in the effort to rethink the role of indigenous people in management of the Colorado River. Berggren, now at Western Resource Advocates, is the author of one of the most insightful analyses of Colorado River governance we’ve had in recent years. (I hope that link works for folks, this might also.)
They catalog the remarkable efforts within the last decade or more to create new frameworks for Tribal involvement in Colorado River governance, notably the Ten Tribes Partnership and the Water and Tribes Initiative. Here’s Cloud:
The challenge, as Berggren documented in his thesis, is a set of water management institutions – by “institutions” here I mean the formal rules we wrote to manage water – which are antecedent to the government agencies and political power centers that emerged to carry them out – created to allocate water for municipal and agricultural use.
Because those rules were allocative in nature, the government agencies and political power centers that emerged to carry them out focused almost entirely on carving up the water supply and getting it efficiently to farms and cities. Which worked great, until it didn’t. As the twin challenges of climate change and evolving values emerged, those institutional structures have proven maladaptive.
But it’s a path dependence from which it is hard to dislodge ourselves as new, changing values emerge. These new values (“New” here seems weird, the indigenous communities represent the oldest values! Maybe “newly recognized”?) don’t have a seat at the table.
I don’t know if their proposed solution, is the right one:
But if not this tool, then what should we do instead?
