21 research outputs found
Bargaining and Devolution in the Upper Guadiana Basin
Get PDFIncreasingly, central governments approach contentious natural resource allocation problems by devolving partial decision-making responsibility to local stakeholders. This paper conceptualizes devolution as a three-stage process and uses a simulation model calibrated to real-world conditions to analyze devolution in Spain’s Upper Guadiana Basin. The Spanish national government has proposed spending over a billion euros to reverse a 30 year decline in groundwater levels. We investigate how the government can most effectively allocate this money to improve water levels by utilizing its power to set the structure of a local negotiation process. Using a numerical Nash model of local bargaining, we find that if the national government creates appropriate incentives, local bargaining can produce water stabilization. The actual water levels that will emerge are highly dependent on the central government’s decisions about the budget available to local stakeholders and the default policy, which will be influenced by the relative value the government places on various financial and environmental outcomes. Our paper concludes by determining the relationship between these relative valuations and the government’s preferences over water levels
Promoting Groundwater Reform in the Guadiana Basin
No full textIn many parts of the world, there is a substantial disconnect between existing water institutions and the institutions needed to ensure sustainable water supplies for the future. Implementing large-scale institutional change is politically challenging. In many cases, changes must emerge from political bargaining or negotiation. Accordingly, there is substantial literature looking at applications of negotiation theory to water policy. Carraro, Marchiori, and Sgobbi (2007) review this literature in detail
Overview of Carbon Pricing Toolkit and the Smith College Proxy Carbon Price Tool
No full textWebinar (40 minutes) that covers the basic mechanics of implementing/testing a proxy carbon pricing approach and walks step-by-step through an example use of the Smith College proxy price tool. Presentation by Alex Barron, Assistant Professor of Environmental Science and Policy and Susan Sayre, Associate Professor of Economics, Smith College
Pay for the Option to Pay? The Impact of Improved Scientific Information on Payments for Ecosystem Services
Get PDFThe scientific information needed to precisely link land use changes to changes in ecosystem service provision is often unavailable, particularly for hydrological ecosystem services. Potential buyers of ecosystem services must weigh the risk of paying to induce conservation that fails to deliver valuable ecosystem services against the risk that land is developed before its value is known. This paper uses a two period model to assess when expected future improvements in scientific information should substantially impact payments for conservation today. Optimal current payments increase, often substantially, as the quality of expected future information increases, but the gain from increasing payments to account for the expected degree of improved information is small in many cases. Larger values occur when the buyer believes that the land whose private development value is the highest also provides the highest ecosystem service value, when the buyer faces relatively more uncertainty about ecosystem service provision than about the cost of inducing conservation, and when the buyer believes land is highly likely to be developed absent incentive payments
Groundwater Depletion in India: Social Losses from Costly Well Deepening
Get PDFWe develop a dynamic groundwater model that incorporates both groundwater pumping and investment in deeper wells and apply the model to the arid, alluvial aquifer region of Northern India that is experiencing rapid depletion. We compute the potential benefits of regulating groundwater use by comparing the net benefits of groundwater under optimal management to the net benefits under a common pool regime with two different cost structures: one with flat electricity tariffs, which are widespread in India, and a second with full marginal cost electricity pricing. Using numerical simulation, we find that the opportunity to invest in deeper wells significantly exacerbates the common pool problem and suggests the potential for large benefits (66% of common pool benefits) from optimally managing groundwater use or new drilling. Flat tariffs exacerbate the problem, but large gains (almost 23%) remain even if farms are charged the full marginal cost of electricity
The Downside Risk of Climate Change in California’s Central Valley Agricultural Sector
Get PDFDownscaled climate change projections for California, when translated into changes in irrigation water delivery and then into profit from agriculture in the Central Valley, show an increase in conventional measures of variability such as the variance. However, these increases are modest and mask a more pronounced increase in downside risk, defined as the probability of unfavorable outcomes of water supply or profit. This paper describes the concept of downside risk and measures it as it applies to outcomes for Central Valley agriculture projected under four climate change scenarios. We compare the effect of downside risk aversion versus conventional risk aversion or risk neutrality when assessing the impact of climate change on the profitability of Central Valley agriculture. We find that, when downside risk is considered, the assessment of losses due to climate change increases substantially
Probabilistic Political Viability: A Methodology for Predictive Political Economy
Get PDFCurrently available political economic tools are not very useful for predicting the outcomes of real-world policy problems. Researchers have limited information on which to assign parameters to the mappings from policies to outcomes to utilities or to represent the political process adequately. We present a method for evaluating the viability of political alternatives in complex settings and apply it to an ongoing California water policy debate. Certain options would be "robustly politically viable" if stakeholder groups trusted that they would be implemented as negotiated. Once we incorporate institutional mistrust into the model, none of the alternatives are robustly politically viable.
The Sacramento—San Joaquin Delta and the Political Economy of California Water Allocation
No full textLocal Negotiation with Heterogeneous Groundwater Users
Get PDFThis paper assesses the political implications of intra-aquifer heterogeneity in the benefits and costs of optimal groundwater management. We use simulation modeling to predict groundwater extraction regimes under two alternative local decision-making structures and compare these structures to optimal management. Local collective action performs poorly when the intra-aquifer disparity in the potential gains is large. Moreover, large intra-aquifer disparity is generally associated with large potential gains. As a result, local collective action is unlikely to be successful in capturing the largest welfare gains. Individual subregions within a groundwater basin almost always benefit most from political structures whose outcomes diverge from optimal management. These results may be of particular interest to policymakers in California. The state of California currently allows local regions to make their own decisions about groundwater management with little outside intervention. The analysis in this paper suggests that there may be regions where large potential gains from optimal management are available, but cannot be realized by the two alternative local political institutions. This suggests that there may be a role for State intervention in the local political processes by which local water management decisions are made
