Engaging local governments in watershed management

Adaptive management is a potential strategy for engaging municipalities as partners and encouraging their participation in watershed management. The USEPA's Watershed Protection Approach contains many of these elements and is a good example of an adaptive approach to water resources management.

Watersheds

A watershed is an area in which the natural hydrological boundaries drain to a common location. Watersheds are often referred to as nature's boundaries. As such, they provide identifiable geographic areas around which to organize policies and management strategies.

The emphasis on watersheds as a unifying framework for natural resource management is not new. During the nineteenth century, geologist John Wesley Powell explored and studied the western U.S. and was among the proponents of a watershed approach that called for political boundaries to be configured around natural drainage basins. In New York State, watershed protection featured prominently in the establishment of the Adirondack and Catskill Forest Preserves. Federal lawmakers also recognized the watershed as a unit of management in legislation such as the 1955 Watershed Protection and Flood Prevention Act, the 1965 Water Resources Planning Act, and the 1972 Clean Water Act.

Watersheds are currently playing a more active role in federal drinking water protection. The 1986 amendments to the Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA) led to the USEPA's 1989 Surface Water Treatment Rule; this provision allows municipal water suppliers that rely on surface waters to avoid the construction of costly filtration plants if the supplier is able to successfully implement USEPA-approved watershed management practices. Additional amendments to the SDWA in 1996 direct states to assess drinking water sources and potential origins of contamination. Both policies reach beyond the treatment of contaminated water to stress pollution prevention.

The challenges

While the term watershed management is used with increasing frequency, the concept may be unclear to local government officials. Black (1996) provides a concise definition of the term: "the planned manipulation of one or more factors of the natural or disturbed drainage so as to effect a desired change in or maintain a desired condition of the water resource."

Watershed management is especially difficult when nonpoint sources are part of the pollution problem and when the watershed covers numerous local governments. Nonpoint sources of pollution arise from multiple diffuse origins and are more difficult to identify than point sources. This feature has frustrated efforts to control NPS at all levels of government, including the local level. Local decision-makers often perceive NPS to be an ill-defined topic, believe evidence to be inconclusive, and consider potential remedies for addressing such sources to be impractical (Howe 1985). As a result, NPS may not be an issue for them. Even if backed by legal mandates, local officials may fail to add new complex and narrowly framed environmental issues to their busy slate of decision-making tasks (Arnold and Gibbons 1996). This reluctance hampers pollution prevention, because local governments are one of the integral partners in attempts to control nonpoint sources.

Their right to self-government—often referred to as home rule— enables municipalities to influence water quality in a number of ways. Through the enactment of land use regulations, zoning, and planning, local governments have the ability to affect the type and location of human activity within a watershed, thus reducing the possibility of harm from pollution. They may also help to protect water quality by requiring the adoption of best management practices by their own employees and by facilitating sound practices among others in the community. Indeed, municipalities are "the front line of public land use control" (Platt 1991, 160). Watershed boundaries, however, frequently do not match political boundaries, and threats to water quality often occur outside municipal borders. Faced with critical issues that affect their own residents, municipal officials may choose to ignore downstream concerns in favor of local matters.

Overcoming the challenges

State law may pre-empt local home rule in the pursuit of water quality since it is a concern that influences the public health. Nevertheless, regulatory programs and management strategies will function more efficiently if they have the cooperation of local officials. Indeed, cooperative approaches are being espoused throughout the country as policy-makers and resource managers tackle tough issues like nonpoint source pollution at the watershed level (USEPA 1999). One technique offers potential tools for agencies and individuals who are either engaging in watershed management for the first time or revisiting current strategies.

Computer model of a mountain watershed (Black 1996)

Adaptive management

Adaptive management is an ecosystem-based natural resource management strategy that acknowledges uncertainty and recognizes that policies are experiments from which individuals should learn in a process of knowledge-building (Lee 1993). It is based on a continuous learning process in which the physical and social sciences are used to analyze new information and help guide future decisions.

To learn, information must flow from the ecological, social, and institutional settings and among the parties involved in the undertaking. An adaptive management approach embraces this information exchange and its associated learning as objectives of the process that will promote a greater likelihood of success over time. Adaptive policies are designed to test hypotheses about how an ecosystem, such as a watershed, will react to management strategies. The carefully formulated hypotheses link biophysical and social aspects of the ecosystem, and the participants monitor the effects of the chosen strategies on the various interconnected elements. If the policy does not yield the anticipated result, the adaptive design allows the participants to learn from the experience and make changes in future management strategies rather than simply equating the unexpected with failure.

Watershed problems like NPS are plagued by uncertainty, both in the sources of pollution and the effects of management strategies on physical and social elements of the watershed. Adaptive management's emphasis on learning recognizes this uncertainty and allows for, indeed encourages, readjustment throughout the process. The direct feedback loop between science and management and the deliberate emphasis on management as an experiment distinguish adaptive management from traditional incremental policy-making (Halbert 1993).

Given the multiple players in adaptive management, such an approach requires interorganizational cooperation. Because of their key role in affecting the health of a watershed, local governments are a critical part of this cooperative effort. To achieve the cooperation of local governments, municipalities should participate in defining the problem to be addressed in the management pursuit. By involving all major stakeholders, there is a greater chance that the problem will be successfully defined. In addition, local governments should share power with the other parties throughout the management exercise. Allowing local governments to make choices when implementing a program also improves the political feasibility of a policy.

USEPA's approach: Key elements of adaptive management

In recent years, the USEPA (1995) has advocated the "Watershed Protection Approach." Although not touted as an example of adaptive management in the USEPA's public literature, this strategy advances many key elements of an adaptive approach as a way to help better understand and control stressors in a watershed. It departs from the USEPA's traditional focus on point sources by encouraging the integration of regulatory and nonregulatory strategies to help meet water quality goals.

This approach considers elements beyond water quality and "ensures that environmental objectives are well integrated with those for economic stability and other social and cultural goals. It also provides that the people who depend upon the natural resources within the watersheds are well-informed of and participate in planning and implementation activities" (USEPA 1996, 3).

The USEPA notes the importance of engaging local interests, including municipalities, in this iterative process because they contribute knowledge about the situations in and around specific water bodies and serve a vital role in making the issue part of the local agenda. As partners in the process, local governments are also better prepared to accept and implement corrections to the management strategy that may become necessary as new information arises.

Conclusion

Ashokan Reservoir, Town of Olive, Ulster County, NY (Photograph by Alice Merz, used with permission)

The National Research Council (1999, viii) recently stressed that watershed management is "an iterative, living process." While admittedly easier to explain than to implement, adaptive management is well-suited to engaging local governments in the dynamic pursuit of water quality. This type of strategy, as illustrated in the USEPA's Watershed Protection Approach, stresses collaborative decision-making, continuous learning, and the ability to change in midcourse as new information becomes available. Furthermore, a top-down federal directive to engage in adaptive management is not a prerequisite for local governments and others to employ such a tool; rather, any interested parties in a watershed can begin to advance the adaptive approach as a management strategy to meet local circumstances. These traits are all potentially useful to efforts to address problematic NPS on a watershed level.

Bibliography

Arnold, C. L., Jr., and C. J. Gibbons. 1996. Impervious surface coverage: The emergence of a key environmental indicator. Journal of the American Planning Association 62(2):243-258.

Black, P. E. 1996. Watershed hydrology, second edition. Ann Arbor Press, Chelsea, MI.

Halbert, C. L. 1993. How adaptive is adaptive management? Implementing adaptive management in Washington State and British Columbia. Reviews in Fisheries Science 1(3):261-283.

Howe, R. S. 1985. The politics of nonpoint pollution control: A local perspective. Journal of Soil and Water Conservation 40(1):107.

Lee, K. N. 1993. Compass and gyroscope: Integrating science and politics for the environment. Island Press, Washington, DC.

National Research Council. 1999. Watershed management for potable water supply: Assessing New York City's approach. National Academy Press, Washington, DC.

Platt, R. H. 1991. Land use control: Geography, law, and public policy. Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs, NJ.

USEPA. 1995. Watershed protection: A project focus.

USEPA. 1996. Watershed approach framework.

USEPA. 1999. Protecting sources of drinking water: Selected case studies in watershed management.
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Timothy D. Schaeffer is a doctoral candidate at the SUNY College of Environmental Science & Forestry, telephone 315-470-6695. Valerie A. Luzadis is an assistant professor at the College.