William Blomquist

Permanent URI for this collection

https://hdl.handle.net/1805/25231

Water Policy Resource

Professor William Blomquist is an IUPUI School of Liberal Arts faculty member within the Department of Political Science. He teaches American politics, constitutional law, public policy, and research methodology. He is the associate editor of the Water Resource Research Journal and a member of the Policy Studies Journal editorial board.

Professor Blomquist has collaborated with local governments, state and federal agencies, and nongovernmental organizations in the United States and elsewhere on decisions about how to organize policy making and implementation in water resource management, how to allocate water resources among competing uses, and how to involve multiple stakeholders and communities in those processes. He has led workshops and provided consultation for government agencies and nongovernmental organizations, and conducted collaborative research with local governments and nongovernmental organizations.

Professor Blomquist's translation of research into water policy resource solutions is another excellent example of how IUPUI's faculty members are TRANSLATING RESEARCH INTO PRACTICE.

Browse

Now showing 1 - 10 of 31

Welcome and Introductory Remarks
(Indiana University, 2013-01-25) Blomquist, William; Labode, Modupe; Wilson, Fred
William Blomquist, “Welcome.” Modupe Labode, “Introductory remarks.” Fred Wilson, “Inspiration: Musings on what Monuments Memorials, and Public Art Inspire Me”
California’s New Landscape for Groundwater Governance (Water in the West Reports and Working Papers)
(Stanford University, 2017) Conrad, Esther; Gordon, Beatrice; Moran, Tara; Blomquist, William A.; Martinez, Janet; Szeptycki, Leon
Dispute Resolution Processes. Thinking Through SGMA Implementation
(Stanford University, 2019) Moran, Tara; Martinez, Janet; Blomquist, William
This report examines 74 multi-entity parties formed as Joint Powers Authorities or Memorandums of Understanding to guide Groundwater Sustainability Agencies through the process of including dispute resolution clauses in their Groundwater Sustainability plans.
Putting Adaptive Management into Practice: Incorporating Quantitative Metrics into Sustainable Groundwater Management
(Stanford University, 2019) Conrad, Esther; Moran, Tara; Crankshaw, Ilana; Blomquist, William; Martinez, Janet; Szeptycki, Leon
This report uses four cases to examine how agencies have used adaptive mangement and quantitative metrics to set minimum thresholds, measurable objectives and interim milestones to measure groundwater in California. The report offers recommendations for Groundwater Sustainability Agencies as they write their sustainability plans.
To Consolidate or Coordinate? Status of the Formation of Groundwater Sustainability Agencies in California
(Stanford University, 2016) Conrad, Esther; Martinez, Janet; Moran, Tara; DuPaw, Marcelle; Ceppos, David; Blomquist, William
Decentralization of River Basin Management: A Global Analysis
(World Bank Group, 2005) Dinar, Ariel; Kemper, Karin; Blomquist, William; Diez, Michele; Sine, Gisele; Fru, William
Decentralization and increased stakeholder involvement have been major elements of water sector reform as ways to promote sustainable and integrated resource management particularly of river basins. Based on an analytical framework for relating decentralization and stakeholder involvement to improved river basin management, this paper infers several hypotheses about factors associated with greater or lesser likelihood of success of the decentralization process using data from 83 river basins worldwide. The results suggest that physical, political, economic, financial, and institutional characteristics of the basin do affect the process and the level of performance of the decentralization. In particular, the presence of water scarcity may be a stimulus to reform, uniting the stakeholders in the basin and leading to better performance; organized user groups push for the initiation of decentralization reforms but may be associated with costs to the process and difficulty of achieving decentralization; the existence of dispute resolution mechanisms supports stakeholder involvement and improves decentralization performance; where stakeholders accepted greater financial responsibility, complying with tariffs and contributing to the budget for basin management, the decentralization process and performance measures increased; basins with higher percentages of their budgets from external governmental sources benefited from better stability and support and it shows in the performance of the decentralization process.
Institutional And Policy Analysis Of River Basin Management: The Tarcoles River Basin, Costa Rica
(World Bank Group, 2005) Blomquist, William; Ballestero, Maureen; Bhat, Anjali; Kemper, Karin
This paper describes and analyzes the effort to institute river basin management in the Tárcoles basin of Costa Rica. Located in west-central Costa Rica, the Tárcoles basin represents 4.2 percent of the nation's total land area, but is home to half the nation's population and the metropolitan area of San José, the nation's capital and largest city. Water management issues include severe water pollution resulting from sewage, industrial waste discharges, agricultural runoff, and deforestation. In the early 1990s a locally-initiated effort established a river basin commission for the Río Grande de Tárcoles (CRGT), which was supported by the central government's environment ministry. Since the late 1990s, however, the DRGT has struggled through changes of leadership, inconsistent support from the central government, and waning participation from basin stakeholders. Despite several programs to arrest deforestation and encourage better industrial and agricultural practices, the basin's water problems continue largely unabated. The Tárcoles case is instructive about both the possibilities and the fragility of efforts to establish integrated water resource management at the river basin level.
Institutional and policy analysis of river basin management: the Guadalquivir River Basin, Spain
(World Bank, 2005-02-25) Blomquist, William; Giansante, Consuelo; Bhat, Anjali; Kemper, Karin
The authors describe and analyze river basin management in the Guadalquivir River Basin in Spain. The Guadalquivir river flows westerly across southern Spain, with nearly all of its 57,017 km2 drainage area within the region of Andalusia. Water management issues in this semi-arid, heavily agricultural, but rapidly urbanizing region include drought exposure, water allocation, water quality, and in some areas, groundwater overdraft. A river basin agency (Confederacion Hidrografica del Guadalquivir, or CH Guadalquivir) has existed within the basin since 1927, but its responsibilities have changed substantially over its history. For much of its life, CH Guadalquivir's mission was water supply augmentation through construction and operation of reservoirs, primarily to support irrigation, under central government direction with little provision for water user participation. Following the Spanish political system's transformation and Spain's accession to the European Union, water law and policy changes greatly expanded CH Guadalquivir's responsibilities and restructured it to incorporate representation of some basin stakeholders. Although the basin agency's accomplishments in reservoir construction have been prodigious, its record of performance with respect to its newer responsibilities has been mixed, as have perceptions of its openness and responsiveness to basin interests other than irrigators. This paper - a product of the Agriculture and Rural Development Department - is part of a larger effort in the department to approach water policy issues in an integrated way. The study was funded by the Bank's Research Support Budget under the research project "Integrated River Basin Management and the Principle of Managing Water Resources at the Lowest Appropriate Level: When and Why Does It (Not) Work in Practice?"
Resolving Common Pool Resource Dilemmas and Heterogeneities Among Resource Users
(International Association for the Study of Common Property, 1998) Schlager, Edella; Blomquist, William
Heterogeneities among resource users are commonly viewed as anathema to resolving common pool resource dilemmas. Ostrom (1990:211) states that resource users are more likely to adopt a set of rules that improves joint welfare if 'appropriators will be affected in similar ways by the proposed rule change', which is only possible if appropriators are homogeneous in all important respects. While heterogeneities may, in many cases, confound attempts to resolve common-pool resource dilemmas, they are ubiquitous. As the IAD framework demonstrates, there are numerous dimensions on which resource users may differ. Furthermore, most attention to heterogeneities has focused on attempting to reach agreements for solving shared problems. As both Ostrom (1990) and Scharpf (1997) argue, reaching an agreement is only one step in resolving shared problems, attention must be paid to implementation, including commitment and monitoring. Heterogeneities may effect resource users' willingness to follow as well as enforce rules. "Even though in many instances heterogeneities present substantial challenges to users of a shared resource, they nevertheless surmount such obstacles and devise and implement institutional arrangements. The issue then is how those arrangements address and overcome the obstacles presented by differences among resource users. In general, most institutional arrangements devised to address common-pool resource dilemmas also address heterogeneities by separating resource users into homogenous groups, forcing resource users to work together, or removing groups of users from the resource. Thus, in evaluating institutional arrangements for managing common pool resources, attention must be paid not only to their efficiency, effectiveness, and fairness, but also to how the resolve resource user heterogeneity.
Local Communities, Policy Prescriptions, and Watershed Management in Arizona, California, and Colorado
(International Association for the Study of Common Property, 2000) Schlager, Edella; Blomquist, William
For the past 25 years, since the National Water Commission published its final report, 'Water Policies for the Future,' prescriptions of the water policy literature have centered upon two themes: 1) 'the watershed' is the appropriate scale for organizing water resource management--although watersheds are regions to which political jurisdictions almost never correspond--because all water sources and uses within a watershed are interrelated; and 2) since watershed-scale decision-making structures do not exist to begin with, they should be created as soon as possible to bring together all 'stakeholders' and produce integrated watershed management plans that can be implemented efficiently, preferably through some form of watershed management authority. Despite the consistency of the message over the last quarter-century, the gap between prescription and practice is wide. On the other hand, our observation of water resource management activities in the western states has revealed that the development of regional watershed management is in fact occurring in several places, but in an altogether different manner--watershed-scale decision-making arrangements and management activities are being assembled in a variety of decentralized and polycentric forms that involve both linked and nested relationships among smaller organizations. Drawing upon political economy and institutional analysis literature, the paper provides a straightforward conceptual and analytical presentation to account for incremental and decentralized approaches to the development of regional-scale institutions as represented in four watersheds in California and Colorado.

Browse

Recent Submissions