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John Brown

About John Brown

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Asequia

Decentralize Water Planning and Management

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From acequias to groundwater-dependent communities across the state, New Mexicans are living the consequences of the state’s approach to water governance. To meet New Mexicans’ diverse water needs, New Mexico must decentralize and democratize how it manages its most scarce and vital resource: water.

This is an intended and likely outcome of successful implementation of the 2023 Water Security Planning Act (WSPA), which envisions the creation of regional water planning coordination bodies throughout the state.

During the recent legislative session, the New Mexico Water Advocates understandably focused much of its attention on state-level concerns—funding, and on Interstate Stream Commission (ISC) rules for carrying out state-mandated functions for implementing the WSPA. Scant attention was paid to the nine designated water planning regions or to the rules and authorities under which the regional entities would operate. This essay is intended to shift the focus of our concerns to the regions themselves.

From Uniformity to Polycentricity

The term “polycentric” denotes governance systems where decision-making authority over all uses of a public good (here, the water resource) is not held centrally by the state, but instead is divided across multiple, overlapping decision centers that use diverse approaches to coordinate their activities. Though the State’s initial rules for constituting the Regional Water Planning and Management Councils are still being debated, the “polycentricity” concept can be applied to governance practices that are likely to emerge from the Councils’ work. Polycentric governance is not limited to governments, nor does it imply a single form of institutional arrangement.

Embracing Diversity and Complexity

Heterogeneity in this context refers to differences and disparities among stakeholders that can affect the ability of a community to undertake successful collective action. These differences—in endowments, beliefs, preferences (including financial interests), occupations, education, ethnicity, etc.—can significantly influence whether it is possible for members of a community to find shared existential common ground despite differing perceptions of their individual self-interest. Individuals and groups often hold overlapping perspectives, which can either support or complicate collective action.

Design Principles for Collective Water Governance

In Governing the Commons, Elinor Ostrom identified several issues that are typically addressed in constituting and maintaining successful, long-lasting natural resource governance institutions. She called these “design principles.” They include:

  • Clear resource and legitimate user boundaries exist and are understood.
  • Rules are congruent with local social and environmental conditions.
  • User benefits from managing the common pool resource as a public good or commons are proportionate to the inputs required from the user.
  • Individuals affected by the operational rules can participate in modifying those rules.
  • Monitors accountable to the users monitor the users’ appropriation and provision levels.
  • Monitors accountable to the users monitor the condition of the resource.
  • Users who violate rules are likely to be assessed graduated sanctions by other users or by officials accountable to those users.
  • Users have rapid access to low-cost local arenas to resolve conflicts.
  • The rights of users to devise their own institutions are supported by government authorities. (These institutional arrangements will vary among regions.)
  • Actions operationalizing these design principles are organized in networks of nested enterprises, providing both horizontal and vertical linkages for coordination and joint action.

This list of design principles, while based on Ostrom’s, has been updated and modified by more recent empirical work of scholars and and practitioners.[1]

Other factors such as the size of user groups, differing types of heterogeneity within or between them, and the type of government regime within which users operate may also be relevant.

These core design principles offer guidance as to how New Mexico’s incipient Regional Water Planning and Management Councils might be constituted. Past attempts at regional water planning have foundered in part because—contrary to language in the 1987 bill that authorized “regions of the state [to] plan for their own water futures”—State water agencies seemed more concerned to maintain control and to insist on uniformity than to tackle real problems identified by people living and working within the regions.

A Pragmatic Path Forward

To what extent can these design principles be useful in crafting institutions for New Mexico’s water planning and management? Might they be applicable in designing polycentric governance and management systems at a variety of scales? We can’t be sure. However, the Water Advocates started down this road in the belief that water planning could be made effective if centralized state water agencies really were to listen to the people they serve. This approach suggests a strategy to make that happen.

In the article cited above, the author (Cox) asserts that a probabilistic rather than deterministic approach to understanding the usefulness of the design principles is warranted. Experiments in game theory as well as case study data from the field suggest that in repeated interactions participants begin to employ more cooperative strategies as they learn more about each other. A polycentric approach provides opportunities for actors in each region to communicate informally, recognize shared interests and conflicting needs and values, and build the trust needed to come to workable solutions to our multiple water crises.

Let’s Build Them—Together

If the state is sincere about empowering communities to shape their water futures, it must support the formation of Regional Water Planning and Management Councils that reflect local voices, address local conditions, and apply proven principles of collective governance. The path won’t be easy—but by listening, learning, and trusting local knowledge, New Mexico has a chance to craft resilient institutions equal to the challenge.

John Brown is a member of the New Mexico Water Advocates board and a former executive director of the New Mexico Water Dialogue. He has taught in the public administration program and the political science department at the University of New Mexico.

[1] Cox, M., G. Arnold, and S. Villamayor Tomás. A review of design principles for community-based natural resource management. Ecology and Society 15(4), 38;

[online] URL: http//www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol/15/iss4/art38

Glossary of Key Terms

Polycentric Governance
A system where decision-making authority is distributed among multiple centers of power—such as local, regional, and state entities—rather than being concentrated in a single central authority. These centers operate semi-independently but coordinate with one another, allowing for more locally tailored solutions.

Common Pool Resource (CPR)
A natural resource—such as water, fisheries, or forests—that is shared by a group of users. CPRs are difficult to exclude people from using, but overuse by individuals can deplete the resource for everyone. Effective management requires collective action and agreed-upon rules.

Design Principles (Ostrom’s Principles)
A set of foundational guidelines identified by political economist Elinor Ostrom for creating successful, self-governing institutions to manage shared natural resources. These principles include clearly defined boundaries, participatory rule-making, monitoring, and conflict-resolution mechanisms.

Nested Enterprises
A governance structure where smaller, local institutions are embedded within larger, overarching frameworks. This layering allows for coordination across different scales (local, regional, state) while maintaining local autonomy where appropriate.

Heterogeneity
The diversity within a group or region in terms of characteristics like culture, income, education, interests, or resource access. In water governance, heterogeneity can either hinder cooperation (due to conflicting interests) or enhance it (by bringing multiple perspectives and strengths).

Operational Rules
The specific, day-to-day rules that govern who can use a resource, how, when, and under what conditions. These differ from constitutional rules (which define who can make rules) and collective-choice rules (which set broader governance policies).

Graduated Sanctions
A conflict management principle where rule violations are addressed with penalties that increase in severity based on the frequency or seriousness of the offense. This encourages compliance without relying solely on harsh punishment.

Low-Cost Local Arenas for Conflict Resolution
Accessible and affordable ways for users of a shared resource to resolve disagreements without going to court. These can include local mediation processes or community meetings.

Probabilistic Approach
An analytical perspective that acknowledges uncertainty and variation in outcomes. Rather than assuming a particular governance model will always work (a deterministic approach), a probabilistic view suggests that certain principles increase the likelihood of success under the right conditions.

Water Security Planning Act (WSPA)
A 2023 New Mexico state law intended to modernize and improve water planning by delegating responsibility and authority to Regional Water Planning and Management Councils. The law emphasizes local participation, scientific data, and strategic coordination to address long-term water challenges.

Regional Water Planning and Management Councils
Entities envisioned under the WSPA to lead water planning efforts at the regional level. These councils are meant to represent diverse communities’ local interests and create actionable plans tailored to each region’s specific water issues, values, and priorities.

State Water Agencies (OSE/ISC)
Refers to the Office of the State Engineer (OSE) and the Interstate Stream Commission (ISC)—the two key New Mexico state agencies responsible for water rights administration, planning, and compact compliance.

Rational water planning process graphic1

Planning versus “a Plan”

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Planning versus “a plan”

John R. Brown

It may have been Dwight Eisenhower who said that “plans are worthless, but planning is everything.” A plan, in other words, may become outdated or irrelevant nearly as soon as it is agreed to, whereas the process of planning never stops. Planning is a means—or rather a set of tools—that individuals and groups of people within a community (or a broader set of jurisdictions—a “region,” perhaps— can learn to use to govern themselves better.

The 1987 statute that authorized regional water planning asserted that each “region” should be able to “plan for its water future.” But this is not how it worked out. No criteria were established for constituting regional entities, defining their membership, or specifying the scope of their authority. A Regional Water Plan had to be “accepted” by local jurisdictions in the region and finally, by the Interstate Stream Commission (ISC). But acceptance did not imply that any elements of a region’s “plan” would ever be implemented by the agencies responsible. Once a regional entity’s work was done, State support (intermittent and inadequate at best) ended. No ongoing role for the regional entities was envisioned, nor was monitoring of the RWPs undertaken. Some of the regional groups survived; others did not. Some had to be reconstituted to update their regions’ plans.

In 2007 and again in 2015, the New Mexico Water Dialogue convened day-long workshops at the Sevilleta National Wildlife Refuge to enable ISC staff and regional water planners to address their concerns face-to-face. The Dialogue’s relationship with the ISC had been fraught from the outset, seen broadly as a struggle for control of the planning agenda between regional entities focused on the importance of planning for their regions’ water future, and State actors concerned with consistent methodology so that regional plans could be compared and “folded into” a State Water Plan.

The Water Security Planning Act (WSPA) of 2023 is designed to provide a bridge across this divide, by authorizing the creation of regional water security planning councils and investing them with authority to coordinate water planning and management actions within their regions. The councils are intended to be largely self-organizing and representative of all stakeholder interests in each region.

This degree of decentralization Is often referred to in political science lingo as polycentric governance. It involves sharing authority to create a system of co-responsibility between institutions of governance at the regional and local levels according to the principle of subsidiarity (i.e., the theory that decisions should be taken at the level closest to where they will have their effect) increasing the overall quality and effectiveness of decision making, while enhancing the authority and capacities of sub-state levels.

ISC duties include assuring regional water plans meet standards for approval, not merely accepting them for filing.  The law says ISC’s approval of plans requires it to recommend the approved plans’ priorities for state matching funding.

Will it work? Governance is not the singular province of governments, and examples of effective collective action abound. Planning is process, demanding the ability to reconcile diverse values, beliefs, and expectations in pursuit of a common goal. After the basic facts about a problematic situation are agreed upon, success depends on the good faith efforts of a wide range of participants.

Governing, at sub-state, multi-jurisdictional scales is, at least in part, a problem of coordination among operators, regulators and stakeholders who share existential—but often competing— interests in a common source of supply (of a scarce collective good). The evolution of institutions for successful governance requires that actors adopt shared strategies for implementing plans and resolving issues, and that they make enforceable commitments to each other to carry them out. As their actions yield benefits and costs participants may adjust operating rules within the limits of their authority, including provisions for monitoring the resource as well as the behavior of actors who affect its condition.

Editor’s note:  John Brown served as the Executive Director of the New Mexico Water Dialogue in the early 2000s and was heavily engaged in regional water planning under the 1987 law. John is a member of the NM Water Advocates Board and was a student of Prof. Elinor Ostrom. 

Rio Grande River

To Thrive in a Climate-Challenged World, New Mexicans Should Govern Water as a Commons

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by John R. Brown

This essay argues for an alternative to a mechanistic application of “priority administration” to allocate the “waters of New Mexico.” The 2023 Water Security Planning Act (WSP) provides flexibility at local and regional levels to move water and share shortages more democratically and intentionally. It allows us to think anew about how to govern our water resource: as a Commons.

“Conventional wisdom” (or more accurately, the ideology that there’s a “free market” solution to every economic problem) insists that to allocate scarce water efficiently to its “highest and best uses,” governments should leave buyers and sellers free to sort out through their market transactions who “owns” what “rights” to particular sources and flows of water. Taken to an extreme, and in the absence or weak enforcement of externally imposed rules, such a private ownership regime would make every water right owner (and claimant) their own governor. Each is incentivized to protect their interest in their private holdings. This scheme provides no incentive to protect the resource as a whole; nor does it account for water’s value in the context of its many critical functions in a social-ecological system.

Why would treating water as a Commons be better? At first glance, it would seem unlikely. A Commons (or common pool resource – CPR) is a shared “good” that under conditions of scarcity is subtractable—where one person’s use can take away from another’s ability to use it (that is, it can be depleted or contaminated), and limiting or excluding people from using (or overusing) it is difficult or costly.

The evolutionary biologist Garrett Hardin[1] declared it a matter of fact that people would “free-ride” on a good they have not helped provide or pay for, and thus a tragedy—where “freedom in a Commons brings ruin to all”—is inevitable. Hardin thought there were only two ways out of this dilemma: privatizing the resource, or strict regulation by the “Leviathan” (state control). But in this assertion Hardin was demonstrably wrong, as Elinor Ostrom and many others have shown. Thousands of cases of long-lasting and self-governing CPRs around the world provide empirical evidence that alternative institutional arrangements are feasible.[2], [3] New Mexico’s indigenous tribal communities, as well as its historic acequias, offer examples of self-organization and adaptive cooperation.[4] Can New Mexico’s water stakeholders (all of us) learn and benefit from viewing our water resources as collective goods, and governing them as such, in pursuit of a shared goal—in this case to thrive in a warmer, drier world?

Under provisions of the WSP Act, the NM Interstate Stream Commission (ISC) is given authority to “establish and conduct a regional water security program.” The Act requires the ISC to promulgate rules that establish regional boundaries, criteria for approving regional plans, and the composition of regional water planning bodies, as well as procedures for the regional entities to consider public welfare values and report any issues and concerns to the ISC. To what extent will those rules support self-organization and self-governance within regional planning entities? A great deal depends on how the ISC views its role(s) and those of each prospective regional water resilience planning entity in crafting them.

Would recognizing and constituting such entities merely add another “layer of bureaucracy” to an already top-heavy system? Or would it strengthen decision making by ensuring that values important to communities within each region are thoroughly considered? Here the concept of polycentric governance is relevant. It suggests that successful governance of scarce shared resources needs to operate at several levels or scales, on the premise that many social problems are best dealt with at the level most closely related to the problem. From this perspective, polycentric governance aims to create an adaptive system of multiple self-governing units of different scales interacting with each other.

Planning coordination within any region, including identifying and helping to resolve conflicts among community planning efforts and their implications for strengthening regional water resilience, ought to be an important aspect of a regional entity’s work. While subject to state law (the WSP Act), these planning entities should not be merely a creature of the ISC. Their composition should reflect the diverse preferences, interests, and concerns of all regional stakeholders—water users, providers, managers, and regulators—and ensure their representation in its deliberations and decisions. Face-to-face interaction in appropriate forums can have profound implications for building trust among heterogeneous actors, which is a vital resource to enhance cooperation for taking collective action.

Closely related to trust-building, a polycentric approach to governance emphasizes mutual learning and decentralized experimentation and takes fully into account traditional technical knowledge as well as 21st century scientific findings. Some functions of regional entities consistent with polycentric governance might include:

  1. authority to approve or to recommend funding for grants and contracts to itself and/or to communities within the region for enhancing water resilience;
  2. monitoring agencies’ and non-governmental actors’ activity affecting the region’s water supply and reporting issues to the public;
  3. defining the public welfare of the region, and testing agencies’ policies, plans and projects against public welfare criteria it adopts;
  4. executing governance arrangements (via memoranda of understanding) within our existing legal framework. [5] 

For collective action to succeed, perception of the benefits of cooperation to the common good must outweigh in actors’ judgments the perceived costs of participating in the collective effort over the long haul. In the case of sustaining, protecting, and equitably allocating New Mexico’s scarce water resources, the stakes have never been higher.

John R. Brown is an active member of the Water Advocate’s board and was the New Mexico Water Dialogue’s Executive Director from 2002 to 2006. John is an independent public policy professional and has written several articles and papers on water planning and policy. 

[1] Garrett Hardin 1968. The Tragedy of the Commons. Science 162:1243-8.

[2] Elinor Ostrom 1990. Governing the Commons. Cambridge University Press

[3] Digital Library of the Commons https://dlc.dlib.indiana.edu/dlc/

[4] J. R. Brown and Rivera, José A. 2000. Acequias de Común: The Tension between Collective Action and Private Property Rights. Conference Paper. PDF. Constituting the Commons: Crafting Sustainable Commons in the New Millennium, the Eighth Biennial Conference of the International Association for the Study of Common Property https://dlc.dlib.indiana.edu/dlc/       https://hdl.handle.net/10535/1869

[5] A regional entity might for example serve as a negotiating forum for developing a shortage sharing agreement for use in an alternative administration process under Active Water Resource Management.