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Peace Engineering

Discover how peace engineering principles can be applied to address water conflicts and promote collaborative solutions for water management in New Mexico.

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Water: An Urgent Community Problem Requiring A Community-Driven Solution

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Fulbright Scholars from Argentina, ending a three-week Young Leaders program at the University of New Mexico, said, “water is a community problem. Research continues to find problems and propose solutions that don’t reach the people. …The only way to generate sustainable solutions is to understand water as a collective action problem and empower the people to take action.” They were focusing on the Middle Rio Grande, but their findings are applicable to public water commons across our beloved New Mexico.

UNM’s three-week program for this year’s cohort of Argentine Young Leaders was titled Peace through Policymaking. They viewed Argentine and the Middle Rio Grande case studies problems through the Peace Engineering framework that uses science and data to define problems and to vet solutions. Peace in this context does not mean the opposite of war. It means the reduction of violence, broadly construed. Peace Engineering explicitly seeks 1) public health in all policy, 2) justice, equity, accessibility, diversity, and inclusion, and 3) climate change sustainability. 

I’ve instinctively applied Peace Engineering concepts since becoming a water policy engineer in 1990. This summer, I’ve learned about the Peace Engineering framework and researched collective action, the Argentine scholars’ overarching recommendation. I believe the Peace Engineering and Nobel Prize winning collective action frameworks will be helpful to organize our water problem-solving to implement 21st century solutions to our more arid climate change future.

As a student at NMSU in the late 1960s, Garrett Hardin’s Tragedy of the Commons essay caught my attention. Recently, a Water Advocates board member used the Tragedy of the Commons phrase to describe water in the Middle Rio Grande. 

In researching the Argentine scholars’ collective action recommendation to generate community-driven solutions to the community problems of overuse of our shrinking water resources commons, I Iearned sustainability thinking focuses now on Ending the Tragedy of the Commons.  

Nobel Prize winning research and theory, by Dr. Elinor Ostrom and her spouse, shows polycentric collective action and polycentric governance works to find and implement community solutions to sustain natural resource commons. In simple terms, it means what the Argentine’s recommended slogan says, “Water is Life! Do your Part.” Various levels of government must all do their parts. Water users, including all of us, must do theirs.

Breaking down polycentric governance, 

Governance means all the processes which determine the range of acceptable individual or collective choices available to members of the associated group or community.

Since poly means many, the meaning of polycentric governance emerges naturally: a system in which many diverse centers of partial authority collectively cover the full range of governance tasks.  Quoted from this source.

We need polycentric collective action to define our problems; to understand the limits of our water. As Hannah Risely-White, the newly appointed ISC Director, told me after the new regional water planning law passed, “The state is going to need all the help it can get.”  

Only through multiple centers of collective action undertaken with scientific integrity, prioritizing public health, and seeking justice, equity, accessibility, diversity, and inclusion in our planning processes and solutions, can we define how we can best equitably adapt to a future with much less water while preserving water for future generations of New Mexicans. The state will never solve these problems top down. Our collective action can and must. 

We need not reinvent. The Peace Engineering and Dr. Elinor Ostrom’s Governing the Commons concepts provide compatible frameworks for New Mexico’s robust new statewide regional water planning program. 

We must adhere to the letter and spirit of the law.  The core of our community problem of overuse is state government’s inability to sustainably govern the public water commons required for our lives.  But we can through collective action, work within existing law, to materialize community solutions.      

Presentations at the International Peace Engineering Symposium at UNM in June 2023 explain Peace Engineering and related topics.  All of the presentations are available on YouTube. I particularly recommend Drexel University Dean of Engineering Dr. Joseph Hughes’ enlightening introduction and University of New Mexico Dean of Engineering Dr. Donna Riley’s place-based definition.

Knowing and applying these concepts will get us a long way. Please visit our website again for more information, coming soon.

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Argentine Fulbright Scholars Recommendations for New Mexico’s Water Future

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Twenty of Argentina’s best and brightest young scholars spent three weeks at UNM in June evaluating two water case studies through the Peace Engineering framework, which seeks the reduction of violence through policymaking. Violence in the water problem context is broadly construed to include harm to each other, water institutions, public health, equity and diversity, and cultural values, for example.  Their theme was Peace through Policymaking.  One of their case studies was the Middle Rio Grande. The other was in Argentina.  

Their insightful policy recommendations focused on sustainability, inclusion, equity, research, alliances, water governance reform, and public education and incentives.  They characterized New Mexico’s water problems as community problems that require community-driven solutions through collective action.  Politicians and decisionmakers roles are to measure and govern.  Urban and suburban communities must be aware of and reduce excessive water consumption.  Rural communities must transition to low consumption crops and efficient irrigation. They outlined a public campaign with this slogan:  Water is Life! Do your Part.  The Argentine Fulbright scholars recommendations are summarized in the slides they presented on June 23, their last day in New Mexico.   Their report and a short campaign video will be available in the coming months.  

The 2023 cohort of Argentine Fulbright scholars was selected from over 400 applicants that met academic and achievement criteria. All graduated recently and are practicing professionals in public policy, law, or are studying for advanced degrees. 

UNM Engineering and Global Programs faculty and administrators invited Norm Gaume, a retired New Mexico water resources expert and President of the Middle Rio Grande Water Advocates, to present the Middle Rio Grande Case Study. He used these slides to introduce the Argentine scholars’ presentation of their recommendations on the final day of their three weeks in New Mexico. The Argentine scholars really engaged in the Middle Rio Grande case study, including asking questions with elected and appointed officials and people they met. They concluded that New Mexico’s water governance is not rational.  Their recommendations are worthy of our careful consideration.  

Early on, the scholars took note of the scientific poll of New Mexico voters that had been commissioned by the Thornburg Foundation and the Water Foundation.

“In late 2021, Research and Polling, Inc., conducted 706 phone interviews of registered voters from a representative cross-section of rural, suburban, and urban parts of [New Mexico].” The voters were asked to name the state’s top problems. Very few mentioned water. They were then asked, ‘what about water?’ A vast majority agreed that water is a major New Mexico problem and requires urgent attention because “drought and lack of water supplies threaten our way of life in New Mexico.”  

The scholars asked the same questions of the officials they met in Santa Fe and Albuquerque.None of the officials named water as a major New Mexico problem, yet all agreed, after being reminded by the second question, that it is. All said they didn’t know much about water and that someone else was working on it.  

The Argentine scholars worked hard to understand the water problems we face in the Middle Rio Grande. Initially, they recommended economic approaches, including escalating charges for water and economic disincentives for excessive uses.  As they began to understand New Mexican’s deep cultural water values and the conflicts between those values and water as a market commodity, they changed their focus to education and incentives. Their campaign slogan captures this focus: “Water is Life!  Do your Part.” 

The Water Advocates provided the Argentine scholar’s case study recommendations and the Peace Engineering framing to Interstate Stream Commission (ISC) water planning staff. We hope ISC will consider the perspective of brilliant young Latino scholars–who looked at our systemic problems with fresh eyes and trained policy-oriented minds, unencumbered by our biases—as the ISC puts in place the rules and guidelines for the new statewide regional and community water resilience planning program. 

Enforcement against illegal water uses was the only punitive approach the scholars recommended. They couldn’t believe that in New Mexico, the most arid of the 50 states, we do nothing about consistent illegal water use. They believe that is not rational. Of course, they are correct.  

We will do our part, together, asking the New Mexico Legislature, our Governor, and our state water management agencies to step up and do theirs. In the words of the Argentineans, our governments’ part is to “measure and rule this problem.” Progress is incremental. Let’s work together to respectfully demand the 2024 Legislature authorize and fund the next, substantive increments.