Towards sustainable outcomes? An evaluation of alternative water governance arrangements in British Columbia
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In response to a need for enhanced water governance, water institution reforms are taking place around the world. Common among these reforms is a shift from monocentric to polycentric governance systems, bridging multiple scales of stakeholders through a mix of institutional arrangements. Benefits of a polycentric approach are commonly associated with higher performance in diverse contexts through better adaption to changing conditions, customized rules that meet local needs and a sense of trust amongst stakeholders. However, even though water reforms identify probable benefits from a polycentric approach, the ability to predict which type of institutional arrangement is likely to yield desired outcomes remains a challenge. This study applies the institutional resource regime framework and transaction cost economics to evaluate the current water regime in British Columbia and identify if an alternative water governance arrangement can promote sustainable outcomes through minimized transaction costs. First, I perform an assessment of the water regime in British Columbia from 1859 to 2016 to identify how and why institutions have changed over time. Second, I compare the perception of transaction costs associated with a watershed agency and a regional district alternative arrangement to the current system to identify if an alternative arrangement can improve coherence through more efficient organizational structures. Third, I assess the perceived transaction costs for a watershed arrangement from respondents in the Okanagan region compared the rest of the province. Data were collected through document analysis and 36 surveys and 5 semi-structured interviews with government officials. Results confirm a complex water regime in British Columbia. Transaction costs under both watershed agency and regional district alternative arrangements were perceived higher compared to the current system, in contrast to what the literature would suggest. In addition, perceived transaction costs do not significantly differ between respondents in the Okanagan region compared to the rest of the province suggesting no additional coherence associated with a watershed agency arrangement in the Okanagan basin. I conclude that the current system is evolving towards integration, but remains complex due to incomplete Aboriginal rights and title to water, jurisdictional and organizational fragmentation and undefined water yield quotas and water quotas.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".