Implementing the Endangered Species Act on the Platte Basin Water Commons

31: Theory Implications

407 The time of spilled blood is short and the time of spilled ink goes on forever. —Louise Barnett (2006: 331) In all societies, collective goods have been seen as essential to the production and enjoyment of private goods. Public roads and streets are necessary for the use of private automobiles. The Federal Communications Commission regulates the airwaves so that individuals and organizations can use market exchange to build, distribute, and enjoy radios, televisions, and telephones. We have recently been reminded of the importance of the Security and Exchange Commission and the Federal Reserve banking system and their roles in keeping regulatory practices up to standard so the stock markets and the banking system can function properly to allocate investment capital. National defense has always been a top-priority collective good—perfectly non-rival and non-excludable—to keep the enemy from the gates while those within enjoy their private goods and common property. Viable societies have always depended on the provision of highquality collective goods. We have only begun, however, to learn about how to provide large-scale environmental collective goods when ecosystems are not in public ownership and confined to designated boundaries of public parks and forests. The Endangered Species Act (ESA), at its core, held forth a policy promise that we must, at least in a limited way, constrain our willingness to take out un-priced mortgages against Mother Nature and future generations across all landscapes. What the language of the Endangered Species Act did not do, however, was specify a blueprint for its implementation. C h a p t e r 3 1 Theory Implications t h eor y im pL iC a t ion s 408 This has been a tale of how powerful rival self-seeking water providers— historically defensive of their settled regimes—were mobilized to transcend prisoners ’ dilemma dynamics on issue after issue to forge a new state-federal system of water commons governance that has promised to slow and eventually reverse habitat degradation and thereby overcome the tragedy of the commons on a segment of the central Platte River. How did this happen? What was the implementation blueprint in analytical terms? How CHange oCCurred: ConCepTs and VarIables What of a generalizable nature can be abstracted from all the site-specific Platte River Basin detail? What empirically researchable propositions can be formulated and advanced as hypotheses to explain mobilization for the construction of a large landscape–scale environmental collective good? Conditions Precedent to Launching Negotiations No attempt will be undertaken here to list the many things that may impinge on launching negotiations, but it is essential to fulfill five conditions. First, if negotiations are going to work, the geographic and social unit for talks must be determined in a manner conducive to problem solving. If the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) had selected only Nebraska for the recovery program talks on the grounds that it incorporated the critical habitat, the land, and ample water, there would arguably have been a serious problem. Nebraska authorities would have ferociously resisted the imposition of habitat recovery burdens without the contributions of its upstream neighbors. The interstate struggles traced in this study are testimony to this point. An exclusive USFWS focus on Nebraska would have triggered rounds of lawsuits that would have tied up the proceedings in the courts for years. Furthermore, the USFWS needed Colorado, Wyoming, and Nebraska to pressure each other so issues could be forced into the open. For example, it took intense pressure from the two upstream states to compel Nebraska to initiate its depletions plans and institute groundwater well birth control because Wyoming and Colorado needed to assure their constituencies that upstream water contributions would reach the critical habitat. The USFWS, acting bilaterally with Nebraska, could not have mustered such pressure . Choosing the basin as the unit of analysis was an essential precondition of eventual success. Second, essential stakeholders must be identified and made aware of the rationale for their presence at the negotiating table. Stakeholders are organizations and their policy leaders who have something to lose if negotiations fail. Third, the organizational representatives who participate in negotiations must have legitimate authority to speak on behalf of each stake-holding constituency. They t h eor y im pL iCa t ion s 409 must be accepted by others in important constituent networks and be central to those networks. Fourth, there must be sufficient information and data to...