Collaborative Governance and Environmental Justice: Disadvantaged Community Representation in California Sustainable Groundwater Management

A consistent critique of the theory and empirical research on collaborative governance is a lack of conceptualization and analysis of the role of political power and inequality. Our paper contributes to this discussion by analyzing the formal representation of small disadvantaged communities in the 2014 Sustainable Groundwater Management Act in California. Employing primary and secondary data, we model the likelihood of representation in the state's new Groundwater Sustainability Agencies based on key attributes of both the communities and governance settings. We find that the overall collaborative governance is associated with increased representation of these marginalized stakeholders. Importantly, however, even in collaborative settings representation of the smallest, most low-income communities and those lacking political recognition via incorporated cities or public water districts still lags far behind their more advantaged counterparts. In fact, disparities in representation along these lines increased. Using a uniquely interdisciplinary approach our analysis highlights the opportunity afforded by integrating collaborative governance and environmental justice in the shared pursuit of effective and equitable institutions and the inter-related goals of equity and sustainability.