Collaborative Water Governance in the Context of Climate Change: Facilitating Agreement and Compliance in Peruvian River Basin Councils

Scholars stress the value of collaborative governance in natural resource management, whereby public agencies engage non-governmental stakeholders in consensus-oriented, deliberative decision-making. Collaboration is especially important for water management, given the need to adapt to and prepare for climate change-related variability and uncertainty. However, collaborative governance scholarship has paid inadequate attention to the effect of actors’ differing belief systems and the socio-spatial relations in which collaborative efforts are embedded. Peru provides a good test case because the national Water Resources Law calls for establishment of river basin councils; however, similar councils varied in their ability to reach and subsequently implement agreements. This work examines how belief systems and socio-spatial relations complicate collaborative governance regimes through analyzing the extent to which, and by what pathways, they affect agreement and implementation within river basin councils in Peru. With evidence gathered from 234 stakeholder interviews across Peru, it employs within-case process tracing and between-case comparison. This dissertation finds that incongruent belief systems and socio-spatial relations from beyond the councils can present challenges to reaching agreements with which stakeholders will voluntarily implement. However, in the cases studied that reached and implemented agreements, stakeholders overcame those challenges by bridging belief systems and aligning stakeholder motivations. Through these insights, this dissertation argues that not addressing incongruent belief systems and socio-spatial relations within water management could cause Peru to miss opportunities to increase adaptive capacity and ensure sustainability of water supplies. These cases highlight several pragmatic strategies to help basin councils reach agreements that will increase the flexibility, sustainability, and fairness of water management. Further, they highlight how these critical factors can deepen collaborative governance theory’s understanding of when stakeholders voluntarily reach and implement agreements.