Environmental hazards, rigid institutions, and transformative change: How drought affects the consideration of water and climate impacts in infrastructure management

Abstract

Climate change necessitates major changes in infrastructure siting, design, and operations. Successful adaptation of infrastructure management requires overcoming thorny institutional challenges including path dependency and isomorphic pressures that inhibit major shifts in norms and practices. Hazards have been posited as a potential trigger for changing long-standing institutions because they can upend stable system states. However, research on the ability of hazards to shift norms and practices is still nascent and focuses on rapid-onset disasters like floods, hurricanes, or fires. This paper uses the 2012-2016 California drought to assess the potential for slow-onset hazards to lead to institutional change. We assess whether it yielded a shift in institutional norms, namely agency application of existing regulations toward enhanced socio-ecological resilience in the face of climate change. We focus on the environmental impact assessment process under the National Environmental Policy Act and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission's process for licensing hydropower dams. Using computational text analysis of Environmental Impact Statements and participant observation of infrastructure licensing negotiations, we assess whether, over the years of the drought, agencies placed more emphasis on drought issues or climate resilience in analyzing infrastructure siting and design. In EIS documents, we observe a short-term spike in consideration of drought-related impacts and a longer-term increase in water security, suggesting some shifts in institutional practice; however, consideration of climate impacts decreased over the time period. In FERC licensing, there was no consideration of future climate impacts, despite managers' recognition that this posed a problem for projects' future operations. Although these results do not preclude the ability of slow-onset hazards to shift institutional norms, they suggest that doing so is challenging.

After the vote: climate policy decision-making in the administrative state

“…Standardized decision rules govern information flow and shape processing demands (Kaufman, 1957;Simon, 1976). The use of climate science can be limited when it does not readily comport with established decision-making protocols (e.g., time frame, performance measurement, certainty requirements) (Fletcher et al, 2019;Ulibarri & Scott, 2019).…”

Disturbances as opportunities: Learning from disturbance‐response parallels in social and ecological systems to better adapt to climate change

“…Inertia exists in social systems as well. While ecological disturbances may act as ‘focusing events’ or ‘critical junctures’ if plans are laid ahead of time (Lindenmayer, Likens, & Franklin, 2010), governance institutions are typically slow to change, designed to create stability rather than adaptability, and shaped by historical pathways that limit future trajectories (Huber‐Stearns, Schultz, & Cheng, 2019; Ulibarri & Scott, 2019). There are myriad factors that further contribute to social inertia and limit adaptive change.…”

“…Yet opportunities exist where institutions are flexible, inclusive of diverse actors, and collaborative—especially if planning for future disturbances occurs ahead of time to deal with persistent temporal mismatches between the pace of governance and disturbance processes (Kates, Travis, & Wilbanks, 2012; Lindenmayer et al, 2010). Adaptation also requires action at multiple levels of government, in order to solve problems that might require locally tailored solutions with support from higher‐level policy makers (Djalante et al, 2011; Ulibarri & Scott, 2019).…”

“…While there is considerable literature looking at factors that support adaptive capacity in systems, we suggest that there is ample room for research looking across several key topics related to these significant but (historically) infrequent events: pre‐disturbance conditions that allow differing communities to pivot to more adapted systems post‐disturbances; how this varies with disturbance type, scope, frequency and severity; and how adaptive opportunities may be more or less accessible for different aspects and specific populations within social and ecological systems (as we explore in Figure 2). There are also interesting questions for further research regarding what kinds of adaptation may be more feasible in response to different disturbances (Ulibarri & Scott, 2019).…”

Tracking Topics and Frames Regarding Sustainability Transformations during the Onset of the COVID-19 Crisis

“…Given the multitude of discourse material available, new and variably applicable analytical approaches are needed to analyse these data, aiming to produce timely results that allow researchers to make cross-context generalisations. To this end, "big data" tools such as natural language processing (NLP) techniques [29,30] can be used to offer a "bird's eye view" of how discourses change. At the same time, context-specific and interpretative qualitative methods (i.e., "thick data" tools) are needed to elucidate the underlying patterns observed in data-driven analyses, as they allow for an in-depth analysis of prominent frames [31] (for a definition of discourse and frames see [32]).…”