Upcoming talk: Ostrom Workshop Colloquium Series (Indiana University, Bloomington)

As many of my readers know, I have a very strong connection to the late Elinor Ostrom and Vincent Ostrom. My research has been strongly influenced by their scholarship, and their mentorship.

Thus, it is a pleasure for me to come back to Bloomington to Indiana University’s Vincent and Elinor Ostrom Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis (I presented last year at the 5th Workshop on the Ostrom Workshop, WOW5). I will be presenting my paper “River Basin Councils as Action Arenas: Analyzing Rules and Norms in the Lerma-Chapala River Basin Council Using the IAD Framework“ on March 23rd as part of the Colloquium Series. My talk will be broadcast live here. The abstract for my paper is shown below:

This paper uses Elinor Ostrom and collaborator’s Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) framework and applies its insights to an underresearched area in the water field: sanitation policy. Water governance in Mexico has been paradigmatically driven by an internationally praised concept: integrated water resources management (IWRM). This paradigm suggests that water should be governed through multistakeholder roundtables called river basin councils. This paper uses empirical data from a cross-regional analysis of wastewater policies in five Mexican states whose territory is embedded within the Lerma-Chapala watershed to shed light on the complex network of cross-jurisdictional linkages and policy interactions around wastewater governance. To explain how policy decisions within river basins are made, I conducted an institutional ethnographic study of rules, norms and interactions within the river basin council, exploring the emergence of formal and informal governance rules. I use the Lerma-Chapala river basin council in Mexico as a case study to explain how norms, rules and interactions shape wastewater governance. The paper illuminates the complexities inherent to the politics of wastewater management in diverse urban habitats and provides fertile ground and a foundation for future research on the limitations of the river basin council model for water and wastewater governance.

If you’re in Bloomington, I’d love to see you there. Otherwise you can just check the livestream.

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