Governing waters: The development of water pollution policy in the United States, 1850--1980

This dissertation develops a governance approach to environmental problems and policy as a critical response to the traditional economic approach. It also examines the governance of water quality in the United States over the past one hundred and fifty years. The governance approach understands externalities as instances of human interdependence, recognizes positive transaction costs, and accepts the implications of value pluralisrn. For the governance approach, environmental problems are resource use conflicts that emerge when agents are interdependent and have incompatible interests in the use of environmental resources. Correspondingly, environmental policies are institutions that resolve these conflicts and govern resource use. The empirical research examines institutions that have governed water quality in the United States, including the 19th century riparian law and common law in general, the 19th and early 20th century state water pollution control policies, and the 20th century federal water pollution control legislation. The dissertation shows how the governance of water quality has gradually acknowledged new interests in water quality, first mainly protecting private property and water use from pollution, then extending protection to public health, and finally protecting the environment because of its recreational use and for its own sake. The dissertation demonstrates how the new uses of water that have emerged in the 19th and 20th century have created an increasingly complex set of interdependencies, which are today governed by an equally complex set of nested governance institutions. These governance institutions are an outcome of conflict resolution and collective choices in different social arenas, in which agents have forwarded their welfarist and sometimes non-welfarist resource use goals. The dissertation shows how the institutional framework within which conflict resolution and collective choices take place influence whose interests are translated into policy. It also demonstrates how the governance outcomes are influenced by the design of governance institutions and changes in technology and resource use. The analysis demonstrates that efficiency and welfare concerns have not alone determined the course of institutional change. It also shows how the design of governance institutions is a compromise between conflicting interests, which does not necessarily deliver good environmental outcomes.