Sandra Dibble’s latest on the proposed Rosarito Beach desalination plant highlights a point that’s central to the introductory water policy and management class I help teach (/me waves to WR571 students!). Getting the technical stuff right in water management only gets you part way down the road. Getting the institutions right can be a bigger challenge.

If you look at a satellite image of the greater Tijuana-San Diego metropolitan area, you see a huge blob of a city. Add in a map layer that shows the legal geography, and suddenly there’s a sharp line down the middle – the U.S.-Mexico border. Managing natural resources across such boundaries is an extraordinary challenge. You have resources in common. You often have populations in common (less so since we’ve gotten all wall-obsessed, but until recently moving back and forth in these big border twin cities was the norm). But you have very different institutional structures bumping up against one another.

(The 1995 study of the twin cities of Nogales by Helen Ingram and her colleagues, summarized in the book Divided Waters, is a great example of this stuff.)

Dibble’s story talks about the effort underway on the Mexican side of the border to build a really big desal plant. I don’t know enough about the technical and financial details to know whether this makes sense. But what caught my eye, in terms of the institutional arrangements, was this:

The desalination plant would ensure the Tijuana-Rosarito Beach region’s water needs are met for the next 50 years, said Oscar Gracia Valencia, who heads the public-private partnership unit in the Secretariat of Infrastructure and Urban Development.

North of the border, the Otay Water District has been closely following the project’s progress. The water agency, which has more than 220,000 customers in southeastern San Diego County, is hoping to purchase some of the water to diversify its supply.

I pay attention to this stuff because all these communities, on both sides of the border, are heavily dependent on Colorado River water. Which, y’know, is a hobby of mine. So the potential for new sources of supply that reduce the pressure on our beloved, beleaguered river tend to catch my eye.

Moving water across an international border like this is an extraordinary institutional challenge. It will be interesting to watch the progress of these discussions.

One hears a great deal in the current climate of U.S. environmental politics about the charge of federal overreach. My University of New Mexico colleague Reed Benson has a different take:

My concern, in fact, has been the opposite: agencies often don’t fully use the authority they have to address environmental concerns or protect other public interests in water.  This is true of government agencies at all levels, not just federal ones, although much of my writing has focused on the feds — primarily the Bureau of Reclamation.  For a variety of legal, political, and institutional reasons, agencies involved in water have generally been more concerned with maintaining existing practices regarding water supply, flood control, and hydropower than with advancing environmental or recreational interests.

Reed’s written extensively on this stuff if you want to dive in. He’ll be talking to our UNM Water Resources Program students next week.

My embarrassing affliction – obsessively clicking on my book’s Amazon page to try to infer how well it is selling – is apparently common among new authors. But I noticed something the last couple of days that made me clutch.

Amazon screenshot

There are no two books more important as predecessors to Water is For Fighting Over than Marc Reisner’s Cadillac Desert and Elinor Ostrom’s Governing the Commons.

I’m dyin’ here.

We have faculty affiliated with the University of New Mexico Water Resources Program working on public acceptance of wastewater recycling and reuse. We have faculty who make beer. This is a story for us:

Pima County water officials want to organize a statewide brewery competition where beer-makers compete using purified wastewater….

The goal of the “Brew Challenge” is to sway public perception of so-called “potable re-use” and tap an unused water source.

The jokes here really just write themselves. But in my new academic life in the University of New Mexico Water Resources Program, this is one of the interesting projects we’re working on – bringing my communication skills and background to research into questions of public risk perception and acceptance, overcoming the “yuck factor” associated with purifying sewage for direct potable reuse.

The beer idea seems brilliant.