Sustaining the Commons: The Coercive to Cooperative, Resilient, and Adaptive Nature of State Comprehensive Water Planning Legislation

Problem, research strategy, and findings: States need guidance to adopt comprehensive water planning legislation that can affect urban planning and built form. Current state legislation, however, may not yet incorporate emerging water resource paradigms that promote sustainable water management at the state and substate levels. Planners can improve existing state legislation, but need guidance on incorporating the latest thinking on resilience, adaptive capacity, and sustainable commons management. I identify the 26 states with comprehensive water planning legislation, and analyze that legislation using a new assessment tool that builds on the coercive versus cooperative metric (CvCA). I determine where each state's water planning legislation falls on a coercive versus cooperative spectrum, and the extent to which each state's legislation incorporates sustainable commons management (SCM) and social–ecological resilience (SER) mechanisms and attributes. Most of the 26 states with comprehensive water planning legislation balance coercive and cooperative approaches to achieve state and substate water plans, although research suggests that planning is most effective when legislation is more cooperative. Moreover, most have not codified SCM and SER mechanisms into state water planning legislation, suggesting that the plans that follow may lack the adaptive capacity to increase the resilience of the water system. Research limitations include the single data source and potential interpretive coding bias.Takeaway for practice: Planners can advocate for new or improved state water legislation that incorporates integral adaptive and resiliency concepts, encouraging states to include the fundamental features of the social–ecological system that lead to better water management.