The contexts for water allocation decisions often involve diverse interests and high levels of competition. Water conflicts in regions experiencing water scarcity and social tensions, such as Guanacaste Province in Costa Rica, might reach critical tipping points if drier conditions occur as projected. Good governance of natural resources is a multi-objective endeavor that requires strong institutional capacity to effectively manage conflict situations. This project explores institutional capacities in a Costa Rican region that has experienced water conflicts. The research combines conflict data from interviews, court records, and previous studies in order to examine why some disputes escalate to become destructive or even violent, while others do not. Through statistical analysis the projects examines the effects of governance arrangements on conflict intensity amid varying environmental and socio-economic conditions. The project also involves stakeholder workshops in a small area within Guanacaste to explore new methods to link regional-scale analysis to community-scale planning efforts.
The project clarifies institutional features that make some resource disputes more intractable than others. Many previous water conflict studies have been conducted at a macro-scale; yet, most water conflicts take place on regional or community scales. The regional and local orientation of this project is designed to produce useful information to improve water governance and management schemes and to aid decision-makers in allocating water resources. With fewer funds available for public resource management and drier climates expected in many regions, good governance arrangements are critical to secure the well-being and sustainability of local communities and their ecosystems. Communities play increasingly active roles in managing their resources; yet, linking broader-scale science to local planning efforts remains a challenge. The project attempts to bridge this gap.
Mitigating current and future water conflicts in regions such as Guanacaste Province in Costa Rica is a high priority for local communities, decision-makers, investors, and the international community. Similar to Guanacaste Province, many regions in the dry tropics are suspected to face increasing risk of resource conflicts within contexts such as dryer hydrological conditions, increasing demand for natural resources, weakening state governments, and existing social tensions. In this research project, we clarified which institutional designs and features of water governance regimes can be significant sources of risk for escalated/ intractable conflicts and we identified other features that can be significant opportunities to mitigate future conflict. In doing so, we found that research approaches that are embedded within real-time governing processes and that are invested in public and stakeholder outreach to be well positioned to help promote and even help guide effective conflict mitigation efforts. In terms of conflict risks, we found that the friction between fragmented institutions between national and local scales, especially in the absence of effective and legitimate regional water governance mechanisms, to be a key driver of escalated water conflicts in Guanacaste. Once a conflict materializes, the mixture of citizen mistrust (of prevailing political institutions, especially) and low levels of water system knowledge is a primary factor associated with higher degrees of conflict intractability. The common denominator in this mix of conflict aggravating factors is ineffective stakeholder and citizen engagement. Initiating basin-oriented and other forms of cooperative resource management in areas that feature self-organized local actors, histories of conflict, and/ or poorly defined land and water rights can be a significant challenge. Committed and legitimate central actors with sufficient resources are likely required in order to initiate cooperation and resolution processes in such cases. Evidence from Guanacaste suggests that the process of changing governance regimes toward more collaborative and engaged modes of water governance comes with some risk in contexts that include histories of tension and poorly defined land and water rights. In such cases, governance strategies that reduce institutional complexity through some degree of centralization and emphasize strong leadership would likely be an effective initial step prior to implementing new, long-term polycentric governance features. The regional and local orientation of this project produced useful information to improve water governance and management schemes. We found that focused investments in the human resources of water administering organizations - including communications equipment, professional development, civic space, and means of transportation - to be a key step to help mitigate future water conflicts. Other important conflict mitigating steps include securing small-scale water monitoring equipment and increasing legal commitments for legitimate basin-scale planning processes. We found that a promising way forward to effectively mitigating water conflicts to be a constructive process of identifying collaborative actions for water governance, selecting leaders, identifying existing resources, recognizing barriers to success, and deriving other actions to overcome those barriers. Results offer insight for researchers, decision-makers, and development practitioners in regions that also face current resource conflict and climate threats who are interested in understanding how water conflicts might best be mitigated. The research project advances the decision and political sciences, specifically the fields of resource governance and resource conflicts, by contributing an in-depth study of conflict cases at (decision) relevant local and regional scales in an understudied region. From a methods perspective, the project offers insight into the components of a publically engaged research approach that is integrated across temporal scales. The project results demonstrate that a robust solution-orientation of research is needed within these fields, if the results of such research are to help remedy the urgent challenges that are faced in regions such as Guanacaste Province. The project provided early career scientists with critical professional development and training on topics such as scientific methods, comprehensive project management, communications, and public outreach. Many people in Guanacaste were involved with a research project or exposed to science for the first time. Many of the rural water administrators involved with this project had never received targeted material/ reporting of project results from a research team before. In many cases, a greater understanding of the sciences and researchers in general was achieved among project participants, as evidenced by new governing practices and more open communication with other research teams and local universities. Material was produced in Spanish and English to engage with local stakeholders, in the form of reports, newspaper articles, radio, social media, and scientific articles. Several new governing initiatives – including the formation of new organizations - for water resources are now occurring in Guanacaste. These initiatives offer additional learning and experimentation opportunities on what works best for water conflict mitigation and effective water governance. This project was directly involved with helping to initiate such efforts.
