Finding the Fit: Reframing the Institutional Context for Adaptive Change in DMDU

The scientific investigation of global climate change characterizes a complex geophysical system in transition.  Broadly characterized, that system transformation includes a wider range of potential futures with emergent system qualities and tipping points that undermine the foundational planning assumptions for historical water supply planning.  While the geophysical system encompasses the whole of the planet, the intersection with human-built systems and institutions for water supply management occupies a diverse range of delimited local situations.  From the perspective of human-managed water systems, the geophysical system transformation is reflected in a social system also in transition.  Like the geophysical system, social adaptation exhibits emergent social system qualities and tipping points.  As this plays out in multiple centers of water governance across multiple adaptive institutional management scales, each locally adaptive strategy becomes yet another agent of change in the larger network of water supply management.  At these multiple scales of management, decision makers are faced with long-term and long lead time adaptive investment decisions to secure water supply reliability without the usual certainty that any particular project will address evolving conditions.   Urgent action is needed involving significant decisions without what was traditionally viewed as sufficient information.

Typically, the suite of Decision Making Under Deep Uncertainty (DMDU) approaches support decision-makers through participatory deliberation with analysis.  With structured decision making, scenario development, scenario discovery, explicit inclusion of multiple worldviews, and frame reflection; there is a reasonable chance for mutual accommodation even if a common worldview proves elusive. But what if the most effective scale of management no longer matches the historical institution’s scale and governance?   To be effective, these tools require a radical reframing of the scale of management.  If existing scale of resource management reflects the historical dynamics of a hydrologic system; the built infrastructure, management scale, and institutional governance are unlikely to fit an evolving system. 

The Metropolitan Water District of Southern California is the largest treated water supplier in the United States.  Metropolitan supplies 19 million people with supplies imported hundreds of miles from the Colorado River and the California State Water Project through its 26 member agencies.  Those imported water supplies are increasingly affected by global climate change.

Metropolitan has employed DMDU analytical approaches since 2010 while experiencing a series of unprecedented trends in water supply and demand.  At its 2023 Board retreat, climate change adaptation became the central focus for Metropolitan.  It is currently engaged in developing a climate adaptation master plan for water.  It’s a messy process complicated by issues of scale and uncertainty, compounded by eroding supply reliability and fiscal challenges.

Based on over fifteen years of participating in Metropolitan’s water resource planning, this presentation provides a participant’s report on how institutional system transformation is proceeding in southern California.  What has worked, and what hasn’t, reflects an institution grappling with a radical reframing of its value proposition to fit the changing scale of water supply management.  For the scientific community, this offers an inside look at how decision makers struggle to adapt to change.