The overarching goal of the research is to explore opportunities and barriers related to effective governance of agricultural water management, focusing specifically on surface water management, developing a better understanding of how people develop institutions to govern surface water management, how existing institutions function, and how conflict or collaboration emerges.

This overarching goal can be divided into two specific objectives:

1) Develop new knowledge on how people develop water governance institutions and policy: Through policy analysis and ethnographic methods, we will develop a rigorous and data-driven understanding of how people pursue collaboration and develop formal and informal institutions for agricultural water management governance.

2) Produce novel approaches to socio-hydrological modeling by linking social-ecological governance models with hydro-climate models for scenario planning: We will incorporate policy and other social variables developed through Objective 1 into ongoing hydrological modeling efforts. We propose a level of analytical integration across social and hydrological systems that has not to our knowledge been previously attempted.