Collaborative Research: GCR: Common Pool Resource Theory as a Scalable Framework for Catalyzing Stakeholder-Driven Solutions to the Freshwater Salinization Syndrome

Inland freshwater salt concentrations are rising across many regions of the United States and globally—a trend that directly threatens water quality, ecosystems, and drinking water supplies. The research team will test a potentially generalizable approach to reverse inland freshwater salinization that relies on local agencies and other stakeholders—in partnership with engineers, hydrologists, social scientists, and policymakers—to craft locally tailored “bottom-up” solutions to this growing problem (as opposed to regulatorily driven “top-down” solutions). The test case for the study will be the Occoquan Reservoir, a drinking water supply for nearly 2 million people in Northern Virginia. The reservoir is salinizing and to better understand the underlying causes, the researchers will focus on two major salt sources: effluent from a wastewater treatment plant and deicer use in upstream watersheds. Through convergence research, education and outreach they will identify mechanisms that promote collaboration between stakeholders to effectively manage the salt budget of this regionally important drinking water supply. Lessons learned will be upscaled nationally and globally in partnership with the Water Research Foundation. At its core, inland freshwater salinization is a common pool resource (CPR) problem, because inland freshwaters are available to all actors and restricting access would be prohibitively expensive. From detailed studies of collective action arrangements in the water sector, Nobel-laureate Elinor Ostrom developed a social-ecological-systems (SES) framework for diagnosing the conditions under which local actors are likely to band together to manage a CPR without outside interference. This project hypothesizes that Ostrom’s SES framework can be used to diagnose, and resolve, the challenges and barriers that limit, or outright prevent, bottom-up management of inland freshwater salt budgets. Through semi-structured interviews with local water and wastewater managers and other stakeholders, multi-stakeholder deliberations featuring shared learning and exploration, biophysical and social science field and modeling studies, and longitudinal studies of stakeholders’ evolving understanding of the problem, the researchers will test the hypothesis that Ostrom’s framework can “propel knowledge into action” and catalyze bottom-up solutions to threats to ecosystem sustainability and human water security. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.