Brian An, assistant professor in the School of Public Policy, recently co-authored an article in the Journal of the American Water Resources Association. The article, titled “Evaluating California’s Sustainable Groundwater Management Act: The First Five Years of Governance and Planning,” discusses the advances made under California’s 2014 Sustainable Groundwater Management Act. To meet the law’s requirements, many local officials needed to form their own Groundwater Sustainability Agencies, which comes with varying levels of success across different measurements.

This new publication presents a more comprehensive diagnosis of California’s 2014 law, building off of an earlier article published in Environmental Science & Policy. The original article is titled “Managing environmental change through inter-agency collaboration: Protective governance in mandated sustainability planning” and uses California’s groundwater policies as a case study for how agencies can address policy problems collaboratively.

The most recent article is available at https://doi.org/10.1111/1752-1688.12967, and the previous one can be found at https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envsci.2021.08.024.