Participatory Measurement, Management, and Politics of Groundwater in Northeast Brazil

Mon Jan 27, 2020| 3:10 pm | PACCAR Clean Tech Bldg. , Room 202

Dr. Alicia Cooperman, Princeton University

Groundwater access and management are global problems. Water is a very salient political issue, and users, community leaders, and politicians commonly use water access as a powerful political bargaining tool. Successful common pool resource management systems are fundamental for groundwater to continue serving as a secure water source, but users cannot manage what they cannot see or measure. In a field experiment we test the effectiveness of a community-based monitoring and measurement intervention in the semi-arid, drought-prone state of Ceará in Northeast Brazil. In partnership with 120 community associations, we randomly assign 80 of them to two programs: one to improve community awareness of groundwater levels, and another to enable local social structures to transform this awareness into individual behavioral change. We designed and facilitated workshops with residents to understand their groundwater system and devise participatory management plans, and we trained a community Water Committee to measure well water levels with a device designed at WSU for this context. We assess the effect of monitoring and measurement on groundwater-related outcomes: community use, user satisfaction, and user sense of stewardship. In this talk, I present the preliminary results of this field experiment, a conjoint survey experiment about common pool resource management, and related work on local politics of water access.

Dr. Alicia Cooperman is a political scientist focused on environmental politics and policy in domestic and international contexts. Her research addresses core questions of democratic accountability, collective action, and political participation, which she applies to issues of water access, energy policy, and climate change. She is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at Princeton University and received a Ph.D. in Political Science from Columbia University.