Drinking water service provision poses many technical and financial challenges. Local communities that lack fiscal capacity to make necessary infrastructure investments struggle to maintain safe water supplies. This project aims to understand what shapes differential service outcomes, and how to overcome these challenges.

Climate change necessitates major changes in infrastructure siting, design, and operations. Successful adaptation of infrastructure management requires overcoming thorny institutional challenges including path dependency and isomorphic pressures that inhibit major shifts in norms and practices. Hazards have been posited as a potential trigger for changing long-standing institutions because they can upend stable system states. However, research on the ability of hazards to shift norms and practices is still nascent and focuses on rapid-onset disasters like floods, hurricanes, or fires.

Policymakers typically seek to account for tradeoffs in infrastructure decision-making with technical tools like multicriteria decision-analysis, life cycle assessment, and large-scale ecological models. However, while much attention is paid to mechanistic connections between interrelated infrastructure (e.g., effects on streamflow, water temperature, or agricultural runoff), the complex dependencies between water, energy, and food infrastructure pose political and social tradeoffs that extend far beyond engineering considerations.

A seed system is the value chain of seed savers, plant breeders, distributors and farmers, who collectively define, breed, and distribute the seeds of our food crops. Governing seed systems is a complex problem, as it wrestles with issues of innovation, intellectual property, food security, and agroecological resilience. These issues become increasingly important in the face of climate change, as seeds and their genetic diversity are one of the greatest tools we have for climate change adaptation.

Marginalized individuals are less likely to participate or have their interests represented in political processes than historically privileged individuals. Interest groups are considered the best means to address this gap, but there is little research on the role of interest groups in mobilizing people to directly participate in political processes, particularly in marginalized communities.

This is a collaborative project between CEPB and the UC Davis World Food Center, and former WFC director Dr. Josette Lewis. 

This project describes and summarizes California's adoption of "climate smart agriculture" (CSA) policies and programs. We illustrate how synergies and trade-offs are addressed in a policy framework that spans regulatory measures, incentive programs, research, and technological development, that is both climate specific and arising from other simultaneous environmental and economic priorities.

This project investigates the collaborative governance of adaptation to sea level rise in the San Francisco Bay Area. The project seeks to identify, map and understand the governance, ecological and infrastructural interdependencies existing in the Bay Area insofar as climate adaptation to sea level rise is concerned. The project is a joint effort with University of California Berkeley Dept of Engineering and New York University Abu Dhabi Engineering Division. It is financed by a NSF Critical Resilient Interdependent Infrastructure Systems and Processes (CRISP) grant.

We conduct experiments in multi-generational social dilemmas in which we examine the transmission of individual behaviors within and among groups of experimental participants. These experiments allow us to observe the cultural evolution of cooperation over time, including the roles of institutions, communication, and social learning. We conduct computerized experiments in a lab at UC Davis as well as online experiments using Mechanical Turk.

These projects investigate water governance strategies in developing countries, mostly in Latin America. The studies examine the influence of policies and institutions that promote government decentralization and local water management on water sustainability, social equity and economic efficiency. These projects employ a mixed-methods approach to research that includes survey research, interviews, case study analysis, mapping, participatory research, among others. Current projects are located in Northern Baja California, Mexico, El Salvador and Ecuador.

The goal of the study is to understand how local agricultural sustainability programs, also known as "partnerships," in three American Viticultural Associations (Lodi, Napa Valley, San Luis Obispo) influence growers' social networks and adoption of sustainable agriculture practices. The primary research task is a grower survey that asks about practice adoption and program participation; we are also conducting a survey of outreach advisers such as extension advisers and viticultural consultants throughout the state.