The challenge of trans-jurisdictional water law and governance

This chapter examines fragmentation in US water management, its deleterious consequences, and potential approaches to overcoming those problems. In the US, water management is often fragmented geographically among governments, hydrologically between groundwater and surface-water regimes, and functionally among different regulatory tasks. Defragging by fragging is decentralized water markets. In defragging US water management considers: 'hard restructuring'; 'top-down defragmentation'; and, decentralization. It begins with an overview of fragmentation in the US and its problems. Fragmentation of water management is a growing problem in the US. The US has long suffered from both geographic and hydrologic fragmentation. With 48 sovereign states sharing the waters of the continental US and a federal system that awards states strong authority, interstate fragmentation was probably inevitable. The chapter then provides a case study of interstate fragmentation, the most visible type of fragmentation in the US. Finally, the chapter evaluates several principal means to defrag water management.