Restoring Everglades Water Quality: Analyzing the Institutional Dimensions of Agricultural Water Managemen

Agricultural nonpoint source pollution remains a pressing collective-action challenge worldwide despite decades of efforts to improve water quality. In contrast, water quality in the Florida Everglades has improved dramatically since the enactment of the 1994 Everglades Forever Act. The Act relies on the institutional arrangement of a shared phosphorus pollution cap that requires farmers to reduce the phosphorus loads in their collective drainage water before it enters the Everglades and disrupts the ecosystem's ultra-low-phosphorus food webs. This research examines the institutional dimensions of agricultural water management in Florida's sugar-processing region to understand how regulation and farmer cooperation have improved Everglades water quality.;The group compliance mechanism appears to present farmers with a collective action problem of overcoming free riding behavior to jointly maintain compliance. However, the shared pollution cap actually reflects a strategic preference of farmers to better protect agricultural livelihoods as part of their broader fight with environmental groups over the costs of Everglades restoration, as well as preferences to limit regulatory intrusion. Regulatory compliance motivates farmers to shift management practices that they would not have considered in its absence.;Relationships between farmers, agricultural extension officials, and government regulators underpin the successful efforts to implement new management practices. The social capital from these relationships is crucial to facilitating information flows, increasing accountability, and shifting social norms that increase the acceptance of new management approaches. In contrast to many studies that focus only on the benefits of social capital, this research also shows that bridging and bonding social capital (the benefits and obligations from between-group and within-group relationships respectively) can both complement and conflict with restoration goals, showing that farmer narratives also contest the legitimacy of restoration science.;Lastly, while overall trends of improving water quality are documented, the dissertation provides the first empirical analysis of phosphorus reductions at the basin scale (where farms share water management infrastructure). The findings reveal that group compliance has been broadly effective at generating widespread phosphorus reduction. However, there are also clear shortcomings where phosphorus loads have increased in some basins despite overall improvements. Critics of the Act argue for individual compliance at the basin scale. However, these arguments ignore the important farmer cooperation benefits that have occurred by matching regulation to a larger spatial scale that in turn draws on the social network and social capital of farmers.