For instance, in the problem stream, issues tangential to the Delta rapidly rose on the IBWC/CILA’s agenda following a focusing event (the 2010 earthquake), largely because they could be coupled with a pre-designed policy alternative: allowing Mexico to temporarily store their water allocations in US reservoirs. This is not an unusual finding for MSF studies, which often seek to identify examples of agenda coupling at key moments. However, the collaborative institutional context of the Minute 319 process certainly shaped how the focusing event was perceived and fostered the selection of a policy alternative proposed by regional NGOs that was previously deemed “too controversial.” Moreover, the selection of this alternative reinforced the power and potential of a newly formalized collaborative policymaking process between the USA and Mexico, which created a supportive political environment in which the two countries could engage in dialogue and experiment with mutually beneficial policy solutions despite negative national moods and previous policy stagnation.
In addition to MSF elements traditionally associated with agenda setting (e.g., focusing events), other MSF variables related to decision coupling (Herweg et al., 2015; Zohlnhöfer et al., 2016) help explain the continuation and growth of the collaborative process and the development of Minute 319 as its eventual policy output. For example, although formal decision-making authority was centralized in the IBWC/CILA, the collaborative institution’s consensus-oriented norms created a de facto decentralized context that emphasized lengthy deliberations and broad agreement among all stakeholders. Within this context, the binational coalition was positioned to act as a policy entrepreneur that could help sustain attention to Delta issues during a prolonged policy window—similar to the role that coherent coalitions and interest groups may play in other decentralized decision-making institutions that require overcoming multiple veto points (Rozbicka & Spohr, 2016; Saurugger & Terpan, 2016). This process eventually led to the development of a package deal-type policy that gained broad support, in part because some stakeholders were willing to make significant concessions over details like the policy’s applicable timeframe (Herweg et al., 2018), and in part because each stakeholder group could frame at least one of its provisions as a particularly good “win” for their own constituency (Ackrill et al., 2013). Thus, by impacting how decision-making authority was actually dispersed among policy actors and what kind of solution was likely to be most feasible, the collaborative institutional context moderated the influence of generic MSF variables on the policy process and output.
A number of broad, theoretical lessons arise from these findings that must be further developed and empirically tested in other cases. First, applications of the MSF in collaborative institutional contexts should explore variables associated with both the agenda-setting and decision-making phases simultaneously rather than separating the phases. This may be the case particularly when significant authority over components of policy design is devolved to sub-groups focused on technical, rather than political aspects, as these groups will likely be identifying problems and solutions and negotiating their scope at the same time. Second, even in processes where decision-making authority is formally centralized, collaborative institutions may serve to informally decentralize power as a result of long-term deliberative processes and the use of consensus norms. Consequently, tradeoffs and concessions made during policy development, as well as during formal negotiations, must be considered in order to understand why certain policy outputs are developed. Third, collaborative process norms may also influence the feasibility or acceptability of certain policy solutions that would otherwise be discounted in the absence of established trust among diverse actors and precedents to share information and resources.
Although this study was largely exploratory and inductive in nature, it is a first step toward “more systematic theory development” within the MSF (Jones et al., 2016, 31). As such, various practical lessons for other scholars seeking to advance MSF theory were also learned. For instance, this study characterized the collaborative nature of the institutional context using academic and gray literature, as well as insight from stakeholders via interviews, but it did not formally define the rules for collaboration among the various participants. Future studies could leverage insights from other theories, such as the Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) framework’s rule typology (Heikkila & Gerlak, 2018) and institutional grammar tool (Siddiki et al., 2019), to formally analyze rules around membership, interactions, information flow, and other activities, in order to better characterize the institutional context. This may be particularly important when comparing mechanisms across different institutions of the same general type. In addition, in line with a recent study that used the MSF to examine governance innovations (Huber-Stearns et al., 2019), this study obviated the need to consider institutions not as static, but instead to track how they change and influence policymaking differently over longer periods time, as has been suggested as best practice in other theories of the policy process (Jenkins-Smith et al., 2018). This case demonstrates the long-term impact of a coalition of policy actors, who initially coalesced around largely-ignored indicator changes, on policy change that happened decades later. Had the analysis focused only on the interactions within the formalized collaborative process during a shorter time period, it would have overlooked key influences on agenda setting and decision making.
In order to more systematically delineate institutional influences on a policy process from idiosyncrasies associated with a specific policy issue (Kay & Baker, 2015), scholars should conduct comparative studies of policy processes and their outcomes across multiple institutions with similar structures or contexts (e.g., Karambelkar & Gerlak, 2020). While the interpretivist case study approach used here provides useful insight into influential MSF variables under specific conditions, it fails to weigh their importance or make direct causal claims (Vennesson, 2008), as might be done through comparative analyses further separated from a specific empirical context. Systematically applying the MSF in diverse institutional settings beyond those that are collaborative can also help to better differentiate institution-specific mechanisms in the absence of clear counterfactuals, in turn advancing theory within the MSF and about the role of institutions in policymaking processes more broadly.
and 0.
quantiles for at least the five post-fire years. Quantile regression results show that the median fire-related increase in flow for the five post-fire years can be up to 5,000% (Standard Error;
2%) at the 0.
quantile and 161% (
10%) at the 0.
quantile. The fire-related increase in flow was often pronounced at the 0.
quantile for streams in the Pacific Northwest and California regions. The difference in fire effects on flow (at both quantiles) across streams was related to post-fire weather, pyrology, physiography, and land cover. The proposed analytical framework can be useful for detecting and quantifying fire effects on the low and peak stream flows in burned watersheds without overlapping disturbances.
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