English (United Kingdom)

https://curated-unify.zendy.io/wp-json/zendy-region/v1/featured_content/oa?rat=en

https://curated-unify.zendy.io/wp-json/zendy-region/v1/highlighted_journal/

Zendy Plus

Presents the access of premium content as premium feature

Premium Content

Presents the keyphrase highlighting as premium feature

Keyphrase Highlighting

Presents the summarisation as premium feature

Summarisation

Insights

Presents the pdf analysis as premium feature

PDF Analysis

Presents the zaia usage as premium feature

ZAIA

Zendy Tools

Zendy Open

Dam removals and collaborative watershed governance have emerged as leading river restoration strategies, requiring new methods for understanding the interdependency of social, environmental, and technological dimensions of watershed conditions. Here, we provide a synthetic framework and methodology to study three dam removals in the Hood, Sandy, and White Salmon Rivers in the Mid-Columbia River Region, USA. Utilizing social science (participant observation, surveys with 52 participants in watershed groups), and interviews with 18 highly engaged individuals), biophysical (stream temperature and fish return data), and synthetic (land use change) data, we provide a descriptive analysis of the impacts of three dam removals on watershed ecological integrity in their governance contexts. While we find a high degree of alignment in the values, worldviews, and problem-solution framings of participants in watershed governance programs, the impacts of dam removal remain dependent on multi-scalar political arenas and the representation of rivers by their resident knowledge systems. While removals provide rapid ecological and social benefits, they also have negative impacts on different sets of socio-nature relations, potentially undermining watershed restoration efforts even in the context of robust collaborative governance. While strong institutional leadership can provide overarching guidance to restoration 134 programs, it may paradoxically occur due to the crossing of regulatory ecological thresholds (e.g. Endangered Species Act listing). In contrast to reactive US state and federal regulations, treaty rights and responsibilities provide an overarching and pre-emptive framing of human rights and obligation. Watershed restoration, as form of environmental governance, is not limited by information, but by social power. Introduction Dam removal as a river restoration practice has emerged during the same period as widespread adoption of collaborative watershed governance approaches. While the academic and policy literature situates dam removal as a biophysical intervention within a complex array of interests, institutions, and social processes attached to dams (Stephenson 2000; Bonham 2008; Sneddon et al. 2017a), few analyses have situated removals within the overarching restoration concerns addressed by collaborative watershed governance bodies (but see: Lowry 2003; Gosnell and Kelly 2010). Of particular interest is the role that dam removals play in affecting the longer-term concerns and strategies of these bodies, and the relationship between the scientifically evaluated and perceived impacts of dam removals (Sneddon et al. 2017b). We define collaborative watershed governance bodies as multi-partner organizations (Agrawal and Lemos 2007), coalescing around a particular hydro-geomorphologically defined watershed (Sabatier et al. 2005), representing an active political arena as much as a biophysical scale (Molle, 2009). 135 In the Mid-Columbia River, debates over dam removal continue to evolve as the region struggles to overcome its colonial legacy and manage the Federal Columbia River Power System (FCRPS) in accordance with treaty obligations and contemporary environmental laws (Cosens et al. 2014, 2018). Over the last 30 years, in response to numerous crises of fish population declines (White 2011), tributary restoration has become a major focus for federal entities in the region, and has interacted with tribal, local, state, regional, and national institutions and organizations in reshaping regional rivers (Hawley 2011). Drawing upon mixed social and biophysical methods, we examined the relationship among dam removal, watershed conditions, and the political economy of river restoration in the Sandy, Hood, and White Salmon river basins. We synthesized our results using a conceptual model for co-productive socio-enviro-technological systems (SETS) to identify the ultimate impacts of dam removal on watershed ecological integrity. 2. Dam Removal through a grounded Socio-Enviro-Technological Systems (SETS) Lens Methods to study dam removals and river restoration have proliferated in recent years, expanding on biophysical surveys and assays to extensive participant observation, surveys, interviews (Wallace 2014; Fox et al. 2016, 2017), and examinations of the policy literature (Lowry, 2003; McCool, 2012). While few have answered Graf’s (2005) call to produce more synergistic and relevant research for dam removal science, the quest for sufficiently interdisciplinary frameworks 136 continues (see Sneddon et al. 2017a). While we have published an integrative framework for understanding the causes and impacts of dam removal elsewhere (Grabowski et al. 2017a), here we place dam removal within its broader watershed governance context in order to understand its ultimate impacts on the ecological integrity of rivers. Our first major methodological and theoretical step is to seek to understand the causal factors affecting the ecological integrity of a watershed through a socio-enviro-technological systems (SETS) framework (Redman and Miller 2016; Grabowski et al. 2017b), in order to frame the systemic interactions of dam removals. To aid this causal analysis, we draw upon work in event ecology arguing for the importance of multi-scalar and historical processes affecting present socioecological conditions (Walters and Vayda, 2005). In this sense, the ‘event’ of dam removal reverberates through the SETS, ultimately affecting ecological integrity through its direct (e.g., removed fish passage barriers, and restored sediment flux, instream flows in the bypass reach and riparian vegetation in the former reservoir area – see Tullos et al. 2017), and indirect impacts (e.g., social agreements on instream flows, political conflicts over appropriate plans and enforcement). In this sense, scientific information informs a broader social narrative of dams and rivers, illuminating the political economy of river restoration, and laying the experiential ground out of which notions of ‘what is to be done’ grow and become shaped by cognition, affinity, expertise, and power. Conflicts and negotiations over dam removal thus reflect and magnify ongoing social dynamics of governing resident 137 watersheds; as well as the efforts of actors not rooted in the same geographic spaces and affinities as ‘local’ or ‘watershed’ residents. In all cases, the social narratives at work provide the basis for a common or differentiated understanding of the ‘baseline’ forces affecting watershed conditions, which in turn guide landscape management and restoration programs. Collaborative governance organizations have become central actors in restoring and managing watersheds, providing novel arenas for adjudicating power inequalities in collaborative settings (Molle 2009; Brisbois et al. 2018). Debate continues over the ecological effectiveness of collaborative watershed governance (Sabatier 2005; Wortley et al. 2013), with evaluative research often focusing on self reported and ad hoc metrics of effectiveness, such as easier to measure habitat characteristic data over fish return and outmigration data, or the achievement of programmatic goals (Palmer et al. 2005; Roni et al. 2008). Collaborative governance programs also rely on knowledge systems, or formal bodies of knowledge through which complex systems become known. Formal knowledge largely consists of the production and analysis of data via disciplinary means, making the watershed scientifically and politically ‘legible’ (Latour, 1999), thus enabling the managerial activities of governing institutions (Scott 1998). How knowledge becomes enacted in affecting and modifying the riverscape SETS, however, depends on the institutional and organizational practices of managing land and rivers, building infrastructure, as well as the human activities outside of institutional control and steering. Because collaborative governance bodies in the 138 PNW often feel limited by financial and organizational stability (Chaffin et al. 2015), they must balance the interests of multi-scalar stakeholder groups, and they cannot adopt approaches threatening their financial well-being or political capital (Lubell 2004). Collaborative watershed governance and dam removal thus both occur within the broader neo-liberal turn in environmental governance of decentralizing state authority to more local sets of stakeholders who must negotiate a multi-scalar socio-economic terrain in order to govern the environment (Agrawal and Lemos, 2007). In this context, both framing and enacting watershed restoration is continuously re-negotiated by actors of varying influence and capabilities (Hull and Robertson, 2000; Lave et al. 2010; Violin et al. 2011). Which human activities can be effectively governed by these novel structures seeking improved institutional ‘fit’ with the watershed (Folke et al. 2004), and which are inherently ungovernable, remains a key question for human-nature scholars. Our interrogation of the power-knowledge dynamics of watershed governance however is not content with a simple critique of the inevitable power knowledge relationships, rather we draw upon the notion of ‘matters of concern’ (Latour 2004), in a broader attempt to understand the underlying processes of making the ‘environment’ known. In this sense, the ecological integrity of rivers as a matter of social concern indicated both by fish exhibiting their own agency in inhabiting certain types of habitats and rivers (Schiemer 2000; Druschke et al. 2017) and as a social construct and boundary object (Moog and Chovanec 2000) motivating the engagement and knowledge production of a diverse set of social 139 actors. In order to understand ecological integrity, we must therefore simultaneously understand the biophysical causality of integrity as well as the inherently political processes of framing, filtering, and adjudicating between definitions of integrity. To do so we draw

Removing Dams, Constructing Science: Watershed Restoration Through A Socio-Eco-Technical Systems Lens