ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This multi-disciplinary study of drought in California and its implications for the arid West originated as a grant proposal by the University of Colorado Conflict Resolution Consortium, submitted to the University's system-wide Program on Global Change and Environmental Quality. The Consortium is an interdisciplinary network of University of Colorado faculty and researchers on all four campuses who share a common scholarly interest in conflict management and dispute resolution. One of the Consortium's principal research emphases is environmental dispute resolution. Similarly, the University of Colorado's Global Change and Environmental Quality Program is an assemblage of faculty and researchers across the four campuses who bring a trans-disciplinary emphasis on problems created by large-scale human-induced environmental change.
Consortium activities are underwritten principally by funding from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. Given the scope of activities undertaken in the research described in this monograph, field work, writing, and final manuscript production were ultimately supported in equal part by funding from the Global Change and Environmental Quality and the Consortium itself. Professor Burton's work was also supported in part by the Faculty Research Awards program of the University of Colorado at Denver.
Our intent in proposing and subsequently conducting this California Drought Project, as the study has come to be known, was to focus a variety of disciplinary perspectives on one common research subject: the impact of severe and sustained drought on the institutions and institutional relationships through which water resources are allocated to the people of California. Chapter One of this monograph describes in detail what these perspectives are and how each member of the project team applied them; it also discusses why we recognized in the California drought an appropriate analogy to the difficult resource management decisions which are or soon will be confronting public institutions throughout the Western United States, especially if some of the current scientific speculations on regional impacts of global climate change are eventually borne out.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Several scholars on the Boulder and Denver campuses of the University of Colorado took part in this study, each bringing a distinct disciplinary emphasis to bear on the common problem of what happens to governmental institutions when the finite resource they are responsible for distributing is suddenly in short supply, and what these institutions did/can/should do about it. These scholars and their organizational affiliations include:
Guy Burgess - Co-Executive Director of the University of Colorado Conflict Resolution Consortium.
Guy has a Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Colorado at Boulder and has as a principal research interest the social dynamics of large-scale environmental disputes.
Heidi Burgess - Co-Executive Director of the University of Colorado Conflict Resolution Consortium.
Heidi also has a Ph.D. in Sociology from the Univeristy of Colorado. In addition to her environmental dispute resolution research, she has also been involved as a practitioner in a number of dispute resolution efforts.
Lloyd Burton - Associate Professor, Graduate School of Public Affairs, University of Colorado at Denver; Denver Campus Director, University of Colorado Program on Global Change and Environmental Quality.
Lloyd holds the Ph.D. in Jurisprudence and Social Policy (a teaching as distinguished from a practicing law degree), from the School of Law, University of California, Berkeley.
Charles W. Howe - Professor of Economics, University of Colorado
Chuck holds a Ph.D. in Economics from Stanford University. During 1991 he was a Fulbright Scholar at the Wageningen Agricultural University, The Netherlands.
Lynn Johnson - Associate Professor of Civil Engineering, University of Colorado at Denver.
Lynn received his Ph.D. in Water Resource Systems from Cornell University, Ithaca, New York.
Lawrence J. MacDonnell - Director, Natural Resources Law Center, University of Colorado Law School at Boulder
Larry has a Ph.D. in Mineral Economics from the Colorado School of Mines and received his J.D. degree from the University of Denver College of Law.
René F. Reitsma - Research Associate for the Center for Advanced Decision Support for Water and Environmental Systems (CADSWES) of the Department of Civil Engineering, University of Colorado at Boulder; Assistant Professor, Department of Geography, University of Colorado at Boulder.
René received his Ph.D. in Social Geography at the University of Nijmegen, The Netherlands.