"Using Ethnographic Methods to Improve Water Policy Implementation: A Case Study from the Santa Ana Watershed"
- https://uccs.ucdavis.edu/events/2019-August-7-Olson
- "Using Ethnographic Methods to Improve Water Policy Implementation: A Case Study from the Santa Ana Watershed"
- 2019-08-07T12:00:00-07:00
- 2019-08-07T13:00:00-07:00
- Professor Valerie Olson, University of California, Irvine
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Recent California propositions and initiatives direct government agencies to engage “disadvantaged communities” in integrated water management. This talk summarizes the methods, preliminary results, and lessons learned from an ongoing pilot project to improve community engagement in the Santa Ana Watershed. The project uses an ethnographically-informed approach for collecting and analyzing comparative qualitative data from elected officials, water agencies, mutual water companies, and lay community members. When complete, the project will provide a suite of qualitative tools for sustaining more equitable and responsive project planning, implementation, and evaluation.
Valerie Olson (UC Irvine) is an environmental anthropologist who studies how social groups manage 
and govern trans-geographic spaces such as ecosystems, marine areas, and watersheds. Her recent book, Into the Extreme: US Environmental Systems and Technologies (2019), is an ethnography of government sponsored human spaceflight. Professor Olson serves on UCI interdisciplinary research teams and campus initiatives such as Water UCI, the Salton Sea Initiative, the UCI OCEANS Initiative, and the UCI Community Resilience program.
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