Preview: New Mexico's 16th annual Water Dialogue

As I get ready to attend the 16th annual statewide meeeting of the New Mexico Water Dialogue (sic), a quick look at the agenda of the event looks intriguing, even if these are largely about experts and agents involved with water resources talking to each other. For example, a "panel" that begins at 10, ends with a noon cut-off for "lunch." No question and answer session? Call me jaded after so many academic conferences where a small group is only addressing a small group (usually itself). We'll see -- participation is certainly not explicitly scheduled or listed so it'll be interesting if it's a repeat of the MRG Water Assembly I attended a few months ago, or some new beast. Pardon my skepticism. You can see the old topics from the MRG version along with some presentations here. But I hope it's a good meeting, since I'm not sure I'll have the stamina to attend the Buckman Diversion Project public meeting on water quality (= LANL connection) that follows tomorrow evening (14th).

But I am haunted by excerpts from a recent book volume "Water, Place, and Equity" that is co-edited by the keynote speaker at the Dialogue's meeting tomorrow, Helen Ingram. For water wonks everywhere, Helen's name is well known and she was one of the first, and most original, authors writing about the intersect between socio-economic concerns, equity, and access-power over water issues. You can see her full CV here, if you're interested. One of the contributors, a good colleague of mine named Margaret Wilder, to the volume argues that it is possible to have increased political voice and access without a commensurate increase in economic access to use any of that political voice. In Mexico, and more specifically Sonora, Wilder views the increasing number of watershed planning groups as positive in a strict "political voice" sense. That said, poorer water users do not get to 'translate' voice to direct political power, because of a lack of economic resources, in this new form of decentralized water management and planning. I cannot do her full argument justice here, but encourage readers to track down the work cited above.

Does this sound familiar to New Mexicans? Don't you have regional water plans for each part of the state? Are the guidelines and findings be used for an overall state water plan? Are they helpful, or unrealistic, to the OSE personnel who have to assemble their macroscale New Mexico water plan? Is it a way to offer simple participation without full management power over water resources? Yes, Mexico is not New Mexico and vice-versa, but comparative work is valuable as it allows for bananas to be called bananas, and oranges to be called oranges. There's great utility in this kind of (even simplistic) transboundary water analysis and synthesis. Soon, I'll post about how the New Mexican experience, and the Spanish national experience, compare, differ, and align on sometimes similar lines. Until then, festering in a large meeting hall...-epp

 Larger map of the ISC regional water plan boundaries available at: http://www.ose.state.nm.us/GRAPHICS/Maps/ose_wtr_plng_reg08.pdf