Why Collaboration? The Gila River Indian Community’s Innovative Partnerships

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The Gila River Indian Community’s generational battle to restore rights to their water resources would not usually foreshadow a path of collaboration. The Community historically relied on the Gila River for their social, economic, cultural, and spiritual lives. But after the American Civil War in the 1860s, diversions of the Gila River by miners and white settlers devastated the Community’s economy and dried up this critical cultural connection.^[1] This history sits in stark contrast to the realities of today. The Gila River Indian Community now holds the single largest entitlement of Arizona’s largest renewable water supply,^[2] and the Community has emerged as a key collaborator in securing Arizona’s water future. This blog post explores the system context within which the Community’s water rights have unfolded and the drivers facilitating collaboration. Both the system context and drivers are conceptualized by Emerson, Nabatchi, and Balogh in their writings on collaborative governance.^[3]

The Gila River Indian Community and its collaborative efforts exist within a multilayered context of legal, political, and environmental influences that shape the potential and performance of collaboration.^[4] Chief among the influences identified by Emerson et al. that are present within this context include policy and legal frameworks and political dynamics and power relations across levels of government.

Policy and legal frameworks: The Community’s superior water rights claim

To understand how the Gila River Indian Community became water dealmakers, one must first understand Arizona’s “prior appropriation” water rights regime. The doctrine is also called “first in time, first in right,” because the person who first appropriates and puts water to beneficial use has a superior right to use that water than subsequent users. ^[5] Thus, the date of appropriation is critically important. In the 1908 case Winters v. United States, the Supreme Court found that the establishment of a Native American reservation implied a right to water.^[6] As a result, the priority date for water rights on reservations is the reservation’s establishment date or time immemorial for reserved aboriginal tribal lands.^[7] For the Gila River Indian Community, this meant that their rights pre-dated and were thus superior to those of most existing users, including miners, farmers, and cities founded after the reservation’s establishment.^[8] This superior water rights claim laid the groundwork for the Community’s future water rights settlement and partnerships.

Political dynamics and power relations: The Community’s significant CAP entitlement

The 2004 passage of the Arizona Water Settlement Act represents a critical legal framework and a significant shift in political dynamics and power relations in favor of the Gila River Indian Community. With its passage, the Community became the single largest holder of water from Arizona’s most important water source—the Central Arizona Project (CAP).^[9] Arizona’s largest renewable water supply, the CAP brings critical water supplies from the Colorado River to central and southern Arizona.^[10] While the Settlement recognizes the Gila River Indian Community’s claims to the Gila River, what it actually provides is an “alternative supply” from the CAP allocation.^[11] The alternative supply from the CAP provides the Community with water while not displacing existing users of the Gila River.^[12]

The CAP and the Gila River Indian Community’s water rights settlement is at the heart of the many innovative partnerships and exchanges that the Community has sustained. Parties to the settlement include the United States, the State of Arizona, Salt River Project (SRP), the Phoenix Metropolitan area cities, and numerous other irrigation districts, cities, and municipal water providers.^[13] Not only did the settlement allow the parties to avoid costly and uncertain court battles, the settlement also provides a means for the Community to earn a steady income by leasing portions of its entitlement, mitigating drought, and earning credit for storing water in underground basins.^[14]

While the water rights settlement is the setting within which collaboration unfolds, particular drivers provide the necessary spark to ignite collaboration. Here, consequential incentives and interdependence are two of the essential drivers that provide the impetus for collaboration. The innovative partnerships and exchanges the Gila River Indian Community has forged are impressive in sheer number and their mutually beneficial characteristics. The Community currently has partnerships with the State of Arizona, a host of Valley Cities, utilities, and water districts, to name a few.^[15]

Consequential incentives and interdependence: Mutually beneficial partnerships

The Gila River Indian Community embarked on a collaborative journey driven by consequential incentives and interdependence. In this context, consequential incentives refers to the resource needs, threats, and opportunities that induce the Community and its partners to engage together.^[16] Interdependence describes when a single organization is unable to accomplish something on its own.^[17] Here, these concepts generally drive collaboration in the following way.

First, parties can avoid extensive, costly, and uncertain legal battles by choosing collaboration over litigation.^[18] Here, for example, the Gila River Indian Community initially filed water rights claims in the Gila River Adjudication court case, but the sheer magnitude of the claims and the sources of supply caused considerable concern among existing water users.^[19] Local parties turned to settlement negotiations to avoid an uncertain outcome through litigation and assure water supplies to millions of users.^[20] Next, the Community helps provide critical water supplies for cities, industries, and urban development.^[21] In exchange, the Community is able to leverage financial incentives, including funding to construct and rehabilitate water delivery systems that have historically hindered the tribe in developing the infrastructure necessary to put their water to use.^[22]

The Gila River Indian Community’s collaborative efforts have safeguarded the Community’s water supplies, secured sources of income for their future, and helped address the region’s broader water supply problems. Notably, the Community has also shown the benefits of the storage and credit accrual system, a strategy that other tribes can replicate.^[23] Sharon Megdal, director of the University of Arizona Water Resources Research Center, remarked: “I see this example of a tribal nation entering voluntarily into an intergovernmental agreement with the state so that all the parties can develop these mutually beneficial exchanges or marketing transactions in a voluntary way...It’s really a notable innovation.”^[24] The importance of collaboration between the tribes and local, state, and federal partners will only grow in significance as drought conditions intensify and water levels decline in the warming West. Just last month, in a move applauded by Governor Stephen Roe Lewis of the Gila River Indian Community, Arizona Governor Doug Ducey announced that the State is investing $30 million to work with communities with Colorado River water rights to keep more water in the Colorado River system.^[25]