THE ENERGY AND RESOURCES GROUP and THE DEPARTMENT OF ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCE, POLICY, AND MANAGEMENT PRESENT: SPEAKER: Linda Estelí Méndez Barrientos DATE: Wednesday, March 4, 2020 TIME: 4:00-5:30pm PLACE: 126 Barrows TITLE: Dealing with Change: Integrating power scholarship into environmental governance DESCRIPTION: Current governance theory has not adequately addressed how power asymmetries and inequality affect decision-making processes and the distribution of its outcomes. This talk presents a transdisciplinary effort to bridge diverse power scholarship traditions into an integrated framework for policy analysis. A case study on collaborative environmental governance is analyzed, illustrating the framework’s applicability. Using the implementation of groundwater governance reform in California, the talk presents empirical data collected through 250 hours of participant observation and 30 semi-structured in-depth interviews with groundwater reform participants. The presentation discusses the challenges of multi-stakeholder cooperation in defining inclusive and representative arrangements, as well as the effectiveness of policy processes in developing sustainable and equitable groundwater management institutions in California. SPEAKER: Linda Estelí Méndez Barrientos is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Environmental Science and Policy at the University of California Davis. She is also a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow and National Science Foundation trainee in the Climate Change, Water and Society program at UC Davis. Her research seeks to improve our understanding of the role of inequality and power asymmetries in processes of institutional change and policy implementation. Currently, she is studying the implementation of groundwater management reform in California. Previously, she worked in South Africa where she studied the implementation of the National Water Act in its effort to redress apartheid’s heritage of inequality. She also holds two masters degrees, one on Water Management from Wageningen University in the Netherlands and the other on Agricultural Policy from Montpellier SupAgro in France.