Transboundary River Governance in the Western US: The Role of Cross-Scale Linkages in Interstate Compact Compliance*

Recently, in common pool resource studies, considerable effort and attention has been devoted to relations, ties, and linkages among different governments, organizations, resource user associations and groups at different scales. These relationships and linkages are posited to affect the ability and capacity of 1) resource users to engage in collective action and devise governing arrangements for common pool resources (Ostrom 1990), 2) resources users to collaborate and coordinate across multiple resources and/or jurisdictions to address regional problems (Blomquist, Schlager et al. 2004), 3) national governments to devolve authority and resources to lower levels of government to govern common pool resources (Berkes 2002), and 4) national governments to effectively enforce and administer treaties, agreements, and other arrangements to address international and global common pool resource problems (Young 2002a; Webster 2009) These linkage and ties, often referred to as “cross-scale linkages”, in general occur between arrangements at the same level of organization or authority (e.g. horizontally between states) or between different levels of organizations (e.g. vertically between an international regimes and national government) (Young 2002a). According to Berkes (2002), these genera