A Place at the Well: The Imperative for Farmer Inclusion in Water Conservation Policy Design

Achieving cleaner water for rural and suburban communities in a sustainable way requires approaches tailored to the unique socioeconomic, ecological, and historic contexts embedded in a particular community and place. Water quality trading (WQT) is a payment for ecosystem services style policy that is currently popular across North America as a mechanism to reduce water pollution from rural communities. Yet this approach is failing to generate markets with enough trades to measurably improve waterways. Some failures are attributed to poor program design and others to stakeholder communities who are averse to the premise or morality of WQT. However, rural communities are not homogenous and many are in fact amenable to payment for ecosystem services policies such as WQT. Although our case study identified Tennessee watersheds as “feasible” locations, we present evidence that the typical program design parameters would fail, despite having a willing population of farmers. We argue that identifying amenable communities or feasible locations simplifies the agency of stakeholders and is ultimately insufficient to make ecosystem services programs work unless the design and implementation phases of the programs include local stakeholders.