Dustin Garrick

Ph.D. Candidate, Geography & Regional Development

MPA, Environmental Science and Policy, Columbia University
BA, Government, University of Texas, Austin

Phone: (520) 400-4333
FAX: (520) 844-3398

E-mail: dgarrick@email.arizona.edu

408 Harvill Building, Box #2
Tucson, AZ 85721-0076
USA

Curriculum Vitae

Research

My research explores the intersection of collaborative and market-based approaches to environmental policy by examining institutional changes in the property rights regimes and political authority structures that govern freshwater allocation. I pursue these interests by comparing alternative institutional frameworks for environmental water allocation in the Pacific Northwest, where market-oriented programs have developed to reallocate water rights from consumptive users, such as irrigated agriculture, to instream environmental uses to restore salmon and steelhead fisheries. The contributions of established and emerging institutional actors, including water trusts, river basin organizations, and state agencies, represent an important by-product of political restructuring in an era of water marketing that has vested institutional authority and capacity in diverse public and private sector actors. Synthesizing conceptual and analytical approaches developed in institutional economics, I measure and analyze the transaction costs—or costs of defining, transferring, monitoring, and enforcing property rights—of environmental water transfers to examine and compare processes of institutional change in environmental water allocation.

Project Involvement

• 2007-Present: "Water Markets and Environmental Flows: Water Policy Reform and Institutional Economics in the Western U.S. and European Union" with Dr. Carl Bauer
• 2005-Present: "Boundary Conflicts, Collective Choice Institutions and Conflict Resolution Mechanisms in Western U.S. Interstate Rivers" with Drs. Edella Schlager and Tanya Heikkila (NSF # SES 0451559)