Policy Diffusion and Innovation: Media and Experts in Colorado Recreational Water Rights

Beginning in 1998, an innovation in water rights policy took place in Colorado. This paper analyses the diffusion of the recreational in-channel water right policy innovation among Colorado communities. This research involved in-depth case studies in 12 Colorado communities. Data include interviews, legal and legislative documents, and mass media coverage. These new water rights spread among Colorado communities through two processes. First, experts acted as information entrepreneurs providing both technical and policy information to other communities. Through repetitive journalistic sourcing, media coverage spread the influence and reputation of certain experts who then influenced internal policy decisions in subsequent communities. How and why policies spread between communities are the questions that drive scholarship on policy diffusion. Through forces of economic competition (Boehmke & Witmer, 2004), social learning (Glick & Hays, 1991), or like a contagion (Boushey, 2010), scholars posit that certain conditions make policy diffusion more likely. This study seeks to apply these lessons that are derived primarily from state-level research to local environmental policymaking in order to accomplish two goals: to understand similarities and differences between these two levels of policymaking, and to analyse policy diffusion concepts in the context of a particularly technical area of environmental policymaking in order to further refine our understanding of the likelihood of technical policy change. This study analyses the diffusion of policies within one case study in Colorado that spans 12 communities. By analysing the process by which a new policy spreads through these communities and the influences over the processes of diffusion, this paper contributes to the expanding literature that seeks to explain how and why environmental policies evolve, change, and influence others within the local government context. Environmental policy scholarship has historically acknowledged the importance of analysing local policy processes due to the significant role that these policies play in environmental outcomes (Busenberg, 2008; Layzer, 2002; Nicodemus, 2004). The local government context is Correspondence Address: Deserai A. Crow, Journalism and Mass Communications and Environmental Studies Program, University of Colorado Boulder, Armory Building, 1511 University Avenue, 478 UCB, Boulder, CO 80309, USA. Email: [email protected] ISSN 1939-0459 Print/1939-0467 Online © 2012 Taylor & Francis http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/19390459.2012.642635 D ow nl oa de d by [ D es er ai A . C ro w ] at 1 1: 26 2 8 M ar ch 2 01 2