Water policy and cultural exchange: Transferring lessons from around the world to the western United States James L. Westcoat Jr.

Wescoat, J. L. (2005). Water policy and cultural exchange: Transferring lessons from around the world to the western United States. Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar.

Theorists on organizational knowledge, knowledge-based management, and intellectual capital concur on the importance of knowledge as the impetus to organizational cohesion, sustainability, and innovation. Nonaka (2001) and others differentiate tacit knowledge from explicit knowledge. Wescoat (2005), in his discussion on transferring lessons from one group to another, examined how water management information is conveyed from outside the United States to western regions within the country, using explicit knowledge. Impediments to knowledge transfer exist, from attitudes of "irrelevance . . . incomprehensibility . . . proximity . . . coercion . . .the politics of difference" (pp. 3-4). Wescoat identified numerous cases, despite these potential obstacles, of occurrences where learning transfers took place. Wescoat traced the historical and geographic contractions and expansions of water management knowledge exchange from the beginning of the 20th century to current times.

With this background, Wescoat extracted four conceptual approaches: "comparative theory and practice . . . diffusion of innovations . . . social learning and social movements in water management . . . and legal mirrors and legal transplants" (pp. 10-16). The first, comparative theory and practice, rests on a pragmatic approach to knowledge, as espoused by William James and others. By inferring differences and similarities, water managers apply lessons to their own experiences. Wescoat advocated for a more sophisticated model to assess the dissemination of information. Referencing the Diffusion of innovations models of Everett Rogers (1995), Wescoat asserted, "diffusion of innovation research emphasizes the role of communication processes, paths, and media in predicting the spread of innovations . . . it analyzes the difference that access to information makes, as well as the frequency of contact with different communication media, networks, channels, structures, persons, and messages" (p. 13). Wescoat acknowledged the biases and descriptive propensity of the model. To supplement individual knowledge transfers, such as the Diffusion of innovation models, Wescoat added social learning and movements, such as Adaptive Ecosystem Assessment and Management (AEAM), which includes adaptive management, individualistic psychological and contextual analytic approaches, theories of social ideology, hegemony and revolution, and the "'new social movements' that are transnational and transcultural in scope" (p. 15). The fourth example of knowledge transfer entails the body of water law within a society. Decisions contained within the law have applicability outside the jurisdiction from which they originate. Supporters of legal transplant aver that "transfers are common; second, that they involve legal change, as such, as well as whatever other social and environmental changes they mirror; third, that transplants depends upon several practical factors" (17). Dissenters question the influence of external laws, imposed by social judicial and legal elites, on social systems.

Wescoat concluded by discerning the process of knowledge transfer--from curiosity, comparative analysis, and the diffusion of information, if favorable factors exist cause change to occur. The reader would have received a richer understanding of the models and approaches had Wescoat explained which impediments complicated the success of each and to what degree.