A Pie No More?: Building a More Equitable Colorado River Governance Structure

When the framers gathered in 1922 to draft the Colorado River Compact, they viewed their task narrowly. They were trying to divide up a pie, determining how big a slice each of the seven U.S. states would get. They were not building a governance structure for a complex, evolving river basin. But from the beginning, we have had a complex, evolving river basin, lacking a formalized governance structure, where no set of fixed pie-slicing sufficed. As we arrive at the one hundredth anniversary of their efforts, the inadequacy of the institutional duct tape and baling wire tying together the river