To improve the resilience of complex, interdependent infrastructures, we need to better understand the institutions that manage infrastructures and the work that they do. This research demonstrates that a key aspect of infrastructure resilience is the adequate institutional management of infrastructures. This research analyzes the institutional dimension of infrastructure resilience using sociotechnical systems theory and, further, investigates the critical role of institutions for infrastructure resilience using a thorough analysis of water and energy systems in Arizona.

Infrastructure is not static, but dynamic. Institutions play a significant role in designing, building, maintaining, and upgrading dynamic infrastructures. Institutions create the appearance of infrastructure stability while dynamically changing infrastructures over time, which is resilience work. The resilience work of different institutions and organizations sustains, recovers, adapts, reconfigures, and transforms the physical structure on short, medium, and long temporal scales.

To better understand and analyze the dynamics of sociotechnical infrastructure resilience, this research examines several case studies. The first is the social and institutional arrangements for the allocation of resources from Hoover Dam. This research uses an institutional analysis framework and draws on the institutional landscape of water and energy systems in Arizona. In particular, this research illustrates how institutions contribute to differing resilience work at temporal scales while fabricating three types of institutional threads: lateral, vertical, and longitudinal threads.

This research also highlights the importance of institutional interdependence as a critical challenge for improving infrastructure resilience. Institutional changes in one system can disrupt other systems’ performance. The research examines this through case studies that explore how changes to water governance impact the energy system in Arizona. Groundwater regulations affect the operation of thermoelectric power plants which withdraw groundwater for cooling. Generation turbines, droughts, and water governance are all intertwined via institutions in Arizona.

This research, finally, expands and applies the interdependence perspective to a case study of forest management in Arizona. In a nutshell, the perilous combination of chronic droughts and the engineering resilience perspective jeopardizes urban water and energy systems. Wildfires caused by dense forests have legitimized an institutional transition, from thickening forests to thinning trees in Arizona.

This dissertation examines the development of grassroots environmental organizations between 1970 and 2000 and the role they played in the larger American environmental movement and civil society during that period. Much has been written about growth in environmental values in the United States during the twentieth century and about the role of national environmental organizations in helping to pass landmark federal-level environmental laws during the 1960s and 1970s. This study illuminates a different story of how citizen activists worked to protect and improve the air, water, healthfulness and quality of life of where they lived. At the local level, activists looked much different than they did in Washington, D.C.--they tended to be volunteers without any formal training in environmental science or policy. They were also more likely to be women than at the national level. They tended to frame environmental issues and solutions in familiar ways that made sense to them. Rather than focusing on the science or economics of an environmental issue, they framed it in terms of fairness and justice and giving citizens a say in the decisions that affected their health and quality of life. And, as the regulatory, political, and social landscape changed around them, they adapted their strategies in their efforts to continue to affect environmental decision making. Over time, they often connected their local interests and issues with more sophisticated, globalized understandings of the economic and political systems that under laid environmental issues. This study examines three case studies in the rural Great Plains, urban Southwest, and small-town Appalachia between 1970 and 2000 in an attempt to understand community-based environmental activism in the late twentieth century, how it related to the national environmental movement, the strategies local-level groups employed and when and why, the role of liberal democratic arguments in their work and in group identity formation, the limits of those arguments, and how the groups, their strategies, and the activists themselves changed overtime. These three groups were the Northern Plains Resource Council in Montana, Southwest Environmental Service in Southern Arizona, and Save Our Cumberland Mountains in Eastern Tennessee.

The sacred San Francisco Peaks in northern Arizona have been at the center of a series of land development controversies since the 1800s. Most recently, a controversy arose over a proposal by the ski area on the Peaks to use 100% reclaimed water to make artificial snow. The current state of the San Francisco Peaks controversy would benefit from a decision-making process that holds sustainability policy at its core. The first step towards a new sustainability-focused deliberative process regarding a complex issue like the San Francisco Peaks controversy requires understanding the issue's origins and the perspectives of the people involved in the issue. My thesis provides an historical analysis of the controversy and examines some of the laws and participatory mechanisms that have shaped the decision-making procedures and power structures from the 19th century to the early 21st century.

In the rural, modern American West, two Manichean perspectives of the human-nature relationship have contributed to vehement environmental conflicts. Adopting developer Calvin Black and writer Edward Abbey as archetypes, I explore the endurance of these two ideologies in the redrock canyon country of southern Utah and northern Arizona. Black represents the historically dominant anthropocentric view among Euro Americans that nature ought to be domesticated and commoditized; the competing view, represented by Abbey, is eco-centric and considers the intrinsic value of the broader ecological community beyond its utilitarian function. I argue that environmental conflict in the canyon country has been driven by ideologues who espouse one of these two deeply entrenched and seemingly irreconcilable perspectives. Modern-day conflicts over wilderness, land use, and rural development are endemic, rooted in heritage and culture and driven by particular Anglo-American religious and secular beliefs that reflect differing ways of “seeing” the land. In particular these contending perspectives are reflected in the “built” landscape. Using one especially ubiquitous human imprint on the land as both trope and subject, I explore the political and cultural meanings of roads as symbols variously of progress and of exploitation. Questions of road development and public lands access became the center point of environmental conflict driven by dichotomous worldviews that demonized the opposition and its position. What developed in the last half century is a discourse dictated by categories created by ideologues. This dissertation not only explores the particular circumstances that made these environmental contests volatile in an American desert, but it also meditates broadly on the nature of environmental compromise and conflict, the place of people in "wild" landscapes, and the discontents of rural communities upended by new economic realities. This study illustrates generally how people perceive the land, the technology they wield to manipulate it, and the broader cultural and political transformations that result.