Governing the Commons: What the Great Salt Lake Can Teach Us About Democracy

Utah’s water crisis offers lessons in fiscal stewardship, collective problem-solving, and the revitalization of local democracy.

Over the past few months, we’ve written about the new era of fend-for-yourself federalism—a reality in which political polarization at the national level and the federal government’s retrenchment has left states and localities on the line for solving big structural problems on their own. It’s not an easy shift, but the federal pullback could serve to reawaken local governance capacity, forcing communities to take active charge in confronting “wicked problems” that cross over sectors and jurisdictions.

Utah’s Great Salt Lake offers a vivid and timely example of what that might look like in practice.

When the lake hit record lows in 2022, the images of its cracked bed and toxic dust clouds captured international attention. Inside Utah, the crisis catalyzed a sense of ownership. Then-state House Speaker Brad Wilson emerged as a public champion—convening water summits, framing the issue as a shared civic duty, and helping mobilize both funding and reform. Progress was powered by a shared realization that this is a problem that no single agency, jurisdiction, or budget line could solve.

The Great Salt Lake is an ecological, economic, and governance crisis rolled into one. But it’s also a model for how large-scale, shared challenges can revive democratic practice from the ground up.

The Lake as a Common Pool Resource

The lake’s story is a familiar one to anyone who’s worked in natural resources: decades of overuse, population growth, and rising temperatures have driven water inflows to record lows, threatening ecosystems, regional economies, and public health well beyond Utah’s borders.

Utah officials understand that this is as much a governance problem as an environmental and hydrologic one.

As a recent Brigham Young University report summed it up: “We need to increase trust and coordination. New legislation allows users to return water to the lake while retaining rights. However, lack of trust and cooperation between farmers, cities, managers, and policymakers is hobbling our response.”

Utah’s response seeks to rebuild trust through transparent data-sharing, joint monitoring with the state’s Division of Air Quality, and stakeholder reporting that makes each actor’s contribution visible. In doing so, the state has been putting in place the building blocks of governance capacity.

Hannah Freeze, deputy commissioner of the Great Salt Lake Commission, explained in an interview that adaptive management has become a new form of governance. For example, the state now uses the lake’s Union Pacific causeway berm as a live management tool, opening or closing flows between the lake’s north and south arms to balance salinity and protect ecosystems. It’s a real-time example of coordinated problem-solving across agencies.

The lake exhibits all the characteristics of what Nobel laureate Elinor Ostrom called a “common pool resource”: it is non-excludable and subtractable—meaning anyone can benefit from it but each user’s actions affect everyone else. Traditionally, such resources can fall victim to what’s known as the “tragedy of the commons.” But as Ostrom’s research demonstrated, that tragedy isn’t inevitable. With the right institutions, rules, and norms, communities learn to manage shared resources sustainably.

We can look to Utah as a living laboratory of institutional design—the laws, funding, forums, and multi-agency, multi-stakeholder, cross-sector coordination. What can we learn from Utah’s approach?

Governance Comes First

When the state legislature appropriated roughly a billion dollars for water projects, it made headlines. But the more important story is behind the numbers. As Candice Hasenyager, director of the Utah Division of Water Resources, explained, the investment was based on a foundation of governance structures: clear rules, defined roles, and mechanisms for monitoring and accountability.

In 2022 the legislature created the Great Salt Lake Watershed Enhancement Trust, with an appropriation of $40 million. That action, coupled with a new charter signed by public and private partners, demonstrates that money moves when governance builds confidence. When those structures were in place, financing followed—including about $200 million from the private sector.

Hasenyager said her division also is developing a Great Salt Lake Basin Integrated Plan “to ensure a resilient water supply for the lake and all uses within the watershed.” It will give leaders a data-driven framework designed to make collaboration and deliberation more informed, transparent, and forward-looking.

For Funkhouser & Associates’ readers, the lesson should sound familiar. Financial plans and decisions must build on trusted, participatory institutions. Before you can align money to mission, you must align people to purpose.

Deliberative Democracy and Shared Stewardship

The Great Salt Lake is not governed by a single authority—and that’s part of its strength. Freeze describes the Great Salt Lake Commission as a coordinating node rather than a command center, facilitating collaboration among agriculture, municipalities, industry, and wildlife interests, each with partial authority and shared responsibility.

Freeze emphasizes that lasting change is driven by norms as much as policies: “We just need a cultural shift in the way that we think and use and manage water—and that’s 150 years in the making.”

This is what Ostrom called “polycentric governance,” or “nested enterprises.” As political theorist Noah Blakemore Briggs put it, redundancy and overlap are strengths, not inefficiencies: “If one level fails, another can back it up.” That redundancy, he argues, is what creates institutional resilience. Jessica Steinberg of Indiana University’s Ostrom Workshop reminds us that “the vast majority of meaningful knowledge about resource use is local.” Effective deliberation must therefore blend scientific expertise with lived experience—the farmer, the miner, and the city planner each hold part of the system’s truth.

That understanding is reflected in Utah’s process.

In her interview, Freeze explained that Utah has invested millions to help farmers install upgraded irrigation systems that use less water, and that through this the state can “start to pool those volumes of water together within that mutual irrigation company… and lease that water to the lake.” That means agricultural users are participating financially in infrastructure modernization (via cost-share programs) and aligning incentives with conservation goals.

Utah’s lake model shows that legitimacy comes from inclusive, informed, and empowered dialogue. Briggs suggests expanding such shared-responsibility models through “mini-publics” — modern town halls where representative citizens, supported by experts, deliberate and produce binding outcomes.

Governance reform, in other words, is not merely administrative tinkering. It’s about creating the capacity for people to create and own solutions together.