Diking and Drainage of the Delta (1850-1910). Initial European settlement of the Delta involved diking and drainage of most tidal marshland for agriculture and channelization for navigation

This paper uses game theory concepts to interpret the history of the Delta conflict, why the CALFED framework failed in making major strategic decisions, and prospects for the future. Game theory is the mathematical study of self-interested competitive and cooperative moves and countermoves for problems with more than one decision-maker. It often usefully describes the interactions of stakeholders whose individual behaviors result in worse conditions for all parties, despite a common interest in reaching a potential win-win solution (von Neumann and Morgenstern 1944; Myerson 1997; Camerer 2003; Madani 2010). Game theory has been applied to a variety of water and environmental resources problems in the past (Dinar et al. 1986; 1992; Dinar and Howitt 1997; Hipel et al. 1997; Carraro et al. 2005; Parrachino et al. 2006; Zara et al. 2006; Madani 2009; 2010; Hipel and Walker 2010). The mathematical study of stakeholder moves and countermoves within a simplified conceptual model of the Delta conflict highlights reasons for the failure of recent state and federal consensus policies for the Delta: “to encourage the main parties – agricultural and urban water diverters, and fisheries and other instreamprotection interests – to work out a solution among themselves, rather than imposing one externally” (Hanemann and Dyckman, 2009). Parties to the Delta conflict are generally selfoptimizers, as opposed to global-optimizers, giving priority to their own objectives rather than broader state or national objectives, resulting in failure of strategic governance which relies primarily on cooperation.