In 2008 Michigan became a signatory of the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence River Basin Water Resources Compact. The Compact helps protect against diversions of water outside the Basin, and compels signatories to adopt measures for protecting water resources within state boundaries. As part of Michigan’s implementation of this law, it gives large quantity water users the opportunity to collaboratively govern water resources within water management areas. The ability for resource users to successfully manage common pool resources depends on a number of factors that have been identified and described by researchers, one of which is the necessity for members of collaborative governance organizations to have a shared understanding of resource conditions in order to design effective management institutions. This research focuses on Michigan crop irrigators and aims to discover what indicators are important to them for evaluating water resource availability. Results of this research show a high degree of similarity in terms of how irrigators define water resource availability, which is a promising sign for the probability that this community of water users will be able to effectively govern shared resources.
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