Courtney Hammond Wagner

Courtney Hammond Wagner is a postdoctoral scholar in the sustainable groundwater program at Water in the West. As an environmental social scientist, Courtney’s research broadly aims to understand how we design incentives, rules and policies to collectively change behavior in water resource dilemmas to improve community well-being and ecological outcomes. At Water in the west, Courtney is working on two aspects of California’s 2014 Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA) policy process: the mandated use of climate information in groundwater sustainability plans and the role of incentives in farmer groundwater use. This work builds on her previous SGMA research in Yolo County, California to identify the role of farmer social norms and fairness perceptions in the SGMA policy process.

Courtney received a Ph.D. in Natural Resources from the University of Vermont where she studied policy design for declining water quality from agricultural nutrient runoff, and has a BA in Psychology from Dartmouth College.