Knowledge is widely considered a key ingredient for effective and sustainable water governance. In the Colorado River basin, collaborative programs have been established over the past 50 years to inform decision-making in the basin on a range of concerns from water quality to endangered species recovery and ecosystem restoration. We embrace a knowledge governance perspective to examine the institutional arrangements underpinning the production and use of knowledge in the basin’s collaborative programs. Through a review of programmatic documents and targeted interviews with program participants, we find a recurrent emphasis on science-based decision-making to address specific resource challenges across the programs. Our unpacking of the institutional design of the knowledge governance processes highlights two key challenges: (1) the institutional design has created a federal agency–advisory committee–technical committee triad structure that limits the saliency and legitimacy of diverse interests, as well as credibility of diverse ways of knowing and formalized learning processes and (2) a focus on the river in discrete, fragmented units that hinders a broader view of the river as a system and neglects cross-programmatic learning. These findings question if certain institutional design elements may serve to limit the ability of these programs to address new challenges facing the basin. We outline some potential steps to address these challenges with the aim of building more impactful, collaborative knowledge systems that leverage learning to not only lend saliency, credibility, and legitimacy to broad, inclusive, and diverse ways of knowing but also promote adaptiveness in a rapidly evolving socio-environmental system.

知识被广泛认为是有效和可持续的水治理的关键因素。在科罗拉多河流域，过去 50 年来建立了合作项目，为流域的决策提供信息，包括从水质到濒危物种恢复和生态系统恢复等一系列问题。我们采用知识治理的视角来研究支持流域合作计划中知识生产和使用的制度安排。通过对计划文件的审查和对计划参与者的有针对性的采访，我们发现反复强调以科学为基础的决策，以解决跨计划的特定资源挑战。我们对知识治理流程的制度设计的拆解强调了两个关键挑战：(1) 制度设计创造了一个联邦机构-咨询委员会-技术委员会三合会结构，限制了不同利益的显着性和合法性，以及不同认识方式和正式学习过程的可信度，以及 (2) 关注分散的、支离破碎的单元阻碍了河流作为一个系统的更广阔视野，并忽视了跨项目学习。这些发现质疑某些制度设计元素是否会限制这些计划应对流域面临的新挑战的能力。我们概述了应对这些挑战的一些潜在步骤，目的是建立更有影响力的协作知识系统，利用学习不仅为广泛、包容、