Regina M. Buono

Senior Attorney

Regina M. Buono is a Senior Attorney. Prior to joining ELI in 2023, Regina worked in various positions in water law and governance, including in private law practice and for a legislative agency in Austin, Texas; consulting with an international boutique water strategy firm; and as the Baker Botts Fellow in Energy and Environmental Regulatory Affairs at the Center for Energy Studies at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy, where she remains a non-resident scholar. Her research includes work on water governance, water and energy, urban resilience, and adaptive governance and law. She participated in the 2019 Young Scientists Summer Program at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) in Laxenburg, Austria, working with the Governance in Transition subgroup of the Risk and Resilience section to advance research on law and nature-based solutions, and served on the board of advisors to an EU-funded research consortium working to understand the insurance value of nature-based solutions.

Regina holds a Ph.D. in public policy and a J.D. from The University of Texas at Austin, an M.Sc. in water science and governance from King’s College London, and a B.A. in international relations and political science and a B.A. in Spanish from the University of Arkansas.

Media Guide

Selected Publications

Regina M. Buono and Gabriel Eckstein, “The Rio Grande Basin,” in Water Resources Allocation and Agriculture: Transitioning from Open to Regulated Access (Josselin Rouillard, Christina Babbitt, Ed Challies, and Jean-Daniel Rinaudo, editors) (2022)

Regina M. Buono, Jill Baggerman, and Lindsay C. Sansom, “Got a Minute for the Future of the Rio Grande? Considering the Prospects for a Sustainability Minute in the Wake of the Colorado’s Minute 323,” Water International, 46(4): 543-566 (2021).

Doug Kenney, Michael Cohen, John Berggren, and Regina M. Buono, “The Colorado River Basin.” In Sustainability of Engineered Rivers in Arid Lands: Challenge and Response (Jurgen Schmandt and Aysegül Kibaroglu, eds.) (2021)

Regina M. Buono, Elena López Gunn, Jennifer McKay, and Chad Staddon, eds. Regulating Water Security in Unconventional Gas and Oil. Springer International Publishing (2019)

Regina M. Buono, Beatriz Rodriguez Mayor, and Elena López Gunn, “A Comparative Study of Water-related Issues in the Context of Hydraulic Fracturing in Texas and Spain,” Environmental Science & Policy, 90: 193-200 (2018)

Katherine R. Zodrow, Qilin Li, Regina M. Buono, Wei Chen, Glen Daigger, Leonardo Dueñas-Osorio, Menachem Elimelech, Xia Huang, Guibin Jiang, Jae-Hong Kim, Bruce E. Logan, David L. Sedlak, Paul Westerhoff, and Pedro J. J. Alvarez, “Advanced Materials, Technologies, and Complex Systems Analyses: Emerging Opportunities to Enhance Urban Water Security” Environmental Science & Technology, 51(18): 10274-10281 (2017)

Regina M. Buono, Katherine Zodrow, Qilin Li, and Pedro Alvarez, “A New Frontier in Texas: Managing and Regulating Brackish Groundwater,” Water Policy, 18(3) 727-749 (2016)

Alejandro Posadas and Regina M. Buono, “Looming Conflicts? Energy Reform Priorities and the Human Right of Access to Water in Mexico.” In The Rule of Law and Mexico’s Energy Reform (T. Payan and S. Zamora, eds.) (2016)

Regina M. Buono and Gabriel Eckstein, “Minute 319: A Cooperative Approach to Mexico-U.S. Hydro-Relations on the Colorado River,” Water International, 30(3): 263-276 (2014)

Regina M. Buono, “Delimiting Culture: Implications for Individual Rights in the Basque Country Today,” Texas International Law Journal, 39(1): 143-161 (2003)