Edella Schlager is a professor of public policy in the School of Government and Public Policy at the University of Arizona in Tucson, Arizona. She researches multi-level governing arrangements of regional and international river basins. Her research examines institutional and biophysical governance challenges and how they vary by scale (international, national, sub-national) and climate-change impacts; the dynamic adaptive capacity of governing arrangements; and existing and promising policy approaches for addressing increasing variability in social-ecological systems. She has focused on river basins in North America.

Edella teach courses on environmental policy, processes of policy making, comparative federal systems, and collaborative governance.