How water features: negotiating and reassembling the sociomaterial politics of central Californian groundwater

ABSTRACT

This article explores responses to the California Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA) to challenge post-political and governmentality perspectives on environmental management. I chart how SGMA reconfigured sociomaterial orderings in the Central Valley region, enacting a liminal moment for groundwater culture, between a historically entrenched libertarianism and an emergent communitarianism. Local organizations functioned as boundary organizations, re-shaping groundwater assemblages by negotiating boundaries between authority and marginalized communities. I argue that the structures and institutions typically critiqued in post-political and de-political theorising can be more fruitfully conceptualized as part of sociomaterial assemblages within which there lies potential for transformative groundwater politics.

KEYWORDS:

• Sustainable groundwater management act
• drought: groundwater management
• sociomateriality
• post-politics

Acknowledgments

I wish to thank the Institute of Hazard, Risk and Resilience at Durham University for providing funding which supported this research. I would also like to thank the Editor-in-Chief of this journal for his feedback which helped to improve this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

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Christopher Lawless

Dr. Christopher Lawless is Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at Durham University. His research involves applying Science and Technology Studies concepts to critically address the politics of critical infrastructures and the environment. He also continues to pursue longstanding research on the social and ethical impact of forensic and biometric technologies.