Abstract

This Special Section examines the political ecology of drought, focusing on the production of drought in rural areas where regimes of water dispossession, exploitation, and extraction exacerbate drought conditions for rural inhabitants, even as water and energy produced in those impacted rural areas benefit urban areas. This introduction situates the articles in a larger conversation about drought governance practices by tracing four interwoven analytical threads. An initial examination of definitional quandaries over drought paves the way for a discussion of the problematics of governing through drought, in particular, the ways in which, following Urciuoli, "strategically deployable [linguistic] shifters" contribute to consensus-building, and the ways in which legal and regulatory regimes, as well as politics, help shape settler economic practices during droughts. The discussion then turns to social justice and unequally distributed vulnerabilities intensified by groundwater depletion and drought governance practices. The article concludes by critically considering several possible approaches to drought governance that take the coproduction of nature and culture as integral. The introduction argues, and the Special Section articles support this, that a reconfiguration of drought economics and governance, along with a prioritizing of Native American sovereignty in the US, is imperative.

Keywords: drought, political ecology of water, settler colonialism, water law, environmental governance, hydrosocial, western US

How to Cite:

Sullivan, K. M., (2024) “Governing water in the US West: Introduction to 'Water in short supply' Special Section”, Journal of Political Ecology 31(1), 972–993. doi: https://doi.org/10.2458/jpe.7150