| Water is the most essential and contested resource in California. Its widespread redistribution in the state has created bitter battles over control and access. My dissertation explores why particular groups achieve, maintain and lose control over a region's water, and with what effect on allocations, on the resource, and on the welfare of local communities.; In 1908, two watersheds in Northern California became connected through the Potter Valley Hydropower Project that diverted water from the Eel River through a power plant into the Russian River. The purpose of the project was to provide electricity and irrigation water to communities in the Russian River watershed. The growth and prosperity that occurred in the Russian River watershed as a result of access to that water was not matched in the Eel, where over the century the fishery so important to the security and welfare of downstream residents including the Round Valley Tribes and fishing communities, came close to extinction. Despite initial setbacks, today communities protesting the diversion have greater parity in negotiations over the diverted water, and less water is being diverted from the Eel. My dissertation links ideas from social movement theory and historical institutionalism to explain why water allocation policy shifted over the century.; Initially, Progressive Era goals of water and power development, along with minimal government regulation, supported the project's construction. Russian River interests easily established early control over the diverted water. By the 1970s, an increasing environmental consciousness had become embedded in a set of modified and expanded government institutions that legitimated water as an environmental good. This resulted in increasing institutional complexity and diversity, and the ensuing collisions over jurisdictions and mandates between government agencies generated new political and material opportunities for political mobilization. Groups challenging the water diversion, also constituted and reconstituted over time, successfully exploited these new opportunities to press their claims. The synergy between shifts in ideology, in the institutional regime, and in the ability of groups opposing the diversion to access new opportunities for mobilization, altered the decision making process and the allocation of water between the two watersheds. The outcome today is more water flowing down the Eel. |
