Navigating water justice in transforming hydrosocial territories: conflicts between local irrigation and water transfer in Gaoyou Irrigation District, China

Water justice, which ensures equitable access and active participation in governance, is crucial for enhancing the effectiveness of regional environmental governance. However, the intricate connections between socio-spatial inequalities and responses to water injustice within authoritarian contexts remain complex and contested. Specifically, while macro-level water governance in China has been widely studied, the micro-mechanisms of how state power shapes subjectivities to quell resistance, and how local actors navigate these constraints through everyday adaptation, require further empirical grounding alongside emerging scholarship. Existing water justice research has extensively examined these relationships, yet their manifestation within specific authoritarian political regimes—particularly in how technocratic knowledge monopolies and co-opted participation mechanisms operate—warrants deeper investigation. Rather than introducing a new framework, this study applies the concept of hydrosocial territories to scrutinize the power dynamics in the Gaoyou Irrigation District (GID) in China. By mapping the hydropolitical hierarchy, it reveals how power struggles among stakeholders—the central state, GID Administration, Water Users Association, and GID water users—produce four dimensions of water injustice, including distributive, procedural, recognitional, and socio-ecological injustices. The study also critiques authoritarian environmentalism for reinforcing power imbalances and exacerbating water injustice through discursive and material means.