“You can take a guy’s wife, but don’t take his water”: Competing moral economies for water in Cache Valley, Northern Utah, USA

As hydroclimatic stress intensifies across the western United States, conflicts over water use increasingly reflect deep moral and social divisions rather than purely technical constraints. In Utah, severe drought, rapid population growth, and the desiccation of the Great Salt Lake have exposed competing ethical frameworks governing water access, responsibility, and value. While public debate has emphasized ecological decline and political controversy, less attention has been given to the moral economies shaping water governance in Cache Valley, a key agricultural region in the Bear River Watershed and a major source of inflow to the Great Salt Lake. We apply a moral economy framework to examine how farmers, water managers, and members of the public in northern Utah understand and justify water use. Using qualitative thematic analysis, we identify both convergence and divergence in stakeholders’ conceptions of fairness, entitlement, and stewardship. We argue that persistent conflict stems from fundamentally different, often unarticulated, ethical logics. By documenting competing moral economies within a single water system, we contribute to anthropological scholarship on resource governance and delve deeper into moral economic analysis in upper income countries.