Just Wait Until There's a Drought: Mediating Environmental Crises for Urban Growth

Pro‐development water managers from a southern Californian jurisdiction secured voter approval for importing water supplies by mediating a six year drought. Through reorganized water management structures, unsustainable technological practices, and “crisis” discourses, water managers overcame residents' historic resistance to imported water by defining it as insurance against a “natural” emergency, not a social mechanism for growth. The research suggests how the environmental crisis can advance development‐oriented state agencies' hegemony. Given the otherwise general advocacy of environmentalism and “slow‐growth in the empirical setting, water managers” success in overturning sustainable water development regimes reveals potential contradictions within the “environmentalist” landscape.