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.