Lunch seminar: Governing the Underground: Scale, Power, and Groundwater in the San Joaquin Valley

Groundwater sustains nearly half of the world’s irrigated agriculture and supplies drinking water for roughly four billion people, yet over 150 years of large-scale extraction, weak governance regimes have repeatedly permitted its anarchic and unsustainable use. Over time, these regimes have led to the depletion of major aquifers in arid regions around the world, producing falling water tables, land subsidence, and widespread well failures, with catastrophic economic and social results. This talk argues against deterministic explanations that attribute groundwater overuse to invisibility or ungovernability, drawing on Elinor Ostrom’s work on common-pool resources to show that governance failures reflect contingent outcomes and institutional design.

Focusing on California’s San Joaquin Valley, one of the most productive agricultural regions on Earth, it traces how fragmented local institutions, organized around surface water rather than aquifer boundaries, enabled intensive extraction while preventing coordinated management at the scale of the resource. The case illustrates two broader problems in groundwater governance: the misalignment between ecological systems and political structures, and the ability of major stakeholders to capture and deflect regulatory oversight, both of which sustain overexploitation even where its consequences are widely understood.

Sarah Hamilton is an Associate Professor of environmental history and leader of the Environmental Humanities Research Group at the University of Bergen. Her work on water history engages with questions of regulation, conservation, and the generation and deployment of knowledge and ignorance. Her first book, Cultivating Nature: The Making of a Valencian Working Landscape (Washington University Press 2018) received the Turku Book Award from the European Society for Environmental History. This talk is part of a larger project on large-scale groundwater exploitation around the world, which has also produced publications in The Journal of Modern History, Modern American History, and Hydrogeology Journal.

Register for the seminar here