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JUST WAIT UNTIL THERE'S A DROUGHT: MEDIATING ENVIRONMENTAL CRISES FOR URBAN GROWTH
Author(s) -
Nevarez Leonard
Publication year - 1996
Publication title -
antipode
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.177
H-Index - 98
eISSN - 1467-8330
pISSN - 0066-4812
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-8330.1996.tb00462.x
Subject(s) - environmentalism , sustainable development , jurisdiction , state (computer science) , business , natural disaster , environmental planning , hegemony , environmental resource management , natural resource economics , political science , economics , environmental science , geography , law , algorithm , politics , meteorology , computer science
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.