How water features: negotiating and reassembling the sociomaterial politics of central Californian groundwater.

This article explores responses to the California Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA) to challenge post-political and governmentality perspectives on environmental management. I chart how SGMA reconfigured sociomaterial orderings in the Central Valley region, enacting a liminal moment for groundwater culture, between a historically entrenched libertarianism and an emergent communitarianism. Local organizations functioned as boundary organizations, re-shaping groundwater assemblages by negotiating boundaries between authority and marginalized communities. I argue that the structures and institutions typically critiqued in post-political and de-political theorising can be more fruitfully conceptualized as part of sociomaterial assemblages within which there lies potential for transformative groundwater politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]