ABSTRACT
Chapter 3 explores the case study of Southern Arizona, usually known as a bastion of Republican values, investigating the paradoxical emergence of a conservationist coalition, especially between local institutions (like Pima County) and state regulators. This coalition is not a mere product of the drought affecting the region, but the result of several social logics structuring the strategies of adaptation to future water shortages. First, the institutional architecture of water management in Arizona creates an interdependence between the protagonists of the water sector in order to implement their policy instruments; consequently, the more central institutions need minor institutions to ensure that their policies are implemented, appropriating what are, a priori, the most improbable ideas (water conservation in Arizona). Second, the common academic background of the main water professionals create the conditions for a common dialog beyond the differences of interests and beliefs. This perspective is capable of filling certain lacunae in the sociology of the process of production of public policies; it demonstrates that a subsystem of institutions in which interdependence and the absence of a regulatory monopoly produces such a degree of uncertainty about the results that conflicts are, in practice, either marginalized or ignored in order to produce consensus and agreement. This consensus is all the more vague and flexible in that it is based on instruments that can be used by everyone (drought action plans, for example). On the other hand, the introduction of new variables, for example academic backgrounds and career paths, which have mainly been addressed from a qualitative point of view in this chapter, suggests a potential for an analysis of the social determinants of systems of action – particularly the role of engineers and strategies designed to convert their technical skills to the sphere of water management.
