The Future of Water and Democracy: Assessing and Improving Water Governance in the United States

Water governance—the structures and processes for making collective choices over how to allocate, deliver, and protect water supplies—poses both an opportunity and a challenge for democracy. Water governance can create opportunities for knowledge-sharing, collaboration, and meaningful civic engagement, which can support democratic goals like legitimacy and accountability. However, when water governance exacerbates racial and socioeconomic inequalities or fails to inform and involve citizens, people may feel alienated from political systems and institutions—threatening democracy. In this Perspective, we highlight three vehicles for democracy (cross-sector collaboration, community advisory processes, and community-led institutions) and three threats to democracy (lack of governance capacity, imbalanced power in decision-making, and explicit exclusion of marginalized voices) that are common in water governance in the United States. We further examine lessons from research and practice on pathways to strengthen democracy, namely assessing and building formalized water governance processes and outcomes that reinforce legitimacy and accountability in our democracy.