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Description
California is now in its fourth year of a severe record breaking drought. The drought has renewed and intensified anxieties over California's perpetual state of water crisis, and has reinforced and legitimized the need for applying market-based mechanisms for the production, allocation, and use of water resources. Emphasis has been put on the reallocation of water from one space to another in order to promote the "beneficial use" of water. The logic of "beneficial use" is premised on mobilizing water in ways that meet the requirements of capital, and enables the realization of surplus value (profit) from networks of production, consumption, and exchange. Shifting flows of water between different circuits of capital aligns with what David Harvey refers to as a spatial-fix. The purpose of this research is to examine how the transfer of Colorado River water from the Imperial Valley to San Diego through the Quantification Settlement Agreement (QSA) constitutes a "spatial-fix". This agreement provides a strong example of ways in which the production of water becomes intertwined with and articulated through circuits of capital accumulation and circulation. My research specifically looks at how particular political processes and changing social demands for water have altered ways in which different social actors are able to secure and gain access to Colorado River water. Of particular significance is how the QSA has fundamentally challenged the Imperial Valley's historic control over Colorado River water, and resulted in the reallocation of the single source of water that had transformed the region into a highly productive agricultural landscape. Through a political ecological analysis of the QSA, I argue that the Imperial Valley-San Diego County water transfer serves as a "spatial-fix" by securing the socio-ecological conditions for the expanded reproduction of capital while simultaneously extending geographies of commodity production and exchange through capitalist urbanization. In doing so, I examine how the QSA becomes expressed through the reconfiguration of rural and urban space and how these interconnected socio-spatial processes produce highly differentiated socio-environmental outcomes and reflect the geographically uneven character of capitalist development.
