Paper Water, Wet Water, and the Recognition of Indigenous Property Rights

Leslie Sanchez, Bryan Leonard and Eric C. Edwards

Journal of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists, 2023, vol. 10, issue 6, 1545 - 1579

Abstract: Restoring natural resource access for Indigenous groups has become a recent policy focus. We combine satellite data and robust difference-in-difference methods to estimate the causal effect of Native American water right settlements on land and water use on reservations in the western United States over 1974–2012. We find that settlements increase cultivated agricultural land use (crops and hay/pasture) by 8.7%. Our estimates of tribal water use indicate that, even after accounting for water leased off-reservation, many tribes are utilizing only a fraction of their entitlements, forgoing as much as $938 million–$1.8 billion in revenue. We provide evidence suggesting that this gap is driven, in part, by land tenure constraints and a lack of irrigation infrastructure.

Date: 2023
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/725400 (application/pdf)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/725400 (text/html)
Access to the online full text or PDF requires a subscription.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ucp:jaerec:doi:10.1086/725400

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Journal of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists from University of Chicago Press
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Journals Division ().