Abstract
Several factors are exacerbating the ongoing worldwide crisis of lack of access to fresh water. Increasing demand and shrinking supply are adding intensity and oftentimes violence to battles over water resources worldwide. A decisive majority of water resource experts predict the problem will grow and produce new types of disputes that center around questions of water ownership, human rights, and privatization. Although water is frequently discussed and analyzed from economic, environmental, and engineering perspectives, the profound underlying power relations and the political theory of the democratic allocation of water are more rarely examined. This thesis examines the questions of how Californians, in an environment of scarcity, have thought about their water resources and what doctrines have been developed in order to allocate water to citizens. A new form of local water privatization is used as a case study: the corporate bottling of municipal water sources for resale. The dispute over corporate sale of municipal water is examined against the three major doctrines of California water rights: riparian, prior appropriation, and public interest doctrine. This thesis finds the corporate bottling of water from municipal sources to be in violation of all known water rights theories in California. The private provision of water as a strategy to increase human access to freshwater for domestic purposes has become a subject of intense debate in the twenty-first century.