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

Abstract

Restoring natural resource access for Indigenous groups has become a recent policy focus.We combine satellite data and robust difference-in-differencemethods to estimate the causal effect ofNativeAmerican 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 offreservation, many tribes are utilizing only a fraction of their entitlements, forgoing as much as $938million–$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.