Faced with the water crisis that the Western United States has been going through since 2000, the competent players in what we call in this chapter the field of water policy have begun providing solutions that we describe as “neo-conservationist,” although this simultaneously does not prohibit the presence of certain contradictions and supply side policies from occurring in the field. Guided by an emergent disposition, what have elsewhere been described as “water professionals” assert their positions on this crisis amidst an expansive, diverse, and multi-level field. The case of Western American water policy is therefore useful in reconsidering French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s conceptions of the state in particular, but also more contemporary theorizations of environmental governance, and the too-often mystified machinations of water policy (for example, thanks to the fascination about the politics of water driven by popular representations such as the 1974 film Chinatown). Our theoretical contribution to field analysis as it is expanded into the sociological study of public policy has been guided by encounters with the material realities of water politics in action: from 2014 to 2017, we surveyed the constellation of social agents and organizations across the Colorado River Basin (the chief biophysical culprit of the on-going water crisis) through interviews, content analysis, archival work, photography, and prosopography. Whereas critical human geography and public policy analysts have made robust contributions to the analysis of water issues coming from interdisciplinary perspectives like Urban Political Ecology and Natural Resource Economics, this chapter outlines a sociological approach to environmental policy arguing that the emergence of “neo-conservationism” (i.e., a return to principles of societal sustainability in inhospitable terrain) in the Western United States is not so much the result of an unquestioned domination by economic, political and bureaucratic elites whose primary motivation lies in removing obstacles to the process of capital accumulation (such as political economist Max Weber’s thesis of power asserted), but that the water policies observed can be productively interpreted as an example of a provisional state of structural power relations between the different protagonists of this field, which can be observed as much from the banks of a river bed and the seemingly inconsequential offices of the state as from the high offices of political power.

Online at: https://editions-croquant.org/action-publique/876-les-structures-sociales-de-laction-publique-analyser-les-politiques-publiques-avec-la-sociologie-des-champs.html