The Long-Term Outcomes of Recognizing Indigenous Property Rights to Water

(2020) find that the speed with which settle- ment occurs after a tribe initiates the adjudication process is a function of several factors that are largely exogenous to the reservations, such as the majority party in Congress and the number of off-reservation parties included in the adjudication (Sanchez et al., 2020).12 Despite the largely exogenous nature of congressional actions to finalize Wi. [...] 21 We use the estimates from column 5 in Panel A of Tables 1 and 2 to calculate the share of total reservation water use that is attributable to changes in land use associated with the settlement of a Winters right.20 To do so, we take the average predicted change in land use for a parcel and multiply by the average parcel size and number of parcels on each reservation. [...] To assess the potential importance of limited large-scale infrastructure in explaining the small impacts of Winters settlements, we exploit the fact the the Bureau of Indian Affairs constructed irrigation infrastructure projects on some reservations in the early 20th century. [...] The p-value for the sum of the allotted interaction term and the baseline fee simple effect, reported in the bottom of the table, indicates that increases on allotted and tribal parcels are not statistically different from zero in most cases. [...] We construct a counterfactual of changes to land use as the result of a settlement to understand the extent to which under- utilization of settlement water is the result of land tenure constraints.