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

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.