Making and Remaking Drought in California: Tracing the Development of a Hybrid Social Problem and Scientific Fact

This paper examines the history of drought in California as a hybrid scientific fact and social problem from the mid-twentieth century to the present. We build upon a recent comparative-historical sociological framework, reiterated fact-making, that traces the social and scientific careers of facts by analyzing the shifting conditions of possibility, networks of expertise and social mobilization, and epistemic and material path dependencies that are built up around facts over time. In this way, reiterated fact-making helps us see how drought emerged as a social problem in California, and then how it was iteratively transformed into both a scientific fact and an object of expert governance/intervention over the past 70 years or so. The paper therefore extends reiterated fact-making to cases where a social problem is rendered into a scientific fact, rather than vice versa, making the framework suitable for a much broader swathe of topics. It also helps us understand how drought has developed as an object of knowledge and practice over the past few generations—combining deep continuity and radical transformation in the process—in ways that shape when and where it happens, who it impacts, and even what it is.