This article examines the formalization of rainwater harvesting (RWH) and the implications of new policy trends for water governance. Analysis of 96 RWH policies across the United States indicates three trends: (1) the 'codification' of water through administrative rather than public law; (2) the institutionalization of RWH through marketbased tools; and (3) the rise of policies at different spatial scales, resulting in greater institutional complexity, new bureaucratic actors, and potential points of friction. Drawing on the cases of Colorado and Texas, the article argues that states with diverse legal traditions of water enable more successful regulatory environments for downspout alternatives.

While maps have long been inf luential in the dissemination of geopolitical ideas, the critical geopolitical project often frames maps as evidence of the discourse it seeks to displace. As a result, very few maps appear on the pages of the field's most prominent journals. This paper explores this phenomenon and argues that novel approaches to mapping may actually strengthen critical geopolitical scholarship. We argue that scholars can learn much from contemporary approaches in critical cartography to provide geopolitical analysis with new, informative visualizations. We demonstrate this argument with an alternative cartographic representation of Kashmir. This paper makes two key contributions to critical geopolitics: (i) that alternative cartographic representations are well suited to aid in critiques of normative geopolitical ideas and (ii) that the map presented in this paper is but one way to illustrate emerging critical geopolitical scripts. Our hope is that this brief intervention to 'take back the map' will encourage likeminded scholars to (re)consider the merits of maps in articulating geopolitical narratives.