Water sharing offers insight into the everyday and, at times, invisible ties that bind people and households with water and to one another. Water sharing can take many forms, including so-called “pure gifts,” balanced exchanges, and negative reciprocity. In this paper, we examine water sharing between households as a culturally-embedded practice that may be both need-based and symbolically meaningful. Drawing on a wide-ranging review of diverse literatures, we describe how households practice water sharing cross-culturally in the context of four livelihood strategies (hunter-gatherer, pastoralist, agricultural, and urban). We then explore how cross-cutting material conditions (risks and costs/benefits, infrastructure and technologies), socio-economic processes (social and political power, water entitlements, ethnicity and gender, territorial sovereignty), and cultural norms (moral economies of water, water ontologies, and religious beliefs) shape water sharing practices. Finally, we identify five new directions for future research on water sharing: conceptualization of water sharing; exploitation and status accumulation through water sharing, biocultural approaches to the health risks and benefits of water sharing, cultural meanings and socio-economic values of waters shared; and water sharing as a way to enact resistance and build alternative economies.

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Minority communities in Louisiana have long been at the forefront of the struggle to achieve environmental justice. To date, much of this struggle has focused on communities located in the Mississippi River Chemical Corridor, where rural African American communities have historically been disproportionately impacted by the growth of the petrochemical industry. This research examines the broader oil and gas production chain and shows that minority groups residing in Louisiana's coastal zone have been increasingly disproportionately impacted by the development of the offshore oil and gas industry. Extracting and processing oil and gas is an energy-intensive undertaking that requires an expansive network of land-based infrastructure. This infrastructure includes gas processing plants, refineries, petrochemical plants, and a pipeline network that link extraction activities to production activities. In addition, there is extensive infrastructure associated with oil and gas development that is not usually considered within the oil and gas production hierarchy, such as platform fabrication, ship building, and pipe coating. Due to the often-conflicting geographies of risk and settlement, these hazards are not equitably distributed across social groups. Using a combined risk and proximity-based hazardousness of place model to assess the cumulative impacts of these industries, this research found that oil and gas development from 1980 through 2010 has increasingly impacted the Native American and Asian populations in coastal Louisiana, groups that have historically been dependent on the region's abundant fisheries. This research also found that racial and ethnic minority groups are more likely to be disproportionately impacted than other socially vulnerable population groups.

This paper presents the results of a collaborative planning process to develop an integrated coastal restoration plan for Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana that recognizes the knowledge, experience, and priorities of residents and local stakeholders. To achieve this goal, the research team convened a broad group of stakeholders who live and work in Plaquemines Parish, including representatives of the seafood, navigation, and oil and gas industries, as well as residents, landowners, and those who are indigenous to the region, all of whom rely upon the ecosystem services provided by the wetlands, bays, and waterways for sustenance and wellbeing. Using a combination of local knowledge mapping and participatory modeling, the group worked with scientists to develop a restoration plan consisting of a suite of interlinked natural and nature-based solutions. The approach was intentionally interactive and iterative, creating a venue for open dialogue between residents, scientists, and resource users where no one source of knowledge was given primacy over another. Residents were able to contribute information regarding coastal restoration planning within their own communities, and a consensus plan for prioritizing restoration efforts in clusters was submitted for consideration as part of the State of Louisiana’s Coastal Master Plan process. Providing local stakeholders with direct access to scientists allowed their local knowledge to be translated into data products that could be more readily ingested into numerical models and other scientific planning tools.

Shadow networks can play an important role in facilitating transitions toward more sustainable and resilient socialecological systems. Yet, few studies have explored the microdynamics of shadow networks to understand what makes them more or less effective in sustainability transitions. This article examines stakeholder roles and social influence in support of radical innovations over time in a shadow network focused on urban water sustainability in the Colorado River basin. Using qualitative analysis of meeting transcripts and social network analysis, we analyzed the roles of stakeholders from market, government, and scientific sectors in advocating for and influencing other shadow-network members to consider incremental and radical innovations over a 5-year period. The results show that, in our case, stakeholders from the market sector suggested most of the radical innovations. Government-aligned stakeholders mostly supported others' suggestions and facilitated support for niche innovations to become more widespread. Science stakeholders were supportive of others' proposals but were never the source of new ideas for radical innovations; they focused more on interrogating the evidence for and efficacy of others' proposals. These results illustrate how shadow networks can nurture support for radical innovations over time, even when most network members are aligned with the current regime. This research yields new insights about shadow networks in sustainability transitions, and points to the need for more focused analysis of stakeholder roles and social influences within shadow networks to help understand how radical innovations gain support and become better institutionalized.