Despite being a water-rich country, Nicaragua struggles to secure clean water access for many of its residents. In addition to distributional and water quality issues, a prolonged drought affecting all regions of the country has compounded preexisting governance challenges to ensuring rural water needs. This article focuses on a rural community along the southwest Pacific Coast of Tola, Nicaragua, where tourism development and drought converge to produce and exacerbate water insecurity. This article examines this water insecurity in the context of two recent national water laws in Nicaragua (passed in 2007 and 2010 respectively) that sought to provide a more comprehensive legal framework for freshwater water governance. Drawing upon semi-structured interviews and groundwater and meteorological data, we contend that water laws have not effectively mediated the hydrological effects of prolonged drought and tourism development, resulting in pronounced water insecurity for local populations in Tola. We cast the findings of this research as relevant to other water insecure areas in Latin America where industry development and weak policy implementation impact the creation and resolution of local water security-including insecurity compounded by increased climatic variability.

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The Bolivian ‘water wars' of 2000 cast the international spotlight on civil society interventions aimed at reversing neoliberal economic agendas. However, few studies have examined the ways in which activists move from protest to proactive policy formation in these cases of ‘contentious politics'. Drawing on extensive field research, I argue that the Nicaraguan anti‐water privatisation social movement has expanded the contours of Nicaraguan democracy in two ways: (a) through improving the inclusiveness and accountability of existing representative institutions of government, including policy‐making processes, and (b) through creating extra‐institutional democratic spaces and practices.