Who Governs the Aquifer? is a documentary and research project that expands the local focus of Dry Wells of the Paso Basin: A Tragedy of the Commons into a statewide investigation of groundwater democracy in California. The film examines groundwater sustainability agencies and the politics of representation in the management of overdrafted aquifers.

Under the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act of 2014, more than 200 local agencies now determine how the overdrafted aquifers in their care will be measured, allocated, conserved, and restricted. These decisions will shape the future of rural households, farms, tribal communities, ecosystems, and towns across the state.

The project compares agencies with different governance structures: those dominated by large agricultural landowners, water districts, developers, and other local elites; those that include small farmers, domestic well users, working people, environmental advocates, and Indigenous communities; and those responsible for primarily urban, mixed-use, or non‑agricultural groundwater basins. Through public records research, interviews, meeting observation, and documentary filming, the project asks how governance structures shape whose water is protected, whose losses are normalized, and whose claims become part of the public record.

Visually, the project moves between meeting rooms, public records, dry domestic wells, irrigation infrastructure, and everyday life in communities whose futures depend on groundwater decisions—bringing institutional process into contact with lived experience.