Monitored but not metered: How groundwater pumping has evaded accounting (and accountability) in the Western United States

The metering of individual groundwater use has become a common feature of recent interventions in groundwater governance in many parts of the world, though its actual implementation has been largely unsuccessful (Molle and Closas, 2021). Such metering efforts aim to curb groundwater over-extraction by quantifying – usually for the first time ever – who is pumping groundwater, how much, when, and where. This analysis takes a step back from these management interventions and asks how we got here. How did groundwater pumping become such a 'black box' and individual metering become the exception? And what are the consequences of this data gap? This paper explores these questions in the western United States where the close accounting of surface water diversions makes for a useful foil to largely unquantified individual groundwater pumping. I synthesise biophysical, political economic, and epistemic aspects of groundwater development to examine groundwater pumping’s un-quantification and I argue that attention must be paid to all three of these categories if we are to understand why groundwater metering is not more prevalent. I elaborate on these three dimensions – groundwater materiality, knowledge production, and power/profit – as I trace how groundwater’s un-metering has been produced, widened and maintained in the region over the last 140-plus years.