Drought and exceptional laws in Spain: the official water discourse

Only recently securitization research is exploring which mechanisms are used to securitize the water discourse and how securitization affects decision-making processes. In this context, legal texts convey messages and shape public actions, but have been rarely considered in the analysis of water securitization. Moreover, security is usually meant as the absence of violent conflict, while discourse securitization can exist also where there are only vaguely defined threats to the society. This may be the case of water scarcity associated with drought. This paper undertakes a policy frame analysis of nine exceptional laws passed in Spain during the 2005–2008 drought, to address the following questions: To what extent and how can the water discourse in legal texts be securitized? and What are the consequences of that securitization? The analysis shows that securitization is achieved using both linguistic and institutional mechanisms. Dry spells are presented as exceptional situations and using alarmist terms, even if drought is inherent to Spain’s Mediterranean climate. The sense of urgency is used to fast-track the approval of measures that could be part of ordinary water planning. The securitization of the water discourse contributes to consolidate an existing water paradigm, which, in the case of Spain, is based on State-subsidized, technical and legal measures addressing water scarcity (real or exaggerated). It is an example of a “creeping” securitization of the water discourse, meant as the dramatization of otherwise natural circumstances to spur projects and investments conceived for other purposes.