California’s sprawling network of aqueducts and dams is often cited as the embodiment of a high-modernist approach to resource management. But while once widely celebrated, in recent decades this infrastructural system and the institutions that manage it have been the subject of growing criticism and shrinking funding streams. Based on ethnographic research among employees at several California water agencies, this article explores the sense of nostalgia and diminished power experienced by the workers tasked with overseeing these networks. These emic perspectives are frequently articulated in the form of unfavorable comparisons to an imagined past, when the workers believe that their agencies were better resourced and civil engineers’ technical expertise was more respected by the public that they served. Analyzing these stories of declining influence and capacity, the article shows how understandings of individual and institutional power can be conditioned by past paradigms of regional development and technocratic statecraft.

加利福尼亚州庞大的渡槽和水坝网络经常被认为是高度现代主义资源管理方法的体现。但是，虽然曾经广受赞誉，但近几十年来，这种基础设施系统和管理它的机构一直受到越来越多的批评和资金流的缩减。本文基于对加州几家水务机构员工的人种学研究，探讨了负责监督这些网络的工人所经历的怀旧感和权力减弱的感觉。当工人们相信他们的机构资源更好，土木工程师的技术专长更受他们所服务的公众尊重时，这些主位观点经常以与想象中的过去进行不利比较的形式表达出来。