California was the last state in the country to adopt a regulatory frame for state-mandated management of groundwater. With the passing of the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act in 2014, the state embarked on an ambitious and long overdue effort to protect groundwater resources and ensure that all those dependent on this overdrafted resource would have access to it today and in the future. Ten years since the passage of this monumental law, groundwater has continued to be depleted and local agencies have struggled to create Groundwater Sustainability Plans that are adequate. The impacts of the law’s shortcomings are amplified in the perpetually water-poor San Joaquin Valley, where agricultural interests to water have a stronghold on local decisions regarding groundwater use and management and thousands of mostly low-income communities of color have lost access to water in their homes. While issues of water rights and unequal water access have a long history in California, from the settler colonial systems that were put in place under Spanish and British colonization, to unequal distribution of agricultural land, in our contemporary setting, these issues have spilled over to the management and governance of groundwater, replicating themselves in whose access to groundwater has been prioritized in groundwater management planning and how power shapes this prioritization. Focusing on the agricultural industry’s role in access, governance, and management of groundwater in the critically overdrafted San Joaquin Valley, this dissertation asks, what are the impacts on collaborative groundwater management when there is one stakeholder, the Agricultural Industry, as the main decision-maker? Through mixed-methods and employing the theoretical frames of critical race theory, structural power, discursive power, and collaborative governance, this dissertation assesses the long-standing hierarchies in groundwater use and appropriation and how they are reinforced and perpetuated through the implementation of SGMA, allowing the agricultural industry to dominate groundwater governance and management in the SJV. Ultimately, this dissertation interrogates California’s ability to manage groundwater collaboratively, by highlighting the agricultural industry’s role in the implementation of SGMA. The second chapter assesses California’s groundwater rights system by unpacking the problematic connection between private property rights and groundwater use and analyzes how that connection sets up a hierarchy within its groundwater users and uses in SGMA that puts the agricultural industry on a higher pedestal than any other user or use of groundwater. The third chapter explores how this hierarchy in California groundwater use is operationalized, by analyzing two dimensions of power and how the agriculture industry occupies them. In the fourth chapter, a qualitative content analysis of the Revised Groundwater Sustainability Plans, shows the implications of having a hierarchy of groundwater uses and the agricultural industry’s exercise of structural power by analyzing what users of groundwater were prioritized in the projects and management actions adopted in basins across the SJV. Collectively, I show the impacts that not addressing historical and racially contingent inequities in access to land and groundwater, legal hierarchies, and power asymmetries has had on SGMA implementation in the SJV. By doing this, I highlight how the SJV and California will to struggle to manage groundwater equitably and collaboratively so long as there is no change in law and/or critical actions from the state that addresses the unequal access to groundwater resources and the unequal prioritization of agricultural interests in the management of groundwater.