Laura María Torres

Socioeconomic Issues in Irrigation Literature: Approaches, Concepts, and Meanings

“Knowledge Assessment on Sustainable Water Resources Management for Irrigation” (KASWARMI) project made evident cases of unsuccessful or non sustainable irrigation experiences that could only be explained by the underestimation of deep socioeconomic issues. This involves not only the social factors related to the implementation/ adoption of new or better technologies by a wide spectrum of users but also the way in which water use and irrigation projects are conceived, planned and implemented by scientists, politicians and practitioners. The project was interested in assessing the social science inputs irrigation specialists receive. With this objective, this paper presents a state of the art on some selected socioeconomic subjects as they appear in the irrigation literature, and analyzes the way in which they are conceived, thought and articulated with the more “technical” factors of irrigation. This should be useful to raise new avenues of research and to enhance articulation of “technical” and social science approaches in quest of a more close to sustainability irrigation practices. A first search covered eight of the most prestigious journals devoted to irrigation subjects. After this search yielded meager results in terms of the amount of papers found, a new search was conducted, without restraining to specific journals but moving freely with a deliberate thematic purpose. The results showed less socioeconomic issues than desirable in the papers within easy reach of irrigation engineers, a meager presence of Latin American cases and an approach to socioeconomic subjects that lack comprehensiveness, as they did not appear to be fully articulated with the technical subjects of irrigation.

Miradas e instrumentos para la catalogación de paisajes latinoamericanos. Perspectivas emergentes

The paper explores and discusses theoretical and instrumental tools associated with the production of Latin American landscapes from the perspective of networking. The analysis emphases on stressing current international instruments with arguments focused on elements and dimensions that explain and make sense on them. From a glaze that emphasizes social relations as territorializing agent, the document describes the theoretical perspectives that support the design of the instruments to apprehend and recognize the social production of landscapes. Rather than a finished work itself, is explored some of the converging work lines within a research group in training, the Inter-University Network of Latin American Landscapes (RIPLA) In the first part, the paper presents the analysis of the of instruments construction process in the Latin American context. Then, three research lines that converge in the RIPLA landscapes approach are exposed. Finally, it addresses the agreements, discrepancies, challenges and opportunities for the knowledge production in the framework of cooperative work in net