R.A. Boelens

Defining, researching and struggling for water justice: some conceptual building blocks for research and action

This article provides a framework for understanding water problems as problems of justice. Drawing on wider (environmental) justice approaches, informed by interdisciplinary ontologies that define water as simultaneously natural (material) and social, and based on an explicit acceptance of water problems as always contested, the article posits that water justice is embedded and specific to historical and socio-cultural contexts. Water justice includes but transcends questions of distribution to include those of cultural recognition and political participation, and is intimately linked to the integrity of ecosystems. Justice requires the creative building of bridges and alliances across differences.

Formal Law and Local Water Control in the Andean Region: A Fiercely Contested Field

Water access and control rights of peasant and indigenous communities in Andean countries are threatened. Vertical state law and intervention practices, as well as new privatization policies generally ignore, discriminate or undermine local normative frameworks. Recognition of diverse local rights and management frameworks is crucial for improving rural livelihoods but also for national food security. The paper outlines some important findings from the WALIR program (Water Law and Indigenous Rights). It analyses official water policy in the Andean region in relation to local socio-legal repertoires. The paper concludes that support of civil society platforms and peasant and indigenous groups for contestation or reformulation of official law is crucial for the survival of local management systems.

Hydrosocial territories: a political ecology perspective

ABSTRACT We define and explore hydrosocial territories as spatial configurations of people, institutions, water flows, hydraulic technology and the biophysical environment that revolve around the control of water. Territorial politics finds expression in encounters of diverse actors with divergent spatial and political-geographical interests. Their territory-building projections and strategies compete, superimpose and align to strengthen specific water-control claims. Thereby, actors continuously recompose the territory’s hydraulic grid, cultural reference frames, and political-economic relationships. Using a political ecology focus, we argue that territorial struggles go beyond battles over natural resources as they involve struggles over meaning, norms, knowledge, identity, authority and discourses.

Payment for environmental services and unequal resource control in Pimampiro, Ecuador

Payments for environmental services (PES) schemes are widely promoted to secure ecosystem services through incentives to the owners of land from which they are derived. Furthermore, they are increasingly proposed to foster conservation and poverty alleviation in the global South. In this article, we analyze the social relations that have shaped the design, implementation, and outcomes of a PES scheme in Pimampiro, Ecuador. While previous studies describe this case as successful, we show that the PES scheme reinforces existing social differences, erodes community organization, undermines traditional farming practices, and perpetuates inequalities in resource access in the “working” landscape inhabited by the upstream peasant community paid for watershed management. We argue that PES schemes are thus not neutral initiatives imposed upon blank canvases, but intersect with existing development trajectories and power relations. We conclude that analyses of PES need to look beyond conservation to critically examine local resource management and distribution.

Commoditizing Water Territories: The Clash between Andean Water Rights Cultures and Payment for Environmental Services Policies

In the Andean region, the growing water demand of expanding cities, extractive industries, and local and transnational agribusiness puts increasing pressure on the land and water resources of peasant and indigenous communities. Since the 1980s, neoliberal privatization policies have often supported strategies of economically powerful actors to control more water, enacted at the expense of small holders and community-controlled water use systems (Gelles 2000; Achterhuis, Boelens, and Zwarteveen 2010). However, it is common to see indigenous and peasant groups defending their “water territories,” considering them to be their home bases in terms of cultural belonging and as socio-productive spaces for creating and recreating livelihood, while simultaneously forming a “political community.”

Losing the watershed focus: a look at complex community-managed irrigation systems in Bolivia

Water policies tend to misrecognize the complexity of community-managed irrigation systems. This paper focuses on water allocation practices in peasant communities of the Bolivian interandean valleys. These communities manage complex irrigation systems, and tap water from several surface sources, many of them located outside the watershed boundaries, resulting in complex hydro-social networks. Historical claims, organizational capacity, resources availability, and geographical position and infrastructure are identified as the main factors influencing current water allocation. Examining the historical background and context-based conceptualizations of space, place and water system development are crucial to understanding local management practices and to improving water policies.

Territorial pluralism: water users’ multi-scalar struggles against state ordering in Ecuador’s highlands

Abstract Ecuadorian state policies and institutional reforms have territorialized water since the 1960s. Peasant and indigenous communities have challenged this ordering locally since the 1990s by creating multi-scalar federations and networks. These enable marginalized water users to defend their water, autonomy and voice at broader scales. Analysis of these processes shows that water governance takes shape in contexts of territorial pluralism centred on the interplay of divergent interests in defining, constructing and representing hydrosocial territory. Here, state and nonstate hydro-social territories refer to interlinked scales that contest and recreate each other and through which actors advance their water control interests.

Payment for Environmental Services: mobilising an epistemic community to construct dominant policy

The alleged capacity of Payment for Environmental Services (PES) to reach conservation policy goals, while reducing poverty in a cost-effective manner, makes it an extremely attractive development instrument for policymakers and international funding agencies. This article reconstructs the process of envisioning and building the National PES Strategy in Colombia. It reveals how this conservation policy has resulted from the mobilisation of the transnational/national PES epistemic community and its globally expanding discourse. The influential PES network generates internally defined standards of success that proceed without reference to empirical evidence as to the impacts of the implemented policies. PES adoption is influenced by regulatory instruments’ unsatisfactory outcomes, the ways in which market-environmentalist models induce profound indifference towards on-the-ground policy impacts, the discursive power and alignment properties of the PES policy epistemic community, and financial and political pressures by international banks and environmental NGOs.

Disputes over territorial boundaries and diverging valuation languages: the Santurban hydrosocial highlands territory in Colombia

ABSTRACT We examine the divergent modes of conceptualizing, valuing and representing the páramo highlands of Santurban, Colombia, as a struggle over hydrosocial territory. Páramo residents, multinational companies, government and scientists deploy territorial representations and valuation languages that interact and conflict with each other. Government politicians and neo-institutional scientists wish to reconcile diverging interests using a universalistic territorial representation, through game theory. This generates a hydrosocial imaginary that renders invisible actors’ power differentials that lie at the core of the territorial resource use conflict. We conclude that this ‘governmentality’ endeavour enables subtle, silent water rights re-allocation.

Hydropower, Encroachment and the Re-patterning of Hydrosocial Territory: The Case of Hidrosogamoso in Colombia

Mega-hydraulic projects tend to produce severe social and environmental impacts, with burdens and benefits unevenly distributed among different social groups, regions, and scales. This triggers socioenvironmental conflicts, since “territory” has incommensurable functions and values for the diverse parties. This article examines the dominant human-nature interactions that underlie recent hydropower developments and the reconfiguration of the hydrosocial network in Colombia’s Sogamoso basin. We use the Echelon of Rights Analysis (ERA) to examine conflicts over hydrosocial patterning, involving struggles over resources, norms, authority, and discourses. The Sogamoso mega-project highlights how modernist policies discursively frame clean energy, sustainable development, and public utility, while breaking up existing socioecological relationships and aligning water users, rights, and uses in new hydro-political network hierarchies. In Sogamoso, hydropower development discourse ends up declaring local subsistence activities illegal while denying existing rights frameworks. Therefore, crucial questions about water rights, legitimacy, and justice remain unasked and unanswered within political arenas.