Goldmining, dispossessing the commons and Multi-scalar responses : The case of Cerro de San Pedro, Mexico 1

This chapter elaborates how conflict arose over common land and water resources between the inhabitants of Cerro de San Pedro and MSX, causing severe environmental impacts and affecting local communities at large. It explains how the communities redefine and reshape their level of engagement in the management of the commons, and how they create multi-actor and multi-scalar opposition networks strategized to defend the commons by interlinking the local with the national and global. Through multi-actor networks that creatively engage in multi-scalar action, mining-affected population groups together with a variety of mutually complementary advocacy and policy actors have worked hard to balance the two sides' negotiating power and force MSX to clean up the mining residue and facilitate alternative local livelihood opportunities. In this way, environmental justice struggles frame, deploy and entwine diverse scales and engage a plurality of complementary actors

Water governmentalities: The shaping of hydrosocial territories, water transfers and rural–urban subjects in Latin America

With increasing water consumption and pollution in cities and expanding urban areas, impacts on rural areas as water extraction and waste disposal zones are intensifying. To unravel these hydro-territorial dynamics, this paper studies the intersecting and overlapping Foucauldian ‘arts of government’ (‘governmentalities’) deployed to convey water from rural to urban areas in three Latin American cities: Lima (Peru), San Luis Potosí (Mexico) and Bucaramanga (Colombia). We examine conventional (cemented) water transfers, broadly promoted payment for ecosystem services schemes and their conjunction, combining scholarship about hydrosocial territories and governmentality. We demonstrate how particular urban-based imaginaries about rural areas, their inhabitants, norms, practices and identities become embedded in governmentality schemes, and how these are justified, materialized and sustained, producing particular entwined rural–urban subjectivities. We explore how these are accepted, negotiated or contested. Our application of the governmentalities framework to analyze the material and socio-political effects of rural–urban water transfers contributes to existing scholarship on the (re)shaping of rural–urban hydrosocial territorialities showing the ‘hidden’ and ‘invisible’ workings of subjectification. It also contributes to the literature on governmentalities by scrutinizing the importance of technology (including physical infrastructure) in creating rural subjects