Restructuring and rescaling water governance in mining contexts: the co-production of waterscapes in Peru

The governance of water resources is prominent in both water policy agendas and academic scholarship. Political ecologists have made important advances in reconceptualising the relationship between water and society. Yet, while they have stressed both the scalar dimensions, and the politicised nature, of water governance, analyses of its scalar politics are relatively nascent. In this paper, we consider how the increased demand for water resources by the growing mining industry in Peru reconfigures and rescales water governance. In Peru, the mining industry’s thirst for water draws in, and reshapes, social relations, technologies, institutions and discourses that operate over varying spatial and temporal scales. We develop the concept of waterscape to examine these multiple ways in water is co-produced through mining, and become embedded in changing modes and structures of water governance, often beyond the watershed scale. We argue that an examination of waterscapes avoids the limitations of thinking about water in purely material terms, structuring analysis of water issues according to traditional spatial scales and institutional hierarchies, and taking these scales and structures for granted

Securing the market: Water security and the internal contradictions of Chile’s Water Code

Chile has operated a system of private tradable water rights since 1981. In theory, this framework contributes to water security by instituting private property rights to water to enable permanent access, and by using market transactions to facilitate the reallocation of scarce water to ensure optimal distribution. Yet, since 2010, the country has faced critical water scarcity in several regions, arising from a combination of overexploitation and dry weather. The aim of this paper is to analyse the relationship between water markets and water security in Chile. It has two objectives: to examine how the water policy framework has shaped responses to acute water scarcity, based on a case study of the La Ligua river basin during the 2014–15 drought, and to explore how water-society relations have influenced the nature and implications of these responses. The analysis employs a relational approach to water security that attends to the configuration of hydrosocial relations, as opposed to the supply of water. I make three related arguments. First, the framework fostered supply-led responses to drought that were counterproductive to water security. Second, these responses can be attributed to the privatised and individualised hydrosocial relations under the market system, which now present an internal contradiction by threatening to undermine it. Third, supply-led responses were not merely pragmatic solutions to water shortages, but a means to neutralise this internal contradiction so as to stave off the potential destabilisation of the water policy framework

Governance and water security: The role of the water institutional framework in the 2013–15 water crisis in São Paulo, Brazil

Between 2013 and 2015, São Paulo experienced a major drought. With drinking water reservoirs reduced to 5% of their capacity, the water supply company, SABESP, implemented measures to reduce household water consumption, and the government of São Paulo state overruled watershed committees to prioritize the supply of water to SABESP. While attention centered on freak meteorological conditions, the management of water resources and water services also played a role; in particular the conversion of SABESP from a state utility to a mixed capital company in which the state government held a majority stake. As the crisis abated, the state government announced measures to increase ‘water security’, comprising water diversion infrastructure to increase supply alongside governance reforms to improve state-led responses. This paper examines the relationship between water security and water governance in the context of the São Paulo water crisis. We demonstrate how processes and structures that are broadly characteristic of ‘good governance’ both exacerbated the effects of the drought and constrained responses to it. We make two related arguments. First, the mutually-beneficial commercial relationship between the state government and SABESP was fundamental in shaping these dynamics. Second, the drought experience, shaped by these dynamics, has legitimized a shift back towards a centralized, top-down and supply-led approach to water. This is discursively framed as envisaging future ‘water security’, yet serves to enhance SABESP’s revenue streams, and consequently state government finances. We thus contend that the conventional view that good governance is conducive to water security needs to be reevaluated

Villagization and access to water resources in the Middle Awash Valley of Ethiopia: Implications for climate change adaptation

Since the 1970s, the Government of Ethiopia has implemented villagization, whereby nomadic pastoralist groups are supported to develop (more) sedentary lifestyles and livelihoods. Villagization has been officially promoted to encourage diversification from livestock herding to agricultural cultivation, and to fulfil basic needs through infrastructure and services. From the late 2000s, villagization was reintroduced for arid and semi-arid regions as a strategy for adaptation to climate change, as part of the country's green growth agenda. The aim of this paper is to evaluate to what extent this phase of villagization has contributed to adaptation strategies among pastoral and agro-pastoral communities, based on an empirical analysis of four villagised sites in the Middle Awash Valley using qualitative data collected between 2014 and 2018. Perceptions and experiences of villagization varied across individuals, households, villages, and districts. While villagization has generally delivered infrastructure and services, and offered income diversification to those able to access irrigated agriculture, its implementation has been partial and uneven, and it has reproduced previous problems of resource scarcity while creating new risks and vulnerabilities. We argue that villagization may play a role in some aspects of adaptation, if programmes address the drivers of livelihood change, and embed equity and rights

Desalination and the disarticulation of water resources: Stabilising the neoliberal model in Chile

In recent years, seawater desalination has become a more viable and common solution to water scarcity around the world. Desalination is a supply-led solution in that it produces additional water, rather than manages demand for existing resources. Although a growing body of work has analysed the environmental and social implications of desalination, desalinated water has to date been considered as an additional source that fulfils demand, with little attention to how it integrates with existing sources, and to what effect(s). In this paper, we employ the framework of the hydrosocial cycle to analyse how desalination reconfigures the social relations of control over water and reworks waterscapes in Chile. Using two case studies of Antofagasta and Petorca in the drought-affected north, which are dominated by export industries – mining and agriculture, respectively – we argue that desalination serves to disarticulate drinking water from freshwater, with implications for economic growth, social development, and water policy. We show that desalination entails more than providing additional water to alleviate shortages, and rather constitutes a strategy that permits the reorganisation of water sources so as to permit new forms of capital accumulation, through both the water industry as well as the major industries that are threatened by scarcity. We argue that this has three important implications. First, replacing freshwater with desalinated water for human consumption changes the social relations of control over water, by rendering consumers dependent on desalination plants and their risks. Second, this disarticulation serves to liberate freshwater to sustain the same industries that encroached on drinking water sources. Third, as a supply-led solution, desalination alleviates some of the water shortages that had been attributed to Chile's water markets model, thereby reducing pressure for reform

The temporal fragility of infrastructure: Theorizing decay, maintenance, and repair

Recent studies have reconceptualized infrastructure as comprising both material and social processes, thus offering insights into lived experiences, governance, and socio-spatial reordering. More specific attention to infrastructure’s temporality has challenged its supposed inertia and inevitable completeness, leading to an engagement with questions of the dynamics of infrastructure over different phases of its lifespan, and their generative effects. In this paper, we advance these debates through a focus on the processes of decay, maintenance, and repair that characterize such phases of infrastructural life, by exploring how specific infrastructures are materially shaped by, and shape, social, political, and socio-ecological arrangements. Our intervention has two related aims: firstly, to conceptualize decay, maintenance, and repair as both temporal phases of infrastructure’s dynamic materiality and its specific affective conditions; and, secondly, to trace how these phases of infrastructural life rework embodied labor, differentiated citizenship, and socio-ecological relations. We argue that attention to infrastructure's ‘temporal fragility’ elucidates the articulation between everyday capacities and desires to labor, the creation of and demands made by political constituents, and the uneven distribution of opportunities and resources

Advancing human capabilities for water security: A relational approach

We argue that a relational water security framework informed by the capabilities approach offers new ways to consider politics and cultures of water. Each dimension allows us to better contextualize water security beyond just an object (H2O) to be secured for a certain population. Instead, the relational perspective demands a fuller consideration of the political structures and processes through which water is secured, with emphasis on the social relations of access as opposed to simply the politics around water supply. We also attend to cultural dimensions, such as the meanings of water and customary practices that are not easily captured by standardized metrics. By including these dimensions, we necessarily broaden analytical space to evaluate water security as a relational and dynamic process tied to lived experience rather than as solely parameterized conditions in relation to access, quality, or availability of water. We first move to explain our broader conceptualization of water security as linked to human capabilities, then explore in more detail the specific engagements with politics and culture in the sections that follow