Imaginaries of place in territorialization processes:Transforming the Oyacachi<i> páramos</i> through nature conservation and water transfers in the Ecuadorian highlands

How Ecuadorian páramos are perceived has drastically changed over the last five decades. From cold, hostile, and unproductive hinterlands, páramos have changed to become areas for biodiversity conservation and ‘water towers’ that ought to be protected to provide clean and abundant water for cities and irrigation. To understand how these changing perceptions of páramos relate to interventions and their on-the-ground negotiation by local communities, we develop the notion of imaginaries of place and explore its relations to notions of governmentality and territorialization. We show how, based on changing imaginaries of what páramos are, state and non-state interventions have tried to control the Oyacachi páramos in the Northern Ecuadorian Highlands for the specific purpose of nature and water conservation. At the same time, we show that these interventions are highly contested on-the-ground. This leads to confrontations, negotiations, and a re-definition of the imaginaries of place there exist. Our analysis expounds the relevance of understanding imaginaries of place and its close relations to interventions and their negotiation

Rooted Water Collectives in a Modernist and Neoliberal Imaginary: Threats and Perspectives for Rural Water Commons

Water schemes that rely on user (co-) ownership and collective action have been described in the irrigation sector for a long time. Still, interest in such forms of (co-) investment in the domestic/multiple use sector is more recent. To address the persisting issue of rural water service, (what has been coined) self-supply is proclaimed to be a (supposedly) low-cost, sustainable manner to attain the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). User (co-) investments are to be promoted and realized through the creation of an enabling policy environment and development of, and training on, low-cost technologies through government and NGO support and private sector-steered access to such technologies. In this article, we apply the Rooted Water Collectives (RWC) framework to describe two such schemes, one in South Africa and one in Switzerland. The data collection followed an action research methodology, with the main author being involved in interventions in all three schemes. We show here that these collectives create positions of purpose within societies and that what motivates people is to help themselves and contribute to the greater good of the community. This article shows that interventions to foster and sustain such collective actions that follow a neoliberal/modernist imaginary negatively affect their viability since these collectives, through their other-than-capitalist interactions, form part of and depend on an alternative imaginary. We conclude that interventions aiming to strengthen forms of collective action can only succeed if they recognize contextuality, unequal power relationships, and grass-rooted forms of interdependence and collaboration, and actively build on and work toward such alternative, more convivial imaginaries.</p