This thesis is about the multiple territories which dispute the shape and control of the development of the Trahunco-Quitrahue watershed, at Cerro Chapelko, Neuquén province in Argentinean Patagonian. Built into these disputes are the struggles of Mapuce peoples -indigenous peoples of the region- for the recognition in practice of their indigenous rights and the implications these have for natural resources management policies and actions, as well as for participation in decision-making processes. This study began focusing on a proposal of local and provincial water agencies to resolve local water demands by creating a water users association proposed for a small watershed49, the Trahunco stream in San Martín de los Andes (SMA), Patagonia. This territory was claimed by Mapuce communities and hosted several tourism enterprises. As fieldwork developed, the unravelling of the multiple realities involved in the water policy process, whether through the WUA or outside of it, made me broaden the scope of the research. The interethnic character of the site is reflected in its multiple actors, which include among others, tourism investors and allied businessmen, employees and administrators of an International Ski resort, different state agencies relating to the use and control of water resources and the impact of development projects - and two Mapuce indigenous communities, one of them very active in a Mapuce political organisation. All have different views, interests, possibilities and rights in respect to how development is to be defined. Therefore, once into the writing of this text, I decided that the notion of territory was the most appropriate for bringing together into the analysis the multiple dimensions intertwined at this local water policy implementation process. Territory is a concept that allows articulating the processes of social interactions and relationships, disputes for resource uses and control and, identity formation. The main questions of the research are: -What are the social interfaces of the WUA in San Martín de los Andes and how and why are the different meanings, projects and representations negotiated? -What are the processes involved in creating alternative policy spaces as Mapuce countertendencies for furthering their indigenous rights and their notions of territory? For answering these and other nested questions, I followed an actor-oriented perspective which engages with ethnographic research and participant observation as one of my main research strategies. This implied social interaction with the groups researched within their daily activities, gathering information in a systematic, non intrusive way, in order to get a view from ‘within’ the location selected for study. It required entering the fieldwork without a “formal hypothesis” but only with a preliminary comprehension of the problem to be studied. These notions guided the first steps of fieldwork, allowing for an accommodation to the circumstances found and the identification of what the actors consider as the problem around the topic of my interest as a researcher. My primary interest was to do research on the processes of genesis and implementation of a Water Users Association. While doing participant observation I combined a number of research techniques such as informal and formal discussions, individual interviews and meetings with focus groups. Attendance at local meetings, works and other events such as street protests, celebrations, markets, also drew attention to some aspects of the research and led me to new, unexpected insights and questions. For carrying out the fieldwork of this research, several periods of time were spent at San Martín de los Andes: seven months during 2001, three months in 2004 and shorter (one or two weeks) visits in 2003, 2006 and 2007. During the year between September 2006 and August 2007, I was working as a consultant within the Directorate of Indigenous Peoples and Natural Resources, at the National Secretariat of Environment and Sustainable Development. In this opportunity I worked closely to the Director, who is also one of the main Mapuce representatives of the political organisation whose actions this study focuses on. In this period, I met and shared discussions with many indigenous people's representatives and other Mapuce actors. This study analyses Mapuce peoples struggles for carving alternative policy spaces for enforcing indigenous rights and establish a ‘new relationship with the state’. For doing so, I firstly focused on a participatory water intervention in which a variety of actors were involved. Acknowledging the politics of participation in policy processes aiming to regulate the management of such vital resource led me to other arenas of action where actors excluded from the formal intervention, were actually generating new spaces of negotiation, not without conflicts. The social fields of interaction and dispute related to territory and sovereignty in Cerro Chapelko, at San Martín de los Andes, in the province of Neuquén are contextualized in the historically constructed cultural repertoires which influence today’s relationships between the hegemonic elites in power, other members of society and the Mapuce indigenous peoples of the region. Despite the formal recognition of indigenous rights in the national Constitution and the state’s agreements to International Conventions, the indigenous peoples of Argentina do not have access to their enforcement. Contemporary debates about the pre-existence of indigenous peoples in the region still influence the practical recognition of their rights. This is not a minor issue due to the relevance it has for exercising the autonomy in their territories. This permeates into the workings of state institutions involved in water, natural resources and environment management and control. At local level, the study focuses in the particular workings of such institutions in the process of implementation of a participatory water policy that brings together the multiple users at the watershed level, leading to the creation of a Water Users Association. The dynamics of this process reveal the processes of inclusion and exclusion that emerge out of these interfaces, so much related to the denial or ignorance of indigenous rights. The study shows how contemporary local state agencies manage to reproduce the state’s historical notion of territory as a homogenizing process of control and the denial of the rights of indigenous peoples. The exclusion of Mapuce political organisation from the scheme to develop a Water Users Association was not a cul-de-sac for them to pursue their political project. The strategies and tactics that the Mapuce deployed to create alternative policy spaces for their exercise of territoriality, which is a main element of their struggle for the recognition of indigenous rights, resulted a much more effective way for their participation in decision making. The construction of these countertendencies, that Mapuce call in general ‘the new relationship with the state’, emerge as alternative modernities which by incorporating difference into policy agendas and institutions, start to put in practice a recognition that in general is still only on paper. Therefore, the watershed is a site where multiple notions of territory are being disputed through different means and for different interests. Tourism developments advance their economic territorial projects supported by the sector’s businesses at local and regional level, The state, which influences the control through interventions as tools, shapes the territory sometimes favouring such projects. Mapuce people’s community members and political organisation, and their allies from different civil society sectors, claim their rights to participate in such definitions and propose new forms of participation. The meanings of ‘participation’ therefore, become a central issue of debate among these different actors struggling to get their notions on the political agenda. A main issue for getting indigenous rights right therefore, is the notion of differential modes of citizenship rooted in the concept of autonomy expressed within a pluri-national state, whose institutions and parliament should include Mapuce -and other peoples, as such. This is the issue from which all other aspects of indigenous rights unfold, therefore, constituting the motor of Mapuce peoples political movement. However, state institutions approach participation as an invitation to stakeholders to be informed on policy programmes and actions. Participation is reduced to a method or technique even in the best of the cases. From the discourses of state functionaries and legal advisors, in this study it becomes clear that the issue of differentiated citizenship is not incorporated into how institutions work. The coexistence of multiple territories without conflict requires that the state and wider society acknowledge in practice these rights the Mapuce are defending. Otherwise, the meanings of participation that are embedded in institutional practices that in fact over-rule or ignore these rights, most probably will continue to generate conflicts and disputes. <br/
