Water Struggles, Citizenship and Governance in Latin America
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Dialogue
Water Struggles, Citizenship and Governance in Latin America JOSE´ ESTEBAN CASTRO
ABSTRACT Jose´ Esteban Castro explores some of the main connections between social struggles over water and the exercise of substantive citizenship and democratic governance in Latin America. He focuses the attention on some of the key analytical distinctions for the study of water struggles in Latin America and elsewhere, and explores the ongoing and emerging trends characterizing these struggles. KEYWORDS water inequality; water injustice; social change; privatization; democratization
Different forms of water struggles in Latin America A first categorization of the events of social struggle over water identified in Latin America since the 1970s leads us to broadly split these into (a) ecocentric and (b) anthropocentric water struggles.1 This first analytical distinction is an artificial device given that in practice most cases are likely to fall partially on both sides of the divide, but the distinction is not entirely arbitrary and it is very useful to highlight specific aspects of the process. On the one hand, water experts insist on the importance of keeping the analytical differentiation between aquatic ecosystems and the water services based on them, among other reasons because historically there has been a separation between both areas of activity and this is often reflected in the legal and institutional systems, in the water management practices and also in the division of labour between the different disciplines producing scientific knowledge about water. On the other hand, it is possible to identify a degree of divergence between social struggles concerned with the protection of aquatic ecosystems (e.g. from pollution, depletion, loss of biodiversity or the negative impacts on the water cycle and water-based wildlife caused by severe human intrusion through large-scale water infrastructures) and those directed at defending the rights of contemporary humans to volumes of water and water-based services that are essential for survival and dignified living conditions. This is an important consideration because the internal contradictions at the interior of the social and political movements concerned with water are often the expression of distinctive, even antagonistic, material interests, beliefs, values, principles, and goals, which justifies our preliminary classification.We do not assume that these contradictions are in principle unavoidable or intractable, but they are the result of specific historical processes Development (2008) 51, 72–76. doi:10.1057/palgrave.development.1100440
Castro: Water Struggles in Latin America characterizing the development of the environmental movement at large (Mart|¤ nez Alier, 2002: 1^15) and, unsurprisingly, they also characterize the internal contradictions between the actors engaged in water struggles in Latin America and elsewhere.
Contentions around development Very often actors who are engaged with the protection of fragile water ecosystems and aquatic wildlife (World Wi
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