Community-Based Water Systems: Preserving Livelihood, Ecology, and Community

Abstract

In the high desert region of the southwestern United States, historical Spanish colonial and native Pueblo settlements long relied upon community-based water collection and distribution systems for irrigation and domestic use. This paper adopts a community-based planning approach to examine the ways in which the community water and irrigation systems—the acequias—today contribute to the maintenance of the cultural landscape and ecological balance in the face of development pressures on traditional land use and natural resources. The formal authority of the acequias—associations of irrigators maintaining and operating irrigation channels—as political subdivisions of the state provide a means for coordinated regional resource planning in concert with state and local government, although challenged by powerful economic and political interests.