Abstract
Just as in other parts of Spain, the Guadalhorce Valley, Málaga, has a long history of policies based on ‘hydraulic utopianism’ (regenerationist and Franco-ist), bent on ‘reorganizing’ political, geographic, and human nature. Residents of the neighboring sub-basin, the Río Grande valley, have seen how these policies, designed to transfer rural water to modern urban centers, have turned the Guadalhorce hydrosocial territory into a ‘hydraulic dystopia’. In this article, we examine how Río Grande valley residents mobilized to maintain control over the development and use of their resources, livelihoods, and knowledge systems, when modernist-urbanist policies planned to take their water from a major dam on the Río Grande. Interviewing actors at different scales we examined how this anti-dam movement organized massively in a creative, multi-actor, and multi-scale network. Our results also show that this unified, successful fight against the ‘common enemy’, the mega-hydraulic construction, has become more complex, as threats crop up not only from the ‘city over there’ but also from ‘internal’ hydro-territorial transformations. These sprout from policies to modernize traditional irrigation systems, supposedly to ‘save water’, but critical voices assume that it is all about passing on the ‘surplus’ to Málaga city, or using that water to expand agribusiness. We conclude that the challenge lies in critically integrating multiple forms of knowledge, stakeholders, and scales to both defend collective water management and creatively construct anti-hegemonic alternatives.
Highlights
Spain’s history of political and geographic re-organization is intimately linked to the ‘hydraulic utopia’ urged by the Regenerationist movement, and paradoxically, implemented during the Franco period [1,2,3,4]
Applying a political ecology approach to water control, the article discusses the findings from various periods of fieldwork (2015–2017)
The hierarchy of knowledge results from interactions, dialogues and contestations over values and meanings; the legitimacy or invisibility of knowledge hinges on power relationships, establishing forms of authority, normative frameworks, discursive guidelines, and orientation in allocating, controlling and distributing resources. In this battle of epistemological domains, as we show local groups and their culture and place-born knowledge respond actively to the imposition of knowledge to alter water distribution and governance patterns; they contest the reorganization of their hydrosocial territory
Summary
Spain’s history of political and geographic re-organization is intimately linked to the ‘hydraulic utopia’ urged by the Regenerationist movement, and paradoxically, implemented during the Franco period [1,2,3,4]. One such alliance is the ‘Coordinating Body to Defend the Río Grande’, belonging to the Guadalhorce basin in Málaga Province Through this case, we will illustrate how social mobilization has shown the capacity to construct social networks with diverse stakeholders, mobilize much of civil society, and challenge dominant modernistic discourses backing dam building and hydrosocial transformation of the sub-basin, see References [3,5,6,7]. We will illustrate how social mobilization has shown the capacity to construct social networks with diverse stakeholders, mobilize much of civil society, and challenge dominant modernistic discourses backing dam building and hydrosocial transformation of the sub-basin, see References [3,5,6,7] This gave rise to the Río Grande movement (hereafter the ‘Coordinating Body’) seeking to exercise hydro-ecological democracy and impact policy-making, in order to set the Río Grande’s water free. While some farmers and communities oppose this modernization of their irrigation systems, others see modernization and investment in their irrigation technologies as a guarantee to conserve their water rights and defend them when confronted with the powerful water interests of the city of Malaga
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have