Abstract
ABSTRACTThe article examines how the design and governance of Peru’s water infrastructure shape the social practices and cultural values stakeholders engage in and draw on when negotiating water rights in a year of drought. Reviewing ethnographic data on a large irrigation project in south-western Peru, we discuss how the project both perpetuates power relations between water experts, authorities and users and creates room to challenge its hierarchical organization. The project’s infrastructural assemblage of state and community canals offers an interesting case to explore how the stakeholder cooperation encouraged by Peru’s water law produces hydrosocial communities.
Highlights
Propelled by the export of natural resources, Peru’s recent economic boom has aggravated the country’s water crisis and urged the state to take measures to calm social tensions and meet the growing water demand of the thriving mining and agricultural industries
Its point of departure is Peru’s current water crisis, which has exacerbated existing social frictions in the country’s water governance and prompted the country to introduce a new water law which encourages water stakeholders to cooperate in a new institutional setting
To understand the social and political structures underpinning such conflicts and the hierarchical relations arising from large-scale irrigation projects, a group of scholars propose that we study modern water management as a hydrosocial cycle, which is ‘a socio-natural process by which water and society make and remake each other over space and time’ (Linton & Budds, 2014, p. 170), and which is made at the interface of political power, social agency, expert knowledge and cultural identity (Boelens, 2014)
Summary
Propelled by the export of natural resources, Peru’s recent economic boom has aggravated the country’s water crisis and urged the state to take measures to calm social tensions and meet the growing water demand of the thriving mining and agricultural industries. The Colca-Siguas Multisector Coordination Committee is an institutionalized network that ALA/Colca-Siguas-Chivay uses to convene representatives from the Majes Siguas Special Project’s stakeholders, which include AAA/Caplina-Ocoña, ALA/Colca-SiguasChivay, AUTODEMA, SEDAPAR (Servicio de Agua Potable y Alcantarillado de Arequipa – the regional public sanitation company of Arequipa) and the four water user groups that the project supplies These actors meet monthly to determine the water volume that is available in the infrastructure and negotiate its distribution among the user groups. Juan’s allegation against Joyas and his plans to reclaim La Campiña’s rights to Hualca Hualca’s water has brought new weight to old strife in Cabanaconde by stirring up water users’ conflicting interests and the different social histories that fuel them His use of Lardi’s science-based estimates of Hualca Hualca’s water flow to support his attempt to modernize La Campiña’s water management has pitted two sets of water values against each other: the state’s modern concept and Cabanaconde’s relational notion. The collaboration between the two men illustrates the challenges the project’s experts face in trying to create a hydrosocial community by attuning their own ideas of water management with the water values of the water users and the tension the project’s infrastructural design generates within the water users’ own communities
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