Abstract
Bolivia has influenced the international water arenas as a pioneer of the Human Water Rights Declaration before the United Nations General Council. However, despite a positive but rather ideological evolution, the country is still facing several water challenges in practice. Water governance is extremely complex due to intricate social structures, important spatial and temporal differences in the availability of water resources, ecological fragility, and weak institutions. A Transdisciplinary Learning Community approach has been adopted by the Universidad Católica Boliviana to take into account the complexity of the water problems caused by social, hydrological, and ecological system imbalances. In this approach, researchers and non-academic actors work closely together to integrate different ways of conceiving, using, valuing, and deciding on water issues. The approach aims at co-creating resilient solutions by recovering and restoring not only the ecological system, but also the social system in which all actors are aware of their role and responsibility. We explain the challenges and concerns raised by this approach in a case study of the Katari River Basin (KRB), which is impacted by a high degree of contamination that is mainly caused while crossing El Alto city, leading to dramatic consequences for the Lake Titicaca ecosystem and its surrounding communities.
Highlights
Water is becoming a scarce resource with difficult access in many places
We start this section with an analysis of how water policies have evolved in Bolivia and how this has impacted the socio-ecological conditions in the river basins in recent history; we analyze more in depth the challenges for collaborative water governance in the Katari River Basin
Integrated Water Management and the Challenge of Collaborative Governance in Bolivia In Bolivia, water governance has struggled intensively with the wicked interplay of social, ecological, and economic factors that go beyond the conventional scope of technically informed management
Summary
For more than 844 million people in the world, basic drinking water is still a dream, and for another 2.3 billion people who lack basic sanitation services, the Millennium Development Goals on water and sanitation have not been fulfilled [1]. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), diseases associated with the lack of drinking water, adequate sanitation, and hygiene are still one of the main causes of mortality for millions of inhabitants of developing countries [2]. Half of the water in drinking water supply systems in developing countries is lost through leaks, a lack of maintenance, poor dimensioning, illicit connections, and/or vandalism. Water has become a crucial element for socio-economic development. Water is such a necessary resource that its infrastructure
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