Local Water Management in the Andes: Interplay of Domination, Power and Collective Participation

Abstract

Water management, rights, and distribution practices manifest themselves ­simultaneously in water infrastructure and technology, normative arrangements, and organizational frameworks for operating and maintaining water control systems, each embedded in diverse political-economic and cultural-symbolic contexts. This situation implies that technology, organizations, culture, political economy, and ecology fundamentally influence and structure possibilities of water captured in contexts of cultural diversity and environmental change. Water rights analysis requires an interdisciplinary focus – one that allows for analyzing the politically contested nature of water resources and water rights as well as the interacting domains that constitute water control systems. I use the concept of ‘domains’ of water rights and control not in the sense of ‘arenas’ or social fields of interaction with territorial and political boundaries, but as (distinct but interlinked) thematic fields producing knowledge on water control. Irrigation water control studies in the Andean region, like investigations and narratives from other parts in the world, have shown the need for conceptualizations that dynamically interrelate the organizational, technical, and normative as interdependent ‘subsystems’ of water control that interact with cultural and political-economic forces and structures of their societal context.

This paper is largely based on elements of my book, The Rules of the Game and the Game of the Rules. Normalization and Resistance in Andean Water Control (Wageningen, The Netherlands: Wageningen University, 2008).