The Social Character of Water

Abstract

This chapter introduces our main arguments concerning the interrelation between water conflicts and the social struggle over the territory of citizenship in the Basin of Mexico. This connection has been largely neglected in the literature for a number of reasons, perhaps owing mainly to the overriding weight of physical-natural constraints on the control and management of water resources and services, which may explain the predominance of techno-scientific explanations to problems in this field. However, this prevailing approach tends to neglect the existence of protracted social inequalities in the access to water and safe water services which are the cause of enormous suffering for millions in the basin, and a major factor in precluding them from full membership of their society. This work attempts to make a contribution to better understanding the main factors underlying these unacceptable conditions.

‘The immanent regularities of social figurations are identical neither with regularities of the “mind”, of individual reasoning, nor with regularities of what we call “nature”, even though functionally all these different dimensions of reality are indissolubly linked to each other.’—Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process