The Struggle for Water in Peru

The Struggle for Water in Peru PDF Author: Paul B. Trawick
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 0804731381
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 367

Get Book Here

Book Description
This ecological history of peasant society in the Peruvian Andes focuses on the politics of irrigation and water management in three villages whose terraces and canal systems date back to Inca times. Set in a remote valley, the book tells a story of domination and resulting social decline, showing how basic changes in the use of land, water, and labor have been pivotal in transforming the indigenous way of life. The author carries out a comparison of contemporary practices in communities that vary systematically along certain dimensions. He analyzes the communities’ similarities and differences in hydraulic organization, landscaping, water use, and other variables. Strikingly diverse patterns appear in local practice, which prove to be the key to unraveling the area’s history. The book concludes by describing the recent intensification of a water conflict. This struggle between peasants and former landlords ultimately led villagers to rise up against the national government. The story culminates in the violent intrusion of the revolutionary group known as Shining Path.

The Struggle for Water in Peru

The Struggle for Water in Peru PDF Author: Paul B. Trawick
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 0804731381
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 367

Get Book Here

Book Description
This ecological history of peasant society in the Peruvian Andes focuses on the politics of irrigation and water management in three villages whose terraces and canal systems date back to Inca times. Set in a remote valley, the book tells a story of domination and resulting social decline, showing how basic changes in the use of land, water, and labor have been pivotal in transforming the indigenous way of life. The author carries out a comparison of contemporary practices in communities that vary systematically along certain dimensions. He analyzes the communities’ similarities and differences in hydraulic organization, landscaping, water use, and other variables. Strikingly diverse patterns appear in local practice, which prove to be the key to unraveling the area’s history. The book concludes by describing the recent intensification of a water conflict. This struggle between peasants and former landlords ultimately led villagers to rise up against the national government. The story culminates in the violent intrusion of the revolutionary group known as Shining Path.

Water and Power in Highland Peru

Water and Power in Highland Peru PDF Author: Paul H. Gelles
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 9780813528076
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 260

Get Book Here

Book Description
Cabanaconde, a town of 5,000 people, is located in the arid Andean highlands. It is dominated by the foreboding Hualca Hualca mountain peak that is the source of this town's much-needed water. How the villagers obtain this water, Paul Gelles writes, is not a simple process: the politics of irrigation in this area reflect a struggle for control of vital resources, deeply rooted in the clash between local, ritualized models of water distribution and the secular model put forth by the Peruvian state. Water and Power in Highland Peru provides an insightful case study on the intense conflicts over water rights, and a framework for studying ethnic conflict and the effects of "development," not only in Peru, but in other areas as well. Most of the inhabitants of Cabanaconde do not identify themselves with the dominant Spanish-speaking culture found in Peru. And the Peruvian state, grounded in a racist, post-Colonial ethos, challenges the village's long-standing, non-Western framework for organizing water management. Gelles demonstrates that Andean culture is dynamic and adaptive, and it is a powerful source of ethnic identity, even for those who leave the village to live elsewhere. Indigenous rituals developed in this part of the world, he states, have become powerful tools of resistance against interference by local elites and the present-day Peruvian state. Most importantly, the micropolitics of Cabanaconde provide a window into a struggle that is taking place around the world.

The Struggle for Water

The Struggle for Water PDF Author: Aaron Fishbone
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Privatization
Languages : en
Pages : 318

Get Book Here

Book Description
"The Struggle for Water brings together a wide variety of materials on the issues and controversies surrounding the complex subject of water ownership and freshwater privatization. - It presents a general overview of the state of the world's freshwater and offers articles on both sides of the privatization controversy. Sections also deal with cooperation and conflict over water resources, international trade in water, and the role of dams. The anthology also includes a six-part debate on the issue. - The work concludes with an appendix of primary documents on important aspects of the topic. - A general introduction and introductory essays to each chapter give the reader the necessary background to put the issue in perspective."--Jacket.

Coastal Lives

Coastal Lives PDF Author: Maximilian Viatori
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
ISBN: 0816539294
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 241

Get Book Here

Book Description
Peru’s fisheries are in crisis as overfishing and ecological changes produce dramatic fluctuations in fish stocks. To address this crisis, government officials have claimed that fishers need to become responsible producers who create economic advantages by taking better care of the ocean ecologies they exploit. In Coastal Lives, Maximilian Viatori and Héctor Bombiella argue that this has not made Peru’s fisheries more sustainable. Through a fine-grained ethnographic and historical account of Lima’s fisheries, the authors reveal that new government regimes of entrepreneurial agency have placed overwhelming burdens on the city’s impoverished artisanal fishers to demonstrate that they are responsible producers and have created failures that can be used to justify closing these fishers’ traditional use areas and to deny their historically sanctioned rights. The result is a critical examination of how neoliberalized visions of nature and individual responsibility work to normalize the dispossessions that have enabled ongoing capital accumulation at the cost of growing social dislocations and ecological degradation. The authors’ innovative approach to the politics of constructing and degrading coastal lives will interest a wide range of scholars in cultural anthropology, environmental humanities, and Latin American studies, as well as policymakers and anyone concerned with inequality, global food systems, and multispecies ecologies.

Fighting for Andean Resources

Fighting for Andean Resources PDF Author: Vladimir R. Gil Ramón
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
ISBN: 0816530718
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 329

Get Book Here

Book Description
Mining investment in Peru has been presented as necessary for national progress; however, it also has brought socioenvironmental costs, left unfulfilled hopes for development, and has become a principal source of confrontation and conflict. Fighting for Andean Resources focuses on the competing agendas for mining benefits and the battles over their impact on proximate communities in the recent expansion of the Peruvian mining frontier. The book complements renewed scrutiny of how globalization nurtures not solely antagonism but also negotiation and participation. Having mastered an intimate knowledge of Peru, Vladimir R. Gil Ramón insightfully documents how social technologies of power are applied through social technical protocols of accountability invoked in defense of nature and vulnerable livelihoods. Although analyses point to improvements in human well-being, a political and technical debate has yet to occur in practice that would define what such improvements would be, the best way to achieve and measure them, and how to integrate dimensions such as sustainability and equity. Many confrontations stem from frustrated expectations, environmental impacts, and the virtual absence of state apparatus in the locations where new projects emerged. This book presents a multifaceted perspective on the processes of representation, the strategies in conflicts and negotiations of development and nature management, and the underlying political actions in sites affected by mining.

The Right to Water

The Right to Water PDF Author: Farhana Sultana
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136518649
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 289

Get Book Here

Book Description
The right to clean water has been adopted by the United Nations as a basic human right. Yet how such universal calls for a right to water are understood, negotiated, experienced and struggled over remain key challenges. The Right to Water elucidates how universal calls for rights articulate with local historical geographical contexts, governance, politics and social struggles, thereby highlighting the challenges and the possibilities that exist. Bringing together a unique range of academics, policy-makers and activists, the book analyzes how struggles for the right to water have attempted to translate moral arguments over access to safe water into workable claims. This book is an intervention at a crucial moment into the shape and future direction of struggles for the right to water in a range of political, geographic and socio-economics contexts, seeking to be pro-active in defining what this struggle could mean and how it might be taken forward in a far broader transformative politics. The Right to Water engages with a range of approaches that focus on philosophical, legal and governance perspectives before seeking to apply these more abstract arguments to an array of concrete struggles and case studies. In so doing, the book builds on empirical examples from Africa, Asia, Oceania, Latin America, the Middle East, North America and the European Union.

Out of the Mainstream

Out of the Mainstream PDF Author: Rutgerd Boelens
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136543562
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 385

Get Book Here

Book Description
Water is not only a source of life and culture. It is also a source of power, conflicting interests and identity battles. Rights to materially access, culturally organize and politically control water resources are poorly understood by mainstream scientific approaches and hardly addressed by current normative frameworks. These issues become even more challenging when law and policy-makers and dominant power groups try to grasp, contain and handle them in multicultural societies. The struggles over the uses, meanings and appropriation of water are especially well-illustrated in Andean communities and local water systems of Peru, Chile, Ecuador, and Bolivia, as well as in Native American communities in south-western USA. The problem is that throughout history, these nation-states have attempted to 'civilize' and bring into the mainstream the different cultures and peoples within their borders instead of understanding 'context' and harnessing the strengths and potentials of diversity. This book examines the multi-scale struggles for cultural justice and socio-economic re-distribution that arise as Latin American communities and user federations seek access to water resources and decision-making power regarding their control and management. It is set in the dynamic context of unequal, globalizing power relations, politics of scale and identity, environmental encroachment and the increasing presence of extractive industries that are creating additional pressures on local livelihoods. While much of the focus of the book is on the Andean Region, a number of comparative chapters are also included. These address issues such as water rights and defence strategies in neighbouring countries and those of Native American people in the southern USA, as well as state reform and multi-culturalism across Latin and Native America and the use of international standards in struggles for indigenous water rights. This book shows that, against all odds, people are actively contesting neoliberal globalization and water power plays. In doing so, they construct new, hybrid water rights systems, livelihoods, cultures and hydro-political networks, and dynamically challenge the mainstream powers and politics.

Water, Power and Identity

Water, Power and Identity PDF Author: Rutgerd Boelens
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317964039
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 450

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book addresses two major issues in natural resource management and political ecology: the complex conflicting relationship between communities managing water on the ground and national/global policy-making institutions and elites; and how grassroots defend against encroachment, question the self-evidence of State-/market-based water governance, and confront coercive and participatory boundary policing (‘normal’ vs. ‘abnormal’). The book examines grassroots building of multi-layered water-rights territories, and State, market and expert networks’ vigorous efforts to reshape these water societies in their own image – seizing resources and/or aligning users, identities and rights systems within dominant frameworks. Distributive and cultural politics entwine. It is shown that attempts to modernize and normalize users through universalized water culture, ‘rational water use’ and de-politicized interventions deepen water security problems rather than alleviating them. However, social struggles negotiate and enforce water rights. User collectives challenge imposed water rights and identities, constructing new ones to strategically acquire water control autonomy and re-moralize their waterscapes. The author shows that battles for material control include the right to culturally define and politically organize water rights and territories. Andean illustrations from Peru, Ecuador, Bolivia and Chile, from peasant-indigenous life stories to international policy-making, highlight open and subsurface hydro-social networks. They reveal how water justice struggles are political projects against indifference, and that engaging in re-distributive policies and defying ‘truth politics,’ extends context-particular water rights definitions and governance forms.

Water Security, Justice and the Politics of Water Rights in Peru and Bolivia

Water Security, Justice and the Politics of Water Rights in Peru and Bolivia PDF Author: Miriam Seemann
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137545232
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 245

Get Book Here

Book Description
The author scrutinizes the claim of policy-makers and experts that legal recognition of local water rights would reduce water conflict and increase water security and equality for peasant and indigenous water users. She analyzes two distinct 'top-down' and 'bottom-up' formalization policies in Peru and Bolivia - neoliberal the former, indigenist-socialist the latter. The policies have intended and unintended consequences and impact on marginalized peasants and the complex inter-legal systems for providing water security on the ground. This study seeks to debunk the official myth of the need to create state-centric, top-down legal security in complex, pluralistic water realities. The engagement between formal and alternative 'water securities' and controversial notions of 'rightness' is interwoven and contested; a complex setting is unveiled that forbids one-size-fits-all solutions. Peru's and Bolivia's case studies demonstrate how formalization policies, while aiming to enhance inclusion, in practice actually reinforce exclusion of the marginalized. Water rights formalization is certainly no panacea.

Hydrosocial Territories and Water Equity

Hydrosocial Territories and Water Equity PDF Author: Rutgerd Boelens
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351973649
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 524

Get Book Here

Book Description
Bringing together a multidisciplinary set of scholars and diverse case studies from across the globe, this book explores the management, governance, and understandings around water, a key element in the assemblage of hydrosocial territories. Hydrosocial territories are spatial configurations of people, institutions, water flows, hydraulic technology and the biophysical environment that revolve around the control of water. Territorial politics finds expression in encounters of diverse actors with divergent spatial and political–geographical interests; as a result, water (in)justice and (in)equity are embedded in these socio-ecological contexts. The territory-building projections and strategies compete, superimpose and align to strengthen specific water-control claims of various interests. As a result, actors continuously recompose the territory’s hydraulic grid, cultural reference frames, and political–economic relationships. Using a political ecology focus, the different contributions to this book explore territorial struggles, demonstrating that these contestations are not merely skirmishes over natural resources, but battles over meaning, norms, knowledge, identity, authority and discourses. The articles in this book were originally published in the journal Water International.