Date/Time: Thursday 4th October 2018, 4:00pm

Venue: Armstrong Building 3.38

This seminar is free to attend and open to everyone, no need to register! 

Rutgerd Boelens is Professor ‘Water Governance and Social Justice’  at Wageningen University, The Netherlands, and Professor ‘Political Ecology of Water in Latin America’ with CEDLA, University of Amsterdam. He also is Visiting Professor at the Catholic University of Peru and the Central University of Ecuador. He directs the international Justicia Hídrica/Water Justice alliance (comparative research and training on water accumulation, conflict and societal action). His research focuses on water rights, legal pluralism, cultural politics, governmentality, hydrosocial territories, and social mobilization, in Latin America and Spain. Among his latest books are “Water, Power and Identity. The Cultural Politics of Water in the Andes” (Routledge, 2015);  Agua y Ecología Política. El extractivismo en la agro-exportación, la minería y las hidroeléctricas en Latino América (with Yacoub & Duarte, AbyaYala, 2015);  “Out of the Mainstream: Water Rights, Politics and Identity” (with Getches & Guevara,  Earthscan, 2010/2012); and “Water Justice” (with Perreault & Vos, Cambridge University Press, 2018).

Abstract:

Latin America’s objectivist water science-policy-intervention nexus tends to simplify the region’s hugely diverse local water cultures and management practices. Throughout history, rather than understanding locally prevailing, hybrid systems of water rights and identities, policies have adopted universalist, civilizing water expert notions. The ‘living’ water rules, rights and ways of belonging to local water societies were not known but artificially invented.
In complex ways this water cultural misrecognition entwines with and produces water distributive injustice and political exclusion. Often well-intended efforts to reorganize and order ‘unruly’ Latin American water cultures tend to engender policy models and interventions that depoliticize their deeply political choices and dehumanize the water societies they affect.
In many places, however, affected water user collectives do not remain silent and creatively struggle for water justice. Consequently, water conflicts are not just about water. At a basic level there is the struggle over water, material and financial resources. At a second level is the dispute about the contents of rules and rights. Next, at a third echelon, we see the struggle over authority and legitimacy to make those rules. And fourth, there is the clash among discourses and worldviews that defend particular water policies and hierarchies.
As outcomes of these struggles, water and society are co-produced in hydrosocial territories that embody the representation of particular worldviews, knowledge frames, cultural patterns and power relationships. Hydro-territorial imaginaries and material spaces are sites of governmentality projects and contested control over socio-natural configuration. Hereby, also water technology is ‘moralized’. In turn, Latin American water user collectives often engage in multi-actor, multi-scalar resistance to interweave and demand for distributive, political and cultural justice and (co-)design their water societies.