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Drip irrigation is often considered a technological solution to increase water use efficiency and crop productivity. However, all too often, its social and institutional entanglements are ignored. This paper treats drip irrigation as a socio-material assemblage and discusses the social and institutional changes triggered by the introduction of drip irrigation infrastructure in Ağlasun, a rural town located in the southwest of Turkey. Through an ethnographic study, we investigate how the switch from surface irrigation to drip irrigation entails an interaction of institutional re-arrangements, material infrastructures and strategizing actors to reshuffle the operation and maintenance of irrigation infrastructures, water distribution rules and water pricing. Expanding the concept of institutional bricolage to socio-material bricolage, we offer a nuanced understanding of how material infrastructures and institutions are mutually shaped by individual and collective agency. ispartof: International Journal Of The Commons vol:17 issue:1 pages:69-86 status: published

In this article we introduce the notion of imaginaries as a conceptual entry to study and better understand how and why commons re-create and transform. We do so by first exploring imaginaries as assemblages, and second by analytically dividing imaginaries in dominant and alternative imaginaries. While the former refer to how people imagine and live their social existence around built expectations and their underlying notions, the latter refers to imaginaries that critique instituted society and through it create ‘germs’ that can lead to transformation. Through this lens we analyze contestations that have emerged around the introduction of drip irrigation in two irrigation communities in the Valencia Region of Spain. These two case studies (Carcaixent and Potries) show how, among the commons, alternative imaginaries are challenging the dominant imaginaries of drip irrigation. We show how these alternative imaginaries result from a different way of assembling irrigation and the social, cultural, material, and economic relations around it. These insights, we argue, open up avenues that allow us to better understand the imaginary creations that reproduce a specific existing order, as well as the germ(s) that can lead to transformations and change

CONTEXT: Worldwide farmer managed irrigation systems have provided crops for food, feed and the market for centuries. From high mountain environments to river valleys and deltas, in all continents people have organized to construct, use, maintain, transform and sustain irrigated agro-ecosystems. In this context it is important to better understand how these systems are sustained. OBJECTIVE: The objective of this contribution is to explore and theorize through which strategies and mechanisms irrigators are able to sustain these systems in a constantly changing socio-environmental context. METHODS: The study is based on ethnographic qualitative research in four areas where farmer managed irrigation systems are sustained by irrigators (Valencia region, Spain; Ecuadorian highlands; Cambodian Mekong delta; and Tsangano district, Mozambique). Research consisted of interviews and observations in these areas and was supported by a literature review of what has been published about these systems. RESULTS AND CONCLUSIONS: Results show that farmer managed irrigation systems are dynamic systems that constantly transform but that are sustained in these changes through what we term ‘communality’. We introduce this term to point out three interrelated elements that stand at the basis of farmer managed irrigation systems sustenance, namely: commons, community and polity. Analysis of the four case studies points out that these three elements are mobilized differently by farmers depending on their socio-environmental context. We show that the mobilization of these different elements amidst internal and external challenges and conflicts, forms the basis for the longevity and sustainability of collectively managed irrigation systems. SIGNIFICANCE: In the literature on farmer managed irrigation systems collective action has been portrayed as the main pillar that sustains these systems. This contribution challenges this notion by showing that irrigation systems are sustained by a combination of individual actions, collective practices, normative frameworks and organizational forms; a sense of community; and the development of political agency (polity). Recognizing that these elements come together as site specific hybrids opens new avenues of inquiry to better understand the sustainability of farmer managed irrigation systems.

Jordan’s water scarcity prompted a national plan whereby treated wastewater is utilized to amend agricultural irrigation water so as to reallocate freshwater to urban/domestic uses. The policy, however, has engendered farmers’ resistance in the Northern Jordan Valley (NJV), causing a stalemate in putting new infrastructure into operation. This research investigated the socio-economic causes of farmer resistance and contestation, and examined the government’s institutional approach to overcome the challenges. We found that the perceived risks of wastewater reuse such as salinization and restrictions from international markets figure prominently in the farmers resistance. As yet, farmers have managed to avoid the shift to treated wastewater use by using the political agency of elite farmers who control the Water Users Associations. These same farmers have adopted informal water access practices to overcome freshwater shortages. At the same time, small producers who don’t have possibilities to access extra water and with less political clout seem more willing to irrigate with treated wastewater. We conclude that understanding the heterogeneous context in which the envisioned wastewater users operate is key to predicting and solving conflicts that arise in treated wastewater reuse projects.

Nearly half of the world's urban population depends on aquifers for drinking water. These are increasingly vulnerable to pollution and overexploitation. Besides anthropogenic sources, pollutants such as arsenic (As) are also geogenic and their concentrations have, in some cases, been increased by groundwater pumping. Almost 40 % of Mexico's population relies on groundwater for drinking water purposes; much the aquifers in semi-arid and arid central and northern Mexico is contaminated by As. These are agricultural regions where irrigation water is primarily provided from intenstive pumping of the aquifers leading to long-standing declines in the water table. The focus of this study is the main aquifer within the Comarca Lagunera region in Northern Mexico. Although the scientific evidence demonstrates that health effects are associated with long-term exposure to elevated As concentrations, this knowledge has not yielded effective groundwater development and public health policy. A multidisciplinary approach – including the evaluation of geochemistry, human health risk and development and public health policy - was used to provide a current account of these links. The dissolved As concentrations measured exceeded the corresponding World Health Organization guideline for drinking water in 90 % of the sampled wells; for the population drinking this water, the estimated probability of presenting non-carcinogenic health effects was >90 %, and the lifetime risk of developing cancer ranged from 0.5 to 61 cases in 10,000 children and 0.2 to 33 cases in 10,000 adults. The results suggest that insufficient policy responses are due to a complex and dysfunctional groundwater governance framework that compromises the economic, social and environmental sustainability of this region. These findings may valuable to other regions with similar settings that need to design and enact better informed, science-based policies that recognize the value of a more sustainable use of groundwater resources and a healthier population.

Adaptation to climate change has become a major policy and project focus for donors and governments globally. In this article, we provide insight into how adaptation projects mobilize distinct imaginaries and knowledge claims that create territories for intervention (the objects) as well as targeted populations (the subjects) to sustain them. Drawing on two emblematic climate change adaptation projects in Ecuador, we show how these objects and subjects are created through a knowledge production process that (a) creates a discursive climate change rationale; (b) sidesteps uncertainty related to climate change impacts; (c) fosters a circular citational practice that (self-)reinforces the project's expert knowledge; and (d) makes complex social variables commensurable based on the project's rationality, interests, and quantifiable indicators. The emerging hydrosocial territories ‘in need of intervention’ require subjects that inhabit, produce and reproduce these territories, in accordance with specific climate change discourses and practices. To manufacture and align these subjects, projects employ participatory practices that are informed by recognition politics aimed at disciplining participants toward particular identities and ways of thinking and acting. We analyze these distinct strategies as multiple governmentalities enacted through participatory adaptation projects seeking to produce specific climate change resilient hydrosocial territories and corresponding subjects.

As climate change escalates, donors, international organizations, and state actors are implementing adaptation projectsEmbedded within these adaptation projects are imaginaries of rural resilience. These imaginaries, however, are contested by individuals and collectives targeted by such initiatives. In this article, we draw on Foucault’s notion of counter conducts to understand how beneficiaries in Ecuador resist, leverage, and/or rework adaptation interventions and towards what end. We identified five counter conducts: (1) negotiating for control, (2) setting the terms for participation, (3) opting out, (4) subverting the discursive frame, and (5) leveraging longevity. We argue that these counter conducts are generative, enacting multi-scalar counter-hegemonic politics of agrarian transformation.

Mega-damming, pollution and depletion endanger rivers worldwide. Meanwhile, modernist imaginaries of ordering ‘unruly waters and humans’ have become cornerstones of hydraulic-bureaucratic and capitalist development. They separate hydro/social worlds, sideline river-commons cultures, and deepen socio-environmental injustices. But myriad new water justice movements (NWJMs) proliferate: rooted, disruptive, transdisciplinary, multi-scalar coalitions that deploy alternative river–society ontologies, bridge South–North divides, and translate river-enlivening practices from local to global and vice-versa. This paper's framework conceptualizes ‘riverhood’ to engage with NWJMs and river commoning initiatives. We suggest four interrelated ontologies, situating river socionatures as arenas of material, social and symbolic co-production: ‘river-as-ecosociety’, ‘river-as-territory’, ‘river-as-subject’, and ‘river-as-movement’.

Agricultural transformations have significantly contributed to the global market’s year-round supply of capital-intensive greenhouse-grown crops. For instance, berry production in México is increasingly relying on greenhouse systems to meet the growing demand of international markets, particularly in the USA. It is still unclear to what extent these transformations are related to land tenure, as data on greenhouse distribution often do not exist, are incomplete, or lack spatial resolution. This paper presents a support vector machine learning algorithm tool to map greenhouse expansion using satellite images. The tool is applied to the major berry-growing region of Michoacán, México. Here agricultural areas are transforming to satisfy foreign demand for berries, altering local land and water resource use patterns. We use this tool and a unique land tenure dataset to investigate (a) the spatially explicit extent to which high-input commercial agriculture (mainly the production of berries) has expanded in this region since 1989; and (b) the extent to which smallholder (ejidal) land has been incorporated into the highly capitalized agro-export sector. We combine a national dataset on ejidal land (which includes both communal and parcel land) with geospatial agricultural data to quantify the land-use changes in six municipalities in the berry-growing region of Michoacán between 1989 and 2021. We find that the development of the greenhouse berry boom can be quantified and shown with spatially-explicit detail, growing from zero to over 9,500 ha over the period, using almost one-quarter of all regional agricultural land in 2020. We further find that the capital-intensive market-oriented berry industry has been widely integrated into smallholder ejidal lands, so much so that over half of greenhouses are found there.

In the Andes, indigenous communities are being increasingly besieged because their páramos act as water providers for cities and irrigation systems downstream. This has led indigenous communities to protect their hydrosocial territories from external actors and re-create them to contest these threats. In this context, we analyse how the Kayambi community of La Chimba in the northern Sierra of Ecuador has managed to defend and secure its hydrosocial territory through the creation and re-creation of its indigenous identity and networks and related cultural politics that find expression in different forms of contractual reciprocity. As a result, the community hydrosocial territory (re)-creation itself is a weapon of resistance, a decolonising process where rural communities continuously can produce their own forms of development. This is particularly important in a context where governments in the region are relying on extractivism and in the explotation of indigenous territories.

Virtual water flows, incorporated in global food trade has increased the last decade. The drivers and consequences are complex. These complex relations between humans and water resources are studied from different perspectives. In this article, an overview of four such perspectives on water in global food production and trade is provided. These four perspectives are: (1) More crop per drop for increasing production, (2) Less drop per crop for reducing impacts, (3) National food security and import dependency; and (4) Local values and implications of water used in export food production. Each of the perspectives is valuable in the sense of representing different value frameworks, which represent contrasting norms and convictions, belief systems, and discourses; which are often incommensurable.

Groundwater forms the basis for millions of rural and urban livelihoods in the Global South. Its use for irrigation has spurred widespread socio-economic development in various areas but has also led to aquifer overdraft and related socio-environmental impacts. This article presents common challenges that agricultural groundwater regulation faces in the areas of intensive use. It shows the main approaches that have been used to try to regulate and control groundwater use. These revolve mostly around direct regulation by the state; different forms of co-management between groundwater user groups and state agencies; and incentives aimed at reducing agricultural groundwater use. This review analyzes why in many contexts, these mechanisms have not led to more sustainable aquifer use. Finally, the article brings to highlight the important challenges this poses in terms of socio-environmental sustainability.

In this article we analyse how workers perceive corporate labour standards and the related work conditions in the agro-export sector of Northern Guanajuato, Central Mexico. We do so by first comparing labour standards on local farms to labour standards at an international fresh vegetable production, harvesting, processing and export company that has explicit corporate labour standards. Second, we present how workers from two rural communities of landless workers employed in the agro-export industry perceive the differences between work at local farms and work at the agro-export company. Our results show that better pay and secondary benefits resulting from corporate labour standards do not necessarily translate to perceptions of better work quality. This relates to the broader work conditions in which these labour standards are inserted. Many workers prefer work with lower labour standards but that has more convenient working hours and enables engagement in family and social activities alongside the job. Based on these results we argue that, from a sociological perspective, work quality is a situated and very context-specific notion. Therefore, higher labour standards and better pay even in contexts of cheap labour and widespread poverty are not necessarily associated by workers with higher work quality.

We are facing a global water crisis exacerbated by hydro-climatic extremes related to climate change. Water scarcity is expected to increasingly affect indigenous and marginalized populations. Supporting the sovereignty of indigenous and rural populations to create water secure futures through place-based knowledge, local management, and Community-based Adaptation (CBA) measures may help tackle this crisis. Zapotec communities in Oaxaca, Mexico have self-organized for collective action to use Managed Aquifer Recharge (MAR) to address water scarcity, resulting in a perceived increase of groundwater availability. Treating groundwater as a common-pool resource (CPR) within a sociohydrological system, the objectives of this paper are two-fold: (1) to explore how MAR may be implemented as a CBA measure, and (2) to understand what factors triggered and/or enabled the widespread implementation of MAR by Zapotec indigenous communities in the Valles Centrales of Oaxaca, Mexico. In doing so, we aim to get a better understanding of local processes while also furthering theories that relate to CBA, CPR, and sociohydrology. This paper was born from the desire of the Zapotec community members to share their experience and lessons learned so other drought-vulnerable communities might benefit.

This article explores the relations between agricultural production, international migration, wage labour and processes of differentiation among peasant households. It does so based on the analysis of the ejido Jesus Maria in the northeast of the state of Guanajuato, Central Mexico. The history of this ejido and how Mexican neoliberal policies led to increased levels of migration and proletarianization since at least the early 1990s is presented. Then, it presents how in this context the production of asparagus for agro-export developed on the irrigated lands of this ejido, showing that this process went hand in hand with social differentiation and important changes in the distribution of land and water. Then, it presents the results of a household and production survey that shows that most peasant households combine agricultural production with local urban and rural wage labour, migration, remittances and/or other economic activities. Households that can live from agriculture alone have had important capital investments in agricultural production coming from international migration and remittances. Based on these results, it argues that, as rural communities become increasingly dependent on external ‘urban/global’ capital, the rural/urban divide has become increasingly permeable with important consequences for peasant economies and related social differentiation processes.

Wastewater reuse is identified as strategic to help ameliorate scarcity in water-stressed regions around the world. However, to develop it, there is a need to better understand the social, institutional and technological contexts in which it takes place. This article develops a novel socio-technical framework to inform such an analysis and applies it to current wastewater reuse in Egypt. Our analysis highlights the different actors, management activities and practices that shape wastewater collection, transfer, treatment, discharge and/or reuse in different social, technological and environmental contexts in Egypt. It points out bottlenecks of current wastewater reuse policies and programmes.

This article explores how irrigation management transfer policies were implemented in Mali, Mozambique, Malawi and Zimbabwe. In Mali and Mozambique, where the irrigation bureaucracy controlled one large irrigation system, state agencies retained control over irrigation management despite reduced state funding. In Malawi and Zimbabwe, where the state irrigation systems and the irrigation bureaucracy were smaller, users have taken over irrigation management, but are having trouble sustaining irrigated agriculture. We show how irrigation management transfer policies were shaped by the interplay between international donors, macro-economic dynamics, national politics and the interactions with (and the nature of) irrigation infrastructure, bureaucracies and organized users.

We define and explore hydrosocial territories as 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. Their territory-building projections and strategies compete, superimpose and align to strengthen specific water-control claims. Thereby, actors continuously recompose the territory’s hydraulic grid, cultural reference frames, and political-economic relationships. Using a political ecology focus, we argue that territorial struggles go beyond battles over natural resources as they involve struggles over meaning, norms, knowledge, identity, authority and discourses.

Ecuadorian state policies and institutional reforms have territorialized water since the 1960s. Peasant and indigenous communities have challenged this ordering locally since the 1990s by creating multi-scalar federations and networks. These enable marginalized water users to defend their water, autonomy and voice at broader scales. Analysis of these processes shows that water governance takes shape in contexts of territorial pluralism centred on the interplay of divergent interests in defining, constructing and representing hydrosocial territory. Here, state and nonstate hydro-social territories refer to interlinked scales that contest and recreate each other and through which actors advance their water control interests.

[EN] Groundwater flow models have been increasingly used to support policy making. A substantial amount of research has been dedicated to improving, validating and calibrating models and including stakeholders in the modelling process. However, little research has been done to analyze how the choices of model makers and steering by policy makers result in models with specific characteristics, which only allow specific modelling outcomes, and how the use of these modelling outcomes leads to specific social, economic and environmental consequences. In this study, we use the social construction of technology framework to explore the development, characteristics and uses of the groundwater model of the Mancha Oriental aquifer in Spain. The specific characteristics and functioning of this model influenced the policy implementation, implying that involving stakeholders in the development and use of models is crucial for improved democratic policy making., This work was carried out as part of the collaboration agreement between the University of Castilla–La Mancha and Wageningen University. The research is also part of Femke Rambags’ MSc Thesis. David Sanz was supported by the Grants for Stays at Other Universities and Research Centres (UCLM). Special thanks go to the Júcar Water Authority (CHJ) and stakeholders (JCRMO) in the Mancha Oriental System for the necessary information. We would also like to thank Dr A. Sahuquillo of the Universitat Politècnica de València de Valencia and Dr S. Castaño of the University of Castilla–La Mancha for comments and participation in the first stage of modelling. The contents of this paper do not represent the views of CHJ or JCRMO. Finally, we thank the two anonymous reviewers of this article for their valuable comments and suggestions.

Based on insights from peasant and indigenous communities’ struggles for water in Andean Peru and Ecuador, in this article we argue that the defense of grassroots interests -and with it the advancement of more equitable governance- greatly hinges on the capacity of these groups to engage in grassroots scalar politics . With increasing pressure on water resources in the Andes, the access to water of many rural peasant and indigenous communities is being threatened. The growing realization that their access to water and related interests are embedded in broader regional and national politics, legal frameworks and water policies, has led many communities and peasant water user associations to engage in networks and create alliances with other water users, governmental institutions and non-governmental actors. To better understand these (and other) grassroots struggles and strategies, in this contribution we develop the concept of grassroots scalar politics , which we use as a lens to analyze two case studies. In Ecuador we present how water users of the province of Chimborazo have defended their interests through the consolidation of the Provincial Water Users Associations’ Federation Interjuntas-Chimborazo and its networks. Then we focus on how with the support of Interjuntas-Chimborazo the Water Users Association of the Chambo irrigation system defended their historical water allocation. In Peru we analyze the conformation and achievements of the federative Water Users Association of Ayacucho (JUDRA) and present how the community of Ccharhuancho in the region of Huancavelica, managed to defend its waters and territory against the coastal irrigation sector of Ica.

Around the world it has proven very difficult to develop policies and interventions that ensure socio-environmentally sustainable groundwater use and exploitation. In the state of Guanajuato, Central Mexico, both the national government and the decentralized state government have pursued to regulate groundwater use through direct state control, groundwater markets, energy pricing, and user self-regulation. We present and analyze these regulatory mechanisms and their outcomes in the field. We argue that the close interdependencies of these regulatory mechanisms have pre-empted the effectiveness of these policy instruments as well as that of other measures aimed at reducing groundwater use in order to advance towards sustainable exploitation levels.

In Ecuador neo-liberal reforms in the 1990s transformed the water and irrigation sector at different scales. We analyze how these neoliberal reforms were implemented from the top-down by the World Bank and the national government, as well as how from the grassroots water users negotiated these policies and their implementation at local and national level. We show that these sectoral reforms were politically contested as it changed roles, responsibilities, and authority at different scales of governance. This is evidenced by the fact that locally the relationships between water users, differently scaled state agencies, and broader networks greatly determined how water users associations negotiated the irrigation management transfer program as well as the development of new water policies. Our analysis highlights how the alliances that differently positioned actors create to navigate water policy implementation shape the scalar and the political dimensions of sectoral reforms. It shows that actors need multi-scalar networks of support to develop political leverage, overcome opposition, and materialize projects in the water governance domain.

In the Andean region, the growing water demand of expanding cities, extractive industries, and local and transnational agribusiness puts increasing pressure on the land and water resources of peasa...

In this article, I explore how new water user organizations have developed in formerly state managed irrigation systems in the Ecuadorian highlands since the 1990s. The article is based on an in-depth case study of the Pillaro irrigation system and illustrations of other cases. These water user organizations have become responsible for irrigation system management and maintenance, which has been carried out based on the mobilization of collective action. I argue that the support of external agents was important in their formation by facilitating internal looking social capital through the development of a shared normative framework and by fostering outward-looking social capital through the creation of networks and networking skills for the defense of collective rights and interests.

Collective groundwater management by water users—self-regulation—is increasingly advocated as a complement to state regulation. This article analyzes the attempts by the Guanajuato State Water Commission (CEAG) in central Mexico to promote user self-regulation through the establishment and development of 14 Consejos Tecnicos de Aguas (COTAS; Technical Water Councils). Based on a joint assessment by a former senior CEAG policy-maker and two researchers, Guanajuato’s groundwater-management policy is reviewed to understand why user self-regulation was less successful than expected. It concludes that increasing awareness and improving the knowledge base on groundwater is not enough to trigger self-regulation by groundwater users. A wider delegation of responsibilities to the COTAS is necessary, combined with: (1) functioning mechanisms for enforcing groundwater legislation, especially concerning well permits and pumped volumes, and (2) mechanisms that ensure the legitimacy and accountability of users’ representatives to both users and state agencies.

Although farmers are often seen as wasting water and getting a disproportionate share of water. irrigation is losing out in the competition for water with other sectors. In cases of drought. water restrictions are overwhelmingly imposed on irrigation while other activities and domestic supply are only affected in cases of very severe shortage All over the world, farmers have been responding to the challenge posed by both short- and long-term declining water allocations in many creative ways, but these responses have often been overlooked by policy makers. This paper examines how farmers have adapted to water scarcity in six different river basins of Asia and the Middle East. It inventories the different types of adjustments observed and shows not only their effectiveness in offsetting the drop in supply but also their costs to farmers and to the environment and their contribution to basin closure. The conclusion calls for a better recognition of the efforts made by the irrigation sector to respond to water challenges and of its implications in terms of reduced scope for efficiency gains in the Irrigation sector.

Groundwater forms the basis for millions of rural and urban livelihoods around the world. Building on insights from the theory of access, in this article we present how groundwater development has brought much well-fare in many parts of the world; and how resulting intensive groundwater use is leading to ill-fare through aquifer overexploitation and processes of water accumulation and dispossession. We show the difficulty of state regulation and the modest achievements of other governance approaches that aim to solve existing groundwater problems. To study these processes we propose a framework of analysis that is based on the study of hydrosocial-networks, the political economy of groundwater and the domains and discourses that define groundwater access. Such analysis highlights the challenges of devising policies and modes of governance that contribute to social and environmental sustainability in intensively used aquifers. These we argue should build on an analysis of equity that scrutinizes the discourses, actors, powers and procedures that define groundwater access. By inciting debates on equity a first and fundamental step can be made toward advancing more inclusive groundwater governance that crucially engages the marginalized and addresses their groundwater problems, concerns and needs.

"This paper analyzes conflict and collaboration and their relation to normative structures based on a case study of the history and external interventions of the Píllaro North Canal Irrigation System in the Ecuadorian Highlands. It does so by using Ostrom’s framework for analyzing the sustainability of socio-ecological systems together with an analysis of the normative structures that define the governance systems through which the interactions in irrigation systems are mediated. I argue that the external interventions by the state and NGOs imposed a new governance system that undermined the existing normative structures and related organizations, leading to internal conflicts. The case study suggests that a reformulation of irrigation policies and state intervention methodologies in user managed supra-community irrigation systems in the Andes could lead to higher levels of cooperation."

Making water management more democratic through the participation of water users, while crucially including the poor, has often proven elusive in practice. Through an in-depth case study, this article analyzes how the provincial water users federation Interjuntas-Chimborazo was consolidated in the Ecuadorian Andes. The case illustrates the critical role external actors can play in the consolidation of federative organizations through methodological design, facilitation, and financial and logistical support to local societal actors. In turn, such federations can effectively promote social democracy. As a new societal actor, the federation Interjuntas-Chimborazo now struggles for voice, representation, and inclusion of the marginalized water users. They participate in formal state-dominated institutional arrangements of stakeholder participation. Yet, more importantly, they also push their claims by tilting established power relations through other means such as protests, mobilizations, lobbying, and negotiations. The development of this federation brings to the fore important lessons on federative organizations, the role of external actors, and participation in water governance.

NGOs have taken up an increasing number of roles and responsibilities in Latin American societies. Based on a study of the multi-stakeholder platform, the Water Resources Forum in Ecuador, this paper shows how through the creation of a broad network of NGOs, academics, grassroots water users organizations and governmental actors; this platform has been able to contribute to the democratization of water governance. This paper analyses the international and national socio-political context in which this platform developed and traces the history and strategies that marked its development. Based on this, it argues that NGOs can play an important role in the development of more democratic and inclusive public policy making in water governance, but that the capacity of NGOs to bring about change greatly depends on the socio-political context and on the networks they are able to forge with grassroots organizations, state agencies, funders and other third sector actors.