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El trabajo que se presenta en este capítulo está basado en una investigación realizada en campo y de la recopilación de información secundaria realizada entre el 2011 al 2013, dentro del marco del proyecto Páramos y Sistemas de Vida, apoyado por el Instituto de Recursos Biológicos Alexander von Humboldt y financiado por la Unión Europea. Este proyecto tuvo como objetivo entender los medios de vida de los pobladores del páramo en relación con las transformaciones territoriales. Además, bajo el soporte de la Alianza Internacional de Justicia Hídrica se estudió el páramo desde el enfoque de la ecología política. El trabajo de campo fue abordado con técnicas de investigación-acción participativa que incluyeron temas sobre análisis de los sistemas de producción, ecología del paisaje, caracterización y análisis de la red hidrosocial. Se usaron entrevistas semiestructuradas, monitoreo de revisión de reportes periodísticos para identificar y caracterizar actores de acuerdo con sus posiciones, intereses, niveles de agencia y relaciones de dependencia con el páramo. Por último, esta investigación incorpora el trabajo de acompañamiento a las acciones de organizaciones que defienden sus territorios frente a proyectos extractivos mineros: movilizaciones, foros, debates, audiencias públicas y otras acciones de incidencia desde la perspectiva de la justicia hídrica

The Magdalena River, Colombia’s main river backbone, features multiple tensions and socio-environmental conflicts. They manifest themselves in the river’s ecological degradation and negatively impact the riparian communities and artisanal fishermen, whose productive activities and rights of access to water are restricted. For these communities, the river is a means of passing down and exchanging knowledge between generations. However, their knowledge and practices are not recognized in the dominant governance processes over the Magdalena River. In an interview with Juan Carlos Gutiérrez-Camargo, environmental activist, researcher and companion of artisanal fishermen, we illustrate the universe of epistemologies and worldviews of these communities. We discuss, from a legal-pluralism perspective, the contradictions between state norms and authorities, parastatal powers, and the customary rights of fishing communities. We analyze how the simultaneous presence of various authorities and the complex, unequal arena of legal, extra-legal and illegal forces, hinders enforcement of fishermen’s customary socio-legal repertoires and also of the Colombian Constitution to protect riverside communities’ human rights. The interview reflects on the great complexity of exercising community leadership, environmental protection and defense of artisanal fishing in the midst of a socio-normative political arena permeated by state abandonment and paramilitary violence. For this reason, the interview stresses the importance of recognizing artisanal fisher collectives as political subjects in river co-governance. It also highlights the ambivalent implications of granting rights to nature and rivers: their meaning, functions and impact depend on their political trajectory and mobilization by grassrooted collectives. Finally, Gutiérrez proposes strengthening knowledge networks to bolster river co-governance where the political-cultural and socio-normative frameworks of riverside communities play a preponderant role.

Digital, Colombia’s Santurbán páramo wetlands are vital water supply sources for highland communities’ livelihoods and downstream cities such as Bucaramanga. Nevertheless, they face strong degeneration because of large-scale mining extraction. Seeking to harmonize divergent interests between conservation policies, domestic water supply and mining–energy development, the national government laid out landuse zones and delimited use of the Santurbán páramo since 2014. This article illustrates how hydroterritorial tensions between the mining company, the government and citizen mobilizations for water end up fencing in the collective assets of smallholder páramo residents. To understand this complex enclosure process, we show how foreign mining capital interests, urban citizens’ claims for water and government ecological boundary-making paradoxically converge. Commensuration of water meanings and values, while bridging diverse worldviews, generates new enclosures of the commons. Engaging with the conceptualization of ‘hydrosocial territories’ and neoliberal reconfiguration politics, we contribute to debates on how modernist commensuration works to commodify water and territory, disqualifying peasants’ territorial self-governance. We conclude that Santurbán páramo residents’ hydroterritorial rights are subject to the interests of social forces competing for control over this páramo territory, whether to transfer rural water to cities or to establish large-scale mining., Humanidades

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’.

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With increasing water consumption and pollution in cities and expanding urban areas, impacts on rural areas as water extraction and waste disposal zones are intensifying. To unravel these hydro-territorial dynamics, this paper studies the intersecting and overlapping Foucauldian ‘arts of government’ (‘governmentalities’) deployed to convey water from rural to urban areas in three Latin American cities: Lima (Peru), San Luis Potosí (Mexico) and Bucaramanga (Colombia). We examine conventional (cemented) water transfers, broadly promoted payment for ecosystem services schemes and their conjunction, combining scholarship about hydrosocial territories and governmentality. We demonstrate how particular urban-based imaginaries about rural areas, their inhabitants, norms, practices and identities become embedded in governmentality schemes, and how these are justified, materialized and sustained, producing particular entwined rural–urban subjectivities. We explore how these are accepted, negotiated or contested. Our application of the governmentalities framework to analyze the material and socio-political effects of rural–urban water transfers contributes to existing scholarship on the (re)shaping of rural–urban hydrosocial territorialities showing the ‘hidden’ and ‘invisible’ workings of subjectification. It also contributes to the literature on governmentalities by scrutinizing the importance of technology (including physical infrastructure) in creating rural subjects.

This paper analyses the socio-territorial conflict prompted by Los Merinos: a residential–tourism project constructed in an ecological reserve that is vital to Andalusian livelihoods. It examines disputes concerning discourses, authorities and rules in order to understand the struggle over land and water. Using the echelons of rights analysis (ERA) framework, the paper scrutinizes the multiscale forces and strategies adopted by business and opposing movement networks in order to shape territory, thereby engaging local and supra-local governments. The authors’ political–ecology lens on environmental justice and territorialization enhances the understanding of the relevance of social movements in contesting the misappropriation of socio-natural environments.

We examine the social resistance against large dams as environmental justice movements in four case studies - the Sardar Sarovar Project from India, the Hidrosogamoso from Colombia, the ‘new water culture’ movement in Spain, and the Lesotho Highlands Project from Lesotho - with diverse social, political and environmental contexts. We discuss three broad issues. First, the nature of the involvement of civil society and metropolitan intelligentsia in leadership roles. Second, how cross-class and multi-sectoral alliances have been forged between the local and the global. And third, how the notion of environmental justice in relation to social justice is adopted in these movements.

This paper explores how, historically, the utopian thinking built into Spain’s water policies has legitimized profound transformations of the Guadalhorce Valley’s hydro-social territory (in Málaga), also justifying water transfers from rural to urban areas. It analyzes how the ‘regenerationist hydraulic utopia’ has been materialized through different ‘governmentality strategies’. This intensified during Francisco Franco’s dictatorship, decaying gradually into dystopias that, to this day, express profound socio-environmental impacts: dispossession, displacement, uprooting and breaking up local water governance institutions and practices. Meanwhile, the urban and tourism industries in Málaga have been strengthened by giving them priority for water supply.

Just as in other parts of Spain, the Guadalhorce Valley, M&aacute, laga, has a long history of policies based on &lsquo, hydraulic utopianism&rsquo, (regenerationist and Franco-ist), bent on &lsquo, reorganizing&rsquo, political, geographic, and human nature. Residents of the neighboring sub-basin, the R&iacute, o Grande valley, have seen how these policies, designed to transfer rural water to modern urban centers, have turned the Guadalhorce hydrosocial territory into a &lsquo, hydraulic dystopia&rsquo, In this article, we examine how R&iacute, o Grande valley residents mobilized to maintain control over the development and use of their resources, livelihoods, and knowledge systems, when modernist-urbanist policies planned to take their water from a major dam on the R&iacute, o Grande. Interviewing actors at different scales we examined how this anti-dam movement organized massively in a creative, multi-actor, and multi-scale network. Our results also show that this unified, successful fight against the &lsquo, common enemy&rsquo, the mega-hydraulic construction, has become more complex, as threats crop up not only from the &lsquo, city over there&rsquo, but also from &lsquo, internal&rsquo, hydro-territorial transformations. These sprout from policies to modernize traditional irrigation systems, supposedly to &lsquo, save water&rsquo, but critical voices assume that it is all about passing on the &lsquo, surplus&rsquo, to M&aacute, laga city, or using that water to expand agribusiness. We conclude that the challenge lies in critically integrating multiple forms of knowledge, stakeholders, and scales to both defend collective water management and creatively construct anti-hegemonic alternatives.

Payment for Ecosystem Services (PES) is not only a prominent, globally promoted policy to foster nature conservation, but also increasingly propagated as an innovative and self-sustaining governance instrument to support poverty alleviation and to guarantee water, food, and energy securities. In this paper, we evaluate a PES scheme from a multi-scalar and political-ecology perspective in order to reveal different power dynamics across the Water-Energy-Food (WEF) Nexus perspective. For this purpose, we analyze the PES scheme implemented in the Hidrosogamoso hydropower project in Colombia. The paper shows that actors&rsquo, strongly divergent economic and political power is determinant in defining how and for whom the Nexus-related water, food, and energy securities are materialized. In this case, the PES scheme and its scalar politics, as fostered by the private/public hydropower alliance, are instrumental to guaranteeing water security for the hydropower scheme, which is a crucial building-block of Colombia&rsquo, s energy security discourse. For this, the water and food securities of the adjacent, less powerful communities are sacrificed. Examining the on-the-ground politics of WEF Nexus is key to understanding their impact on equitable and sustainable governance of water, energy, and food in the everyday lives of millions of resource users. We conclude that politicizing the Nexus can help to trace both the flows of resources and the flows of power.

We examine the divergent modes of conceptualizing, valuing and representing the páramo highlands of Santurban, Colombia, as a struggle over hydrosocial territory. Páramo residents, multinational companies, government and scientists deploy territorial representations and valuation languages that interact and conflict with each other. Government politicians and neo-institutional scientists wish to reconcile diverging interests using a universalistic territorial representation, through game theory. This generates a hydrosocial imaginary that renders invisible actors’ power differentials that lie at the core of the territorial resource use conflict. We conclude that this ‘governmentality’ endeavour enables subtle, silent water rights re-allocation.

En este artículo analizamos las luchas epistemológicas y retos que ha tenido el movimiento social en la subcuenca del río Grande frente a los diversos proyectos modernizadores que intentan transferir el agua rural hacia la ciudad de Málaga. El primero asociado a la construcción de un gran embalse y el segundo con la modernización de los sistemas de riego tradicionales. Concluimos que el reto está en desenmascarar el régimen de verdad que respalda los proyectos de modernidad hidráulica, reivindicar los derechos de uso y control colectivos del agua y así generar procesos de apropiación comunitaria para la defensa del río como un bien socio-ambiental, económico-cultural y político-epistemológico.

Mega-hydraulic projects tend to produce severe social and environmental impacts, with burdens and benefits unevenly distributed among different social groups, regions, and scales. This triggers socioenvironmental conflicts, since “territory” has incommensurable functions and values for the diverse parties. This article examines the dominant human-nature interactions that underlie recent hydropower developments and the reconfiguration of the hydrosocial network in Colombia's Sogamoso basin. We use the Echelon of Rights Analysis (ERA) to examine conflicts over hydrosocial patterning, involving struggles over resources, norms, authority, and discourses. The Sogamoso mega-project highlights how modernist policies discursively frame clean energy, sustainable development, and public utility, while breaking up existing socioecological relationships and aligning water users, rights, and uses in new hydro-political network hierarchies. In Sogamoso, hydropower development discourse ends up declaring local subsistence activities illegal while denying existing rights frameworks. Therefore, crucial questions about water rights, legitimacy, and justice remain unasked and unanswered within political arenas.