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The prisoner population in Latin America is highly vulnerable to violence and deadly disease due to overpopulation, understaffing and political neglect. The COVID-19 pandemic has worsened their situation. Drawing from empirical research in three countries – Argentina, Colombia, and Nicaragua – this paper analyses three phases of marginalisation in prisoners’ trajectories from prison to pit. Our analysis is structured by the triple marginalisation that stretches out from an experienced situation of ‘social death’ in prison, a legally imposed ‘depersonalisation’ of the dead prisoners’ body, and the ‘bare’ death of their plastic-wrapped bodies buried without any ceremony in a politically neglected cemetery. This process points to the everyday necropolitical production of marginal deaths and sheds light on marginalised populations’ moral conceptions of dying in pandemic times.

In Lima's pueblos jóvenes —the vast informal settlements that surround the city—migrants who settled there also founded graveyards. Cemeteries are a natural socio‐spatial extension of the settlements and houses that urbanites constructed with their own hands. Lima's peripheral cemeteries are permeable spaces which are often regarded as zones of risk and insecurity. Visitors, vendors and taxi drivers fear theft or assault. Grave looting and trafficking of burial land are common occurrences. Moreover, as a breeding ground for mosquitos, cemeteries are potential hotbeds of lethal diseases. Adding to such ‘measurable’ risks are the intangible risks and risk aversion connected with spiritual activities. This essay grapples with the conceptualizations of insecurity and risk in areas where the houses of the living and the dead converge, taking Lima's municipal district of Villa María del Triunfo and its Virgen de Lourdes cemetery as a case study. This intervention hence proposes a spatially inclusive conceptualization of security which embraces deathscapes as part of the inhabited urban space. Furthermore, based on the diverse ‘threats’ and ‘risks’ encountered in the cemetery space, I propose an intersectional approach sensitive to tangible and intangible insecurities and to the responses to avert these. With this approach I aim to unravel the various dimensions of (im)materiality in the security debate.

From state-based developmentalism to community-based initiatives to market-based conservation, the Brazilian Amazon has been a laboratory of development interventions for over 50 years. The region is now confronting a devastating COVID-19 pandemic amid renewed environmental pressures and increasing social inequities. While these forces are shaping the present and future of the region, the Amazon has also become an incubator of local innovations and efforts confronting these pressures. Often overlooked, place-based initiatives involving individual and collective-action have growing roles in promoting regional sustainability. We review the history of development interventions influencing the emergence of place-based initiatives and their potential to promoting changes in productive systems, value-aggregation and market-access, and governance arrangements improving living-standards and environmental sustainability. We provide examples of initiatives documented by the AGENTS project, contextualizing them within the literature. We reflect on challenges and opportunities affecting their trajectories at this critical juncture for the future of the region.

COVID‐19 has been particularly damaging to already vulnerable social groups, such as forest peoples. In Brazil, indigenous, Afro‐Brazilian quilombolas and other racialised communities have suffered disproportionately under Bolsonaro's hands‐off policy during the pandemic. We argue that, far from happenstance, this policy fits into a form of necropolitics towards forest peoples. Drawing from Achille Mbembe's seminal work, this article analyses how underlying (and sometimes overt) racism, cultural depredation, and government‐supported deforestation constitute an assault now catalysed by the pandemic. Understanding forest peoples' disproportionate deaths in perspective is critical for addressing their growing vulnerability and the broader politics currently at play.

Drawing on extensive prisons research and sustained contact with (former) prisoners in Nicaragua, this article explores three former prisoners’ post-release trajectories. In the face of a hybrid state that manifests as both a legal penal state and an extralegal system of powers, colloquially referred to as el Sistema (the System), and to the backdrop of a (d)evolving political context, I argue for an understanding of the ‘tightness’ of post-release life by conceptualizing the Sistema’s transcarceral grip. Former prisoners deal with this grip in different ways, ranging from self-censorship to the taking of ‘delinquent freedoms’. A detailed understanding of this grip can help pinpoint how carceral logics are mobilized outside prison in Nicaragua and how its carceral state expands through not only legal but also extralegal means.

Even though the Sandinista nation-building project claims to stand above ethno-racial differences and instead foregrounds class as the major social divider in Nicaragua, the popular experience of class on the mestizo-dominated Pacific coast remains heavily entangled with notions of whiteness/progress and darkness/backwardness. Given that bodies and spaces of social relegation are imbued with expectations of class and color, the social imaginary enveloping the prisoners is colorized in a particular way. However, through the institutional discourse of ‘cambio de actitud’ (change of attitude), Nicaraguan prisoners are pushed to engage in moral performances to lose their delinquent ‘color’ (also a popular metaphor for stigma). In doing so, they both embody and seek to distance themselves from their stereotypical presentation as urban ‘pintas’ (literrally ‘painted ones’, colloquially used to refer to ‘delinquent-looking’ young men). Based on long-term ethnographic research with (formerly) imprisoned young men, I draw out the imaginary surrounding the urban pinta, and then explore the metaphor of ‘color’ widely repeated by my research participants. In doing so, I argue that the ways in which (formerly) imprisoned young men resist and deal with the moral politics of policing and confinement reveals an inherent process of exposure; of coloring and losing color.

In this paper, we describe and analyze the co-management institutional framework at 21 Brazilian Marine Extractive Reserves (MERs) and present the dramas of its implementation from the local manager’s perspective. We categorized the governance instruments of MERs into (i) instruments for land/sea tenure and beneficiaries’ recognition, (ii) territorial use planning, (iii) institutional arenas for discussion and deliberation, as well as (iv) public policies. Although the legal arrangements of these protected areas address fundamental dimensions of governance, we present the challenges of its implementation based on the voice of local managers. The managers are the bridge between the central government and communities, dealing with the implementation of the institutional framework in a reality of multi-level and multi-scale drama: from local to national dilemmas, from organizational to structural ones. We explore these dramas and highlight the institutional dilemmas based on the paradoxes between legalism and social emancipation.

Between 2007 and 2017, Lima experienced an unprecedented growth of the construction sector and an increase in high-rise condominiums. Urban land as a strategic resource has altered the spatial configuration of Lima’s central districts. This paper presents the results of a case study of Barranco, a central and emblematic district of Lima that underwent an intense real estate boom. In our assessment, we connect the recent touristification and gentrification debates to develop a new pattern of Latin American gentrification. We argue that Barranco’s consolidation as a tourist destination, along with the relaxation of local construction policies, has led to the development of one-bedroom apartments in high-rise condominiums destined mainly to be rented out to tourists and other types of floating population. This urban restructuring model has created new business opportunities for what we call a rent-seeking middle class, keen to invest in real estate as an alternative means to increase their income. By way of discussion, we argue that the case of Barranco exemplifies a new trend in Latin American gentrification which is not characterised by an influx of the urban middle class into central areas, nor by a massive physical displacement of lower-income residents, but by the growing purchasing power of a wealthier middle-class group investing in the short-term rental business in combination with other enabling factors.

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.

Hunting management in Brazil in not regulated by a unique legal framework, but by a combination of national environmentallegislation and local rules and norms. Therefore, a multidimensional perspective combining structural and procedural analysis of thedifferent institutional arrangements is necessary for better understanding of this local natural resource management system. Wecombined three analytical approaches in the study case of hunting management in the Piagaçu-Purus Sustainable DevelopmentReserve (RDS-PP) in the Brazilian Amazon. The institutional analysis of the rules revealed gaps and inconsistencies between different structures and decision levels. The meta-governance analysis indicated incongruities arising from different perceptions and values among stakeholders. Finally, the bricolage analysis revealed hybrid strategies used by local stakeholders and state agents. We conclude that complementarity of analytical frameworks is necessary in order to understand how multiple perceptions and power asymmetries in co-management arenas may influence the dynamics and porosity of such institutional arrangements.

Comprehending the context and history-based allocation and distribution of water use rights for irrigation is crucial for understanding social and agricultural dynamics in (semi)arid regions. Irrigation water rights are socio-legal constructs that, for their materialization, depend on the legitimacy, authority and powers backing their claims. We show how the recent conceptual notion of “hydrosocial territories” enables examining water rights claims as expressed in diverse and divergent “legitimation languages”. Water rights and their legitimation languages are embedded in site-particular normative dynamics, cultural-political histories and changing socionatural configurations. This article focuses on Bolivia’s Pucara watershed to examine the historical shifts in legitimizing water use rights, these claims’ social acceptance, and their materialization in hydraulic infrastructure and access to water. The article analyzes three historical periods in which stakeholders sustain different ways to legitimize and defend their water rights. In the first (1950–1978), acquiring rights was sustained through “hydraulic property” relationships: rights-creation by investing in infrastructure development. In the second (1978–1995), a shift takes place to more territorially-oriented claims over water rights in response to governmental attempts to reorganize hydrosocial territories. In the third period (1995–2017), steered by indigenous communities’ wider political emancipation processes and the municipalization policies, territorial claims over water sources and use rights have become decisive in the struggle over water. We show that, to enhance user-oriented irrigation development, it is necessary to understand besides the positions, interests and power structures, also the multiple languages of water rights legitimation that underlay water control and that trigger either conflict or collaboration.

No hay resúmenes disponibles. ECA Estudios Centroamericanos, Vol. 74, No. 756, 2019: [147]-172

In recent decades, an agro-export boom has deeply transformed Peru’s coastal valleys, resulting in dramatic territorial changes and social inequality in the Ica Valley. This article explains how politico-economic and socio-institutional forces have triggered the emergence of a new ‘hydrosocial territory’, transforming the Ica Valley into a virtual-water extraction zone that produces luxury export crops for the North and China. In addition, it shows how these territorial reconfigurations have led to ecological damage, water scarcity and increasing rural–urban inequality sustained by a hegemonic development discourse that supports agribusiness-elite territorial dominance and discourages social unrest.

Getting public opinion to see ‘mining’ and ‘Nature’s Rights’ as non-contradictory and even equivalent and harmonious, calls for far-reaching power strategies. Nature was entitled to rights by Ecuador’s Constitution at about the same time that the Government began promoting mining as central to Ecuador’s future. Building this equivalence to make ‘mining mean nature’, and materialize large-scale mining in the Quimsacocha páramo wetlands, the State and its institutions tested new tactics to manage territory, coined new imaginaries and subjectivities, and limited indigenous/rural political participation. In response, communities started to dispute these governmentality strategies through political practices that framed new meanings of territory and identity. They use formal political and legal arenas but, above all, their day-to-day practices. This article analyzes forms of power and counter-power in the Quimsacocha páramo mining conflict, through the four different, inter-related ‘arts of government’ (Foucault, 2008) and mutual strategies by promoters and detractors of extractive industry who, in apparent paradox, both appeal to Nature’s Rights. We conclude that using Nature’s Rights to promote mega-mining manifests the limitations of social and environmental rights recognition under neoliberal governance, and the tensions inherent in Nature’s Rights themselves. However, anti-extraction struggles like Quimsacocha’s critically make visible as well as challenge the development model and economic system that is implicit in the debate over Nature’s Rights, inviting us to re-think the socio-natural order and foster more just, equitable alternatives.

Ecuador’s mega-dam project aims to control Chone city’s flooding hazards, but it submerges peasants’ territories–legitimized by ‘modern city/majority benefit’ versus ‘rural backward/sacrifice-able minority’ discourse. Presented as disordered, unruly and needing domestication, peasants must follow urban imaginaries and safeguard modern-urban progress. Policy-makers’ water overabundance discourse presents ‘flood risk’ as a natural and techno-managerial problem, hiding how unequal power balances establish ‘high-value’ (urban/elite) areas as protection zones and rural areas as sacrifice zones. Excessive water is stored in rural areas, neglecting peasants’ livelihoods and governance forms. The paper’s political ecology approach displays the ‘water overabundance’ discourse as a techno-political, naturalized construct that profoundly impacts rural–urban hydro-territoriality.

This exploration is based on joint fieldwork conducted by an interdisciplinary research team in the city of Quetzaltenango (Xela), Guatemala. It uses the notion of commoning as an analytic lens to understand social transformations in this intermediate city, and in contemporary Latin America at large. The interplay of commoning, de-commoning and re-commoning processes draws attention to the cocreation and collective production of tangible and intangible resources happening at different scales. The proposed commoning perspective further aims to critically assess the binary contrasts and presumed dualisms that inform academic and policy approaches to social change, in order to create a better understanding of the drivers, interactions and practices of transformation in intertwined rural-urban contexts. Resumen: Comunizar Xela: Negociando espacios colectivos alrededor de una ciudad intermedia centroamericana Esta exploración se basa en un trabajo de campo conjunto realizado por un equipo de investigación interdisciplinario en la ciudad de Quetzaltenango (Xela), Guatemala. Utiliza la noción de “comunizar” ('commoning') como una lente analítica para comprender las transformaciones sociales en esta ciudad intermedia y en la América Latina contemporánea en general. La interacción de los procesos de comunizar, descomunizar y recomunizar llama la atención sobre la creación conjunta y la producción colectiva de recursos tangibles e intangibles que ocurren a diferentes escalas. La perspectiva de “comunizar” propuesta tiene como objetivo evaluar críticamente los contrastes binarios y los supuestos dualismos que informan los enfoques académicos y de política para el cambio social, a fin de crear una mejor comprensión de los impulsores, las interacciones y las prácticas de transformación en contextos rurales-urbanos entrelazados.

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.

[ES] En las últimas décadas han surgido diversos enfoques para dar respuesta a los desafíos que plantea la gestión del agua. Este artículo presenta, de manera introductoria, las principales aproximaciones teóricas desde las cuales se está analizando en la actualidad el uso y la gobernanza del agua: las corrientes neoinstitucionalistas, la teoría de los recursos comunes y la perspectiva del empoderamiento que se relaciona con la ecología política. La descripción de estos enfoques sirve para contextualizar las distintas aportaciones que se presentan en este monográfico sobre el estudio de los territorios hidrosociales, cuyos principales resultados se exponen sucintamente., [EN] During the last decades, different perspectives have emerged to respond to the challenges related to water management. This paper presents an introduction to the main theoretical approaches that currently are deployed to study water management and governance: new institutionalism, common-pool resources theory, and the empowerment perspective that is related to political ecology. The description of these approaches aims at contextualizing the different contributions presented in this special issue, several of which focus on the analysis of hydrosocial territories. Their main results are briefly summarized.

La producción comercial de flores, el acaparamiento del agua y las luchas sociales por un reparto equitativo y un ambiente sano tienen una estrecha relación. Ecuador es el tercer exportador mundial de rosas. Cayambe-Tabacundo es la principal zona de producción y presenta una fuerte presión sobre los recursos hídricos. El agua es acaparada por las grandes empresas florícolas, quedando el resto para agricultura/ganadería de subsistencia en comunidades indígenas. Las florícolas utilizan las certificaciones ambientales y de comercio justo privadas, pero los estándares son permisivos. Este artículo analiza las relaciones de poder detrás de las prácticas de certificación de flores. Concluye que solo tras la presión de agencias gubernamentales, ONGs y asociaciones de usuarios, las empresas florícolas comenzaron a cumplir los estándares.

Does oil palm boost agricultural growth and reduce rural poverty, or is it a threat to rural livelihoods and tropical forest landscapes? This paper introduces a Special Issue on this question, focusing on Latin America. It reviews available literature and data for countries where oil palm either covers large areas (Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Honduras) or has recently expanded (Costa Rica, Guatemala, Mexico, Peru), and presents evidence from nine case studies (including Nicaragua). Combining political economy with a livelihood approach, this article discusses how dissimilar policies supporting oil palm combined with contrasting agrarian change dynamics, market structures, and institutional arrangements driving rural inclusion (and exclusion) in oil palm production have resulted in a variety of expansion trajectories (ranging from smallholder-to plantation-based, plus mixed forms in between) and outcomes across the region. Main findings show that rural livelihoods and landscapes are most threatened where industrial plantations predominate, particularly in weakly governed forest frontiers, while oil palm is beneficial where policies guarantee land access and support smallholders. However, policies that are beneficial to smallholders do not preclude conflicts between oil palm smallholders (often migrant settlers) and forest-dependent (indigenous and Afro-descendant) communities opposing this industry.

While prison authorities enforce the penitentiary both as a dumpster for “animals” and a reformatory for “doubly failed” men, prisoners’ lives and livelihood become doubly precarious. Disposed of through a politics of mediated naming and shaming, their commonplace refrain of being stuck in the “cemetery of the living” grounds this chapter’s focus on the practices prisoners engage in to reckon with and to undo their social disposal, largely arranged around the ideal of penal reeducation and “change of attitude”. Yet how do these changes articulate with(in) the violent realities of the “cemetery,” and the challenges prisoners face during their “social reinsertion”? Drawing from extensive field research in the Nicaraguan prison system, this chapter seeks to problematize the institutionalization of disposal by analyzing (former) prisoners’ parallel engagement in performances of violence and change.

open access article The concept of Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) has been developed in the Global North with little reference to what RRI or RRI-like practices mean in the context of the Global South. We discuss the contextual factors driving the emergence of responsible innovation practice and ways in which they can inform efforts to develop an inclusive and global conceptualization of RRI. Findings show that some activities in the Global South are comparable to those of the Global North, although important differences exist in motivations and structures. We go beyond prior framings to propose a reconfigured, inclusive theoretical framework that accounts for trans-regional differences by looking at three cases to illustrate international differences and to demonstrate an RRI continuum. Netherlands represents a more Global North concept of RRI; Malawi a Global South RRI concept and Brazil sits between these two extremes and assimilates RRI concepts from both ends of the continuum.

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.

Brazilian small-scale farmers are seeking new types of collaborations and economic opportunities amid a changing world. Market opportunities, however, have incurred demanding environmental, financial and labor requirements, and created trade-offs between expanding cash crops and maintaining livelihood security. We analyze the Tomé-Açu region in the Brazilian Amazon, where different collaborative models between small-scale farmers and other social agents (industries, government, non-governmental organizations) have emerged. Local farmers are engaging in collective actions and pursuing different types of partnerships, which facilitate knowledge exchange and access to market niches, also helping them overcome the infrastructural and logistical deficiencies that have historically limited rural development in the region. In particular, we discuss the diffusion and adoption of agroforestry and oil palm production systems among small-scale farmers. We examine the challenges and opportunities these partnerships and social innovations have created for local farmers, who are part of heterogeneous groups with distinct roles, assets and contexts. The state-led oil palm program posed challenges to small-scale farmers who experienced asymmetrical relationships within their partnership with private companies. On the other hand, the farmer-led agroforestry model opened new opportunities for farmers who had more flexibility in deciding their production arrangements, developing new agroforestry techniques, and pursuing commercialization pathways. Despite their limited power, small-scale farmers have been able to overcome some structural barriers through innovations, entrepreneurship, and renegotiation of oil palm contract farming. Thus, their ability to engage in both farmer-led agroforestry and state-led oil palm programs provides concrete examples of the potential of local governance based on collaborative arrangements to support sustainable farming production systems.

International audience; Missionary Linguistic Studies from Mesoamerica to Patagonia presents the results of in-depth studies of grammars, vocabularies and religious texts, dating from the sixteenth – nineteenth century. The researches involve twenty (extinct) indigenous Mesoamerican and South American languages: Matlatzinca, Mixtec, Nahuatl, Purépecha, Zapotec (Mexico); K’iche, Kaqchikel (Guatemala); Amage, Aymara, Cholón, Huarpe, Kunza, Mochica, Mapudungun, Proto-Tacanan, Pukina, Quechua, Uru-Chipaya (Peru); Tehuelche (Patagonia); (Tupi-)Guarani (Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay). The results of the studies include: a) a digital model of a good, conveniently arranged vocabulary, applicable to all indigenous Amerindian languages; b) disclosure of intertextual relationships, language contacts, circulation of knowledge; c) insights in grammatical structures; d) phone analyses; e) transcriptions, so that the texts remain accessible for further research. f) the architecture of grammars; g) conceptual evolutions and innovations in grammaticography.

In the context of globalizing transboundary environmental challenges, strategies to protect and secure the local commons such as water resources have been increasingly scaled up. Consequently, local communities have started to engage in transnational mobilisations to defend their rights and express their concerns. This often implies the adoption and institutionalisation of emerging global norms, principles and modes of framing and claiming – such as the Human Right to Water or the Rights of Nature – which will interfere with and may even go against local understandings, meaning, and rooted struggles or initial claims made by grassroots movements. On the one hand, the appropriation of expert knowledge and technical idiom may improve their recognition and access to political and financial support. On the other hand, transnational involvement may (re)produce misrecognition or exclusion on the ground for community-based organisations. Studying cases from Latin American countries, and combining commons and social movements theories, this paper examines in what ways professionalisation and commensuration strategies as deployed and implemented by transnational grassroots movements impact the local commons.

In this article, I explore how prison riots, large critical incidents of a collective order, emerge, take place, and alter governance relations in place in the Nicaraguan prison system. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted with prisoners and former prisoners of two Nicaraguan prison facilities, I provide a prisoners’ point of view on the political use of violence in prison, particularly during two large prison riots. While authorities often held that prison conditions combined with the “violent attitudes” of prisoners turned prisons into “powder kegs,” such an interpretation does not allow for an understanding of riots as embedded in prison governance structures and conveniently draws the attention away from underlying issues pertaining to the de facto sharing of power in prison in Nicaragua. I argue that by using what has been termed “creative violence,” prisoners attempt to break through the authorities’ imposed regime of public secrecy and draw attention to these issues, forcing authorities to negotiate. Yet, even if riots then function as a catalyst for changes in co-governance arrangements, they do not appear to be geared at permanently damaging or annihilating the existing arrangements but rather at pressuring the authorities hard enough to make compromises and concessions as to the distribution of power in prison.

Recognizing that the ‘prison’ and the ‘street’ are increasingly understood to be enmeshed sites of exclusion and confinement, this introduction proposes an analytical orientation towards relations and practices across these sites, which attends specifically to the ways in which they are mutually constitutive. Utilizing notions of traversal and porosity, we push debates on confinement beyond their prison-centric impulse. This decentring of the prison goes beyond reading one site in terms of the other (the street as just another carceral space; the prison as another site of exclusion). We challenge the divisiveness of prison/street binaries and the domination of boundary-making by emphasizing the importance of polyvalent experiences and by drawing attention to the practices of people who traverse the prison/street threshold. On the basis of the fine-grained ethnographic contributions making up this collection, the introduction points towards novel avenues for a (grounded) theorization of confinement in terms of overlap, traversal and porosity.

The COVID-19 crisis is not a new issue. Conditions leading to it have been taking shape for decades. This pandemic is rather a symptom of much deeper challenges resulting from contemporary production and consumption structures, social inequalities, nature deterioration, and global connectivity. To think about the post-pandemic world is to envision solutions that tackle the root causes of the problem. Local communities and indigenous groups in the Brazilian Amazon are a source of much-needed social innovations that rely on alternative views of Nature and social relations. This essay aims to turn the attention to these practices as starting point to rethink our present and reshape our future. New pathways are needed in order to overcome the region’s ‘old normal’ marked by destructive resource expropriation and social inequalities, and move to a ‘new normal’ that rely on transformations to a more sustainable and equity-based society.

Solidarity economy is often focused on autonomous initiatives outside the regular market system. In Brazil, the leftist national government during the 2000s has supported a number of solidarity economy initiatives by institutionalizing the ideal and practices of sharing and sustainable production and consumption within the regular market system. New actors, policies, and procedures have been instrumental in this institutionalization. However, the questions of how the actors, policies, and procedures interact and how the interaction becomes socially and politically relevant remain largely unaddressed. In this chapter we will explore implications of the interactions for the establishment of solidarity economy based on agroecological practices carried out by small family farmers in Brazil. We firstly give an overview of the national context in which the agroecological practices were linked to the practice and economy of sharing. We then analyze cases of the Program of Food Acquisition in the south of Brazil and agroforestry systems in the Amazon region in order to highlight different patterns of the involved actors’ interaction and eventual articulation of solidarity economy in relation to the promotion of sustainability. The chapter concludes by discussing the linkage between actors at different levels, new institutional arrangements, and monetary and nonmonetary values added to the solidarity economy.

The Italian navigator Antonio de Pigafetta (1480–1540) compiled a vocabulary containing ninety Patagonian terms (Tehuelche) in San Julian’s bay in 1520. In the same bay but in 1780 explorer Antonio de Viedma (1737–1809) wrote a vocabulary of 185 terms. In another expedition nine years later, in 1789, Alessandro Malaspina (1754–1809) compiled two brief vocabularies on the Patagonian language and in 1791 Lieutenant Juan José de Elizalde (?-?) wrote a longer one. The analysis of these vocabularies will include (a) context of compilation, (b) extension, (c) semantic fields and (d) transcription, distribution and organization of lexemes. We will also compare these 19th-century vocabularies with those of Pigafetta’s (1520), Pineda’s (1789) and Elizalde’s (1791).

By combining scholarship on modernity, urbanization and territory, this paper analyses how urban-based visions and ambitions have been realized in hydropower development and specific water access and control arrangements in the Rimac watershed in Lima, Peru. The discourses that sustained and promoted hydropower plant construction and associated development projects in the watershed are scrutinized, showing how the dream of conquering nature through engineers' technical skills was enmeshed with political agendas and visions of modernizing not only nature, but also people. Besides the historical analysis, the paper also explores how historical physical-ecological, legal, social and symbolic reconfigurations continue to shape hydrosocial relations between the city of Lima and the Rimac watershed. Analysing the current management of the watershed's highland lakes and community water use from the hydropower company's tunnels shows how the history of the Rimac is not a clear cut story of water deprivation but rather of complex, entangled, multidimensional relations and dependence. In the context of increasing pressure on water resources, the socio-territorial arrangements and the watershed's history itself are becoming matters of discussion.

This paper explores the gendered and spatialized dynamics that underpin prisoners’ and official discourses of “change” (cambio de actitud) in Nicaragua as these were manifested at two prison facilities during a lengthy period of prison theater training. Teasing out the way in which “change” is resisted, adapted and appropriated by prisoners as they simultaneously embody and contest state discourses of penal reeducation, I argue that while re-educational spaces present opportunities for “doing freedom”, temporarily relieving the tightness of prison, they are also fundamentally part of the prison’s power structure and political-moral realm. Herein change is often posited as opposed to violence, yet my research points to a dialectical relationship rather than a binary opposition between the two, because within the wider co-governance system of Nicaragua’s prisons, violence appears to exist in a parallel rather than past relationship to prisoners’ processes of change. Este artigo explora a dinâmica de género e de espaço, que sustenta tanto o discurso oficial como o dos reclusos sobre “mudança” (cambio de actitud) na Nicarágua, tal como se manifestou em dois estabelecimentos prisionais durante um longo período de formação de teatro na prisão. Identificando a forma como os reclusos resistem, adaptam e se apropriam da “mudança”, ao mesmo tempo que corporizam e contestam os discursos oficiais da reeducação penal, argumento que, muito embora os espaços de reeducação apresentem oportunidades para “fazer liberdade”, aliviando temporariamente a tensão da prisão, eles também fazem parte fundamental da estrutura de poder e do domínio político-moral da prisão. Aqui, a mudança costuma ser posta em oposição à violência, mas a minha pesquisa aponta mais para uma relação dialética do que para uma oposição binária entre as duas, uma vez que dentro do sistema de cogovernação mais amplo das prisões da Nicarágua, a violência parece existir numa relação paralela, mais do que passada, aos processos de mudança dos reclusos. Cet article se penche sur la dynamique de genre et d’espace, qui nourrit tant le discours officiel que celui les détenus sur le “changement” (cambio de actitud) au Nicaragua, tel que cela s’est manifesté dans deux prisons durant une longue période de formation de théâtre en prison. Nous avons mis en relief la façon dont les détenus résistent, s’adaptent et finissent par s’approprier du “changement”, tout en corporisant et en contestant les discours officiels de rééducation pénale, et l’on soutient que, bien que les espaces de rééducation offrent des chances de “créer la liberté”, en soulageant temporairement la tension de la prison, ils font aussi fondamentalement partie de la structure du pouvoir et du domaine politico-moral de la prison. Ici, le changement est normalement opposé à la violence, mais nos recherches soulignent davantage un rapport dialectique qu’une opposition binaire entre les deux, puisque dans le système de co-gouvernance plus ample des prisons du Nicaragua, la violence semble exister dans une relation parallèle, plus que passée, des procédures de changement des détenus.

This paper explores the meanings that youth crime and policing acquire in the context of their mediated representation on the televised news in Nicaragua. In particular, it explores this question by juxtaposing the televised imagery of the apprehended juvenile delinquent with the discursive treatment of his person by both police and reporters on Nicaragua's most watched news shows,Acción 10andCrónica TN8. The police are presented as heroic protagonists who serve and protect the barrio through ‘communitarian policing’ whilst the juvenile delinquent – the ‘pinta’ – is excluded and stigmatised. This turns such youths into socially expendable and ‘tainted, discounted’ outsiders who can be treated as such. In this way, through the news,pintasare targeted for ‘removal’ from the barrio, and their mediated arrests become ‘spectacular performances’ of community. A discrepancy appears, then, between the police's communitarian discourse and its reactionary practice.

Srinivasan et al. provide an interesting overview of the challenges for long-term socio-hydrological predictions. Although agreeing with most of the statements made, we argue for the need to take socio-hydrological analysis a step further and add some fundamental considerations, especially concerning the crucial importance of many (conscious and unconscious) assumptions made upfront of the modelling exercise. Eventual assumptions of technological determinism need correction: Models are not “value-free”, but uncertain, subjective and a product of the society in which they were shaped. It is important to acknowledge this uncertainty and bias when making decisions based on socio-hydrological models, considering also that these models are “social and political actors” in and by themselves. Furthermore, socio-hydrological models require a transdisciplinary approach, since physical water availability is only one of the boundary conditions for society. Last but not least, interaction with stakeholders remains important to enable understanding of what the variable of interest is.

There is a forceful new impetus toward mega-hydraulic projects in Latin America, which are booming but also highly controversial. They bring benefits to some social groups while many others are negatively affected. Technocratic discourses are dominant in the region; they strategically mobilize institutions, infrastructure, money, and knowledge to present particular hydrosocial territorial imaginaries—such as multipurpose dams—as natural, universal, and politically neutral. Meanwhile, affected local communities commonly envision and practice different discourses, values, and worldviews, based on contextualized notions of well-being and territoriality. Using a political ecology perspective, this article examines how the Daule-Peripa mega-hydraulic scheme—Ecuador’s “hydraulic heart”—has de- and repatterned the territory, producing new hierarchical relations and unequal distribution of socioenvironmental impacts. Though political discourses have changed throughout state-centralist and neoliberal époques, governmental policies and practices have continued and renewed their defense of mega-hydraulism. In turn, affected communities and families, through everyday territorial politics, respond and aim to rearrange the hydrosocial network in order to regain control over water, land, and territorial services.En América Latina hay un nuevo auge de proyectos megahidráulicos que, simultáneamente es muy controversial. Estos proyectos benefician a algunos grupos sociales, mientras que muchos otros son afectados negativamente. Junto a éstos, se movilizan estratégicamente instituciones, infraestructura, dinero y conocimiento con el fin de presentar a imaginarios hidro-sociales particulares como naturales y políticamente neutros. Al mismo tiempo, las comunidades afectadas practican y reproducen diferentes discursos y formas de valoración, fundamentadas en nociones situadas de bienestar y territorialidad. Desde la ecología política y la literatura crítica sobre neoextractivismo, este artículo muestra cómo el megasistema multipropósito Daule-Peripa –corazón hidráulico del Ecuador– ha transformado el territorio, involucrando nuevas relaciones jerárquicas y la distribución inequitativa de impactos socio-ambientales. A pesar de que los discursos oficialistas han cambiado desde la época neoliberal, las políticas y prácticas de gobierno se han renovado y continúan defendiendo y promocionando el imperativo megahidráulico durante regímenes autodenominados progresistas, como el liderado por la llamada revolución ciudadana. Este articulo muestra la importancia de entender el auge contemporáneo de megasistemas hidráulicos como construcciones sociotécnicas desde una perspectiva repolitizada e histórica.

This article discusses challenges in fostering participation of marginalized actors in coastal fisheries governance in Brazil. Recent changes in the institutional architecture of fisheries governance have opened new spaces for the participation of small-scale fishers to influence setting of the policy agenda, management practices, and monitoring strategies. However, the participation of local users has been opposed by conservationist policies, which limit their access to fishing grounds. Small-scale fishers' involvement has been characterized by tensions between participatory spaces provided within bureaucratic structures and claimed participatory spaces built from below. This article analyzes fisheries governance in the municipality of Paraty, Southeastern Coast of Brazil, with a focus on three institutional innovations implemented by the government to promote social participation - Fishing Accords, Terms of Agreement, and Management Councils of Protected Areas. Although these innovations are important for the recognition of small-scale fisheries as compatible with conservation policies, problems such as low institutional capacity, power imbalance, limits of decentralized governance, and lack of long-term financial resources remain as challenges for the consolidation of an inclusive development model for coastal fisheries in Brazil.

The global ‘land grab’ debate is going urban and needs a specific conceptual framework to analyze the diverse modalities through which land commodification and speculation are transforming cities across the globe. This article identifies new avenues for research on urban land issues by drawing on an extensive body of academic literature and concrete cases of urban land transformations in Asia, Latin America and Africa. These transformations are analyzed by focusing on three types of urban investments – investments in property, investments in public space and public services, and investments in speculation, image building and ‘worlding’ – and the way these investments are intermingled with and enhanced by processes of gentrification and speculative urbanism. Addressing real estate and infrastructure investments, speculation and gentrification through a land-based lens allows us to deepen the discussion on urban land governance in the global South. We argue that urban land acquisition cannot be thoroughly understood in isolation from the workings of urban real estate markets, public policies, and displacement processes. The urban land grab debate needs to consider the dialectic interplay between land use change and general socio-spatial transformations both in central – or recentralized – and peripheral areas. This is why we plea for a kaleidoscopic perspective on urban land governance by uncovering the complex patchwork of urban land acquisitions and their diverse temporalities and spatialities, their hybrid character in terms of actors involved, and the multiple and often unpredicted ways in which urban dwellers try to gain control over and access to urban land.

This article uses a case study on ecological sanitation as a basis for lessons on identifying and harnessing the plurality of actor frames in social-ecological systems, thereby moving beyond the advocacy positions often taken by implementing NGOs. The study aimed to explore how perspectives between the implementing agencies of an ecological sanitation project in rural Bolivia and the owners of a urine-diverting dry toilet (UDDT) relate to each other, and how this influenced the outcome of the project. The article provides key elements and an example methodology for social learning in the context of multiple interpretative frames in development projects.Cet article utilise une étude de cas sur l'assainissement écologique en tant que base d'enseignement sur l'identification et l'exploitation de la pluralité des cadres acteurs dans les systèmes socio-écologiques, se positionnant ainsi au-delà des revendications souvent émises par les ONG d'exécution. L'étude visait à examiner comment les perspectives des agences d'exécution d'un projet d'assainissement écologique dans les zones rurales de la Bolivie et celles des propriétaires d'une toilette sèche avec séparation d'urine (TSSU) se recoupent, et comment ce recoupement a impacté la réalisation du projet. L'étude propose des éléments-clés et un exemple de méthodologie pour l'apprentissage social dans le contexte des multiples cadres acteurs utilisés dans les projets de développement.Con el fin de avanzar más allá del acento puesto en la incidencia por las ong implementadoras, el presente artículo utiliza un estudio de caso vinculado al saneamiento ecológico para recabar aprendizajes relativos a la identificación y el aprovechamiento de una pluralidad de cuadros interpretativos en sistemas socioecológicos. El estudio tuvo por objetivo analizar cómo las perspectivas de las agencias implementadoras vinculadas a un proyecto de saneamiento ecológico en el ámbito rural de Bolivia se relacionan mutuamente con las de los dueños de inodoros secos desviadores de orina (uddt, por sus siglas en inglés), así como examinar la forma en que dichas perspectivas inciden en el resultado del proyecto. Asimismo, el artículo hace referencia a elementos clave del proceso y proporciona una metodología, a manera de ejemplo, para el aprendizaje social en el contexto de múltiples cuadros interpretativos en proyectos de desarrollo.

Looking beyond a normative analysis of oil palm expansion, this paper offers a nuanced analysis of landscape transformations in the Brazilian Amazonian region of Tome-Acu. Based on quantitative and qualitative data deriving from interviews with key stakeholders, focus groups and surveys with smallholders and migrant workers, contextualized and cross-checked with observations between 2011 and 2017 and secondary sources, we discuss the processes and outcomes of Brazil's Sustainable Oil Palm Production Program (SPOPP). Despite its participatory component and innovative design, simultaneously tackling environmental, economic and social dimensions, the program underwent rapid structural change and suffered from discontinuity. A new boom and bust cycle emerged in the region, however, both “boom” and “bust” periods were marked by mixed outcomes. Notwithstanding the current governance shift characterized by absent state, reduced participation and disinvestment, local agency has been able to reorganize the sector on the ground and a transformed landscape emerged. However, under the current setting if expansion recommences there is no guarantee the sector will be able to avoid many of the socio-environmental problems experienced in the past.

The Misicuni multipurpose hydraulic project was designed to transfer water from a neighboring watershed to the Cochabamba Valley in the center of Bolivia for domestic, hydropower, and agricultural use. The project involved the construction of a 120 m high large dam and a 19 km transfer tunnel, which negatively affected the rural indigenous host communities that were deprived of productive lands, houses, and livelihoods. This article critically analyzes the process to compensate for harmful effects, demonstrating the existence of divergent knowledge systems, interpretations, and valuing of what was affected and how the impacts had to be compensated. The analysis shows that the compensation was fundamentally a process of negotiation about the meaning and the contested commensuration that was implemented in a context of unequal power relations between state institutions and the indigenous population. This led to unfavorable arrangements for the affected communities. The article details the discussions about impacts, knowledge, and values of key elements of the compensation process and highlights how &ldquo, compensation&rdquo, was embedded in the wider struggle over territorial control and natural resource governance. The unreliability of the state institutions worsened the negative impacts for the rural communities because the negotiated outcomes were not always materialized.

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.

Mega-dams are commonly designed, constructed, and implemented under governors&rsquo, rule and technocrats&rsquo, knowledge. Such hydraulic infrastructures are characteristically presented as if based on monolithic technical consensus and unidirectional engineering. However, those who are affected by these water interventions, and eventually governed by the changes brought by them, often dispute the forms of knowledge, norms, morals, and operation and use rules embedded in mega-hydraulic engineers&rsquo, designs. Protests may also deeply influence the design and development of the technological artifacts. By using approaches related to the Social Construction of Technology and Partha Chatterjee&rsquo, s politics of the governed, this article shows (i) how protests against the Baba dam in coastal Ecuador greatly influenced the dam&rsquo, s designs, protecting communities&rsquo, lands from being flooded, and (ii) how, at the same time, techno-political decision-makers deployed hydraulic design as a dividing rule, turning potentially affected communities against each other. We conclude that megadam designs are shaped by the power interplay among governors and governed, with the latter being internally differentiated. By critically analyzing the role of technology development&mdash, materializing changing &lsquo, political context and relationships&rsquo, &mdash, we show how contested and adapted dam design may favor some stakeholders while simultaneously affecting others and weakening united dam-resistance movements.

This chapter engages with the meanings of death and the dead through a focus on urban cemetery cults, in which rural migrant populations in Latin American cities come to grips with a legacy of displacement and violence. The chapter explores two parallel cults: the veneration of folk saints and the communication with anonymous or forgotten dead, whose “restless souls” are deemed to be wandering in purgatory. The chapter claims, first, that the cults need to be understood as a reproduction of traditional rural beliefs within an urban context; and second, that the cults are a form of memory politics enacted by vulnerable populations dealing with disruptive violent pasts and forced displacements. While many capital cities in Latin America have developed formal places for the commemoration of violent episodes, everyday memorialization practices in cemeteries offer an alternative reading of those pasts, and of the position of known and unknown deadly victims therein. The two concurring explanations, I posit, support the idea that designated cemeteries are to be seen as urban cultural hotspots. The geographical focus of this essay is on Bogota and Lima, two metropolises of comparable history and size. The sanctification and veneration cults in these cities testify in complementary ways to the relevance of the cemetery as a cultural hotspot for the urban masses. The richness and diversity of the stories, cults and practices centering on the dead body and its on-living soul is a valuable yet undervalued resource in contemporary urban life.

The modernization program launched by the government of the so called ´Citizen Revolution´ in Ecuador illustrates the new strategies of global capital penetration and intensification towards new frontiers. Notwithstanding its anti-neoliberal discourse, the government project relies on the expansion of the extractive frontier as well on practices of homogenizing and disciplinary inclusion inside of the territories. The policy implementation of ´Millennium Communities’ and ´Millennium Schools´ is analyzed through the concept of governmentality, as a key instrument of spatial and symbolic (re) territorialization. We explore the cases of the indigenous community Cofan Dureno in the Ecuadorian Amazon and the parish Victoria del Portete in the southern highlands. The last section discusses the new responses of local-global alliances to respond to such capitalist expansion in new territories, by means of supporting the enactment of the Rights of Nature in the Ecuadorian Constitution. This ambiguous instrument brings the multiple meanings of nature underlying territorial conflicts into political discussion. The conclusion presents how Rights of Nature are a product of the interaction among actors of diverse geographical scales and cultural backgrounds. It is precisely in its multi-scalar reach and intercultural interaction where the potential of these rights can be found.