Bibiana Duarte-Abadía

This paper examines how utopian river planning has arisen in Colombia and Spain since the late nineteenth century. Specifically, the paper contributes to understanding how particular ideologies of modernism and development present in territorial planning connect both countries. Taking Thomas More’s classic work ‘Utopia’ as the analytical reference, I analyze how utopian tendencies have traveled through time and space to shape territorial planning and water governance. In both countries, this was evident in the late nineteenth century through the political project to strengthen the nation state. For Spain, I describe the regenerationist movement and the hydraulic utopia led by the Spanish intellectual Joaquín Costa, who forged the dream of a water nationhood. By contrast, in Colombia, several political intellectuals looked at Europe and North America as a source of inspiration to achieve progress by controlling rivers. Through the method of disjunctive comparison, I show how the same utopian notions are expressed in similar ways in distinct contexts: violently governing the flows of rivers, standardizing minds and ordering territories towards capital growth. This paper contributes to grasping the notions and roots of the discourses that have colonized the political water agendas in both countries.

En las últimas dos décadas los fondos de agua (FA) han cobrado importancia como mecanismos de conservación del agua y sus fuentes. Éstos promueven una serie de acuerdos entre diversos actores que participan en diálogos sostenidos en contextos de alta desigualdad socioeconómica y política. Así, los FA han logrado conectar a poblaciones peri-urbanas y rurales, habitantes de ecosistemas hídricos estratégicos, con importantes usuarios del agua como ciudades, hidroeléctricas, empresas públicas, privadas y multinacionales, entre otras. Bajo el enfoque de justicia hídrica, este artículo analiza el tipo de participación que tienen los distintos actores involucrados en la co-creación de conocimientos en torno a la seguridad hídrica promovida por distintos FA. El artículo ilustra dos casos de estudio, el primero en Ecuador (Fondo de Manejo de Páramos Tungurahua y Lucha contra la Pobreza (FMPLPT) y el segundo en Colombia (Fondo de Agua de Bogotá). Concluimos que estos FA centran sus esfuerzos en contextos urbanos y poco miran la seguridad hídrica rural.

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 land-use zones and delimited use of the Santurbán páramo since 2014. This article illustrates how hydro-territorial 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’ hydro-territorial 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.

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.

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’ 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’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.

Just as in other parts of Spain, the Guadalhorce Valley, Málaga, has a long history of policies based on ‘hydraulic utopianism’ (regenerationist and Franco-ist), bent on ‘reorganizing’ political, geographic, and human nature. Residents of the neighboring sub-basin, the Río Grande valley, have seen how these policies, designed to transfer rural water to modern urban centers, have turned the Guadalhorce hydrosocial territory into a ‘hydraulic dystopia’. In this article, we examine how Río 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 Río 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 ‘common enemy’, the mega-hydraulic construction, has become more complex, as threats crop up not only from the ‘city over there’ but also from ‘internal’ hydro-territorial transformations. These sprout from policies to modernize traditional irrigation systems, supposedly to ‘save water’, but critical voices assume that it is all about passing on the ‘surplus’ to Málaga 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.

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.

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.

Water Justice - edited by Rutgerd Boelens March 2018

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.