Hydrosocial territories: a political ecology perspective

ABSTRACT

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.

KEYWORDS:

• hydrosocial territories
• water governance
• governmentality
• political ecology
• scalar politics

In this introduction we present a conceptual framework for exploring hydrosocial territories: socially, naturally and politically constituted spaces that are (re)created through the interactions amongst human practices, water flows, hydraulic technologies, biophysical elements, socio-economic structures and cultural-political institutions. In this special issue, we aim to explore how processes of territorialization around water are intrinsically linked to different and often divergent water governance systems and their contestation. Our aim is to develop a better understanding of how the relations between society, nature, territory and governance play out specifically in the water domain.

This issue bundles articles that were presented and discussed at the International Irrigation Society Landscape Conference in Valencia, Spain, between 25 and 27 September 2014. This conference brought together an interdisciplinary group of scholars from around the world to discuss how the notion of hydrosocial territories can help advance a better understanding of interrelated local, regional, national and international processes of water governance and the issues of equity and justice in water control. This resulted in a rich collection of articles, approaches and insights with regard to how the lens of hydrosocial territories can help unravel different water-centred processes.

Drawing on the broader literature, the contributions to this special issue (with most authors applying a political ecology approach), and the insights generated during the above-mentioned conference, this introduction explores how and challenges why actors commonly portray water territories as mere biophysical ‘nature’. This makes water problems and their solutions appear as politically neutral, technical and/or managerial issues which can be ‘objectively’ solved according to technical knowledge, ‘rational water use’ and ‘good governance’. Contrasting such a conception, which is often used as a veil to legitimize deeply political choices that protect and stabilize specific political orders, we call for a repoliticization, that is the recognition of the political nature, of hydrosocial territories through the study of everyday water use praxis.

To examine this theoretical field and its implication for the interpretation of the empirical, this special issue deals with the contradictions, conflicts and societal responses generated by the configuration of hydrosocial territories. It examines how socionatural arrangements and water politics either enhance or challenge the unequal distribution of resources and decision-making power in water governance – the mechanisms, structures, knowledge systems and discourses underpinning their operation. In addition, the range of articles in this issue seek to understand and identify alternatives that contribute to the creation of proposals that respond to questions of socio-economic fairness, political democracy and ecological integrity.

This introductory article is structured as follows. We begin by defining hydrosocial territories and their constituting elements. Then, we outline four conceptual themes that are intrinsically related to the constitution of hydrosocial territories: first, hydrosocial networks and territorialization; second, the politics of scalar territorial reconfiguration; third, the governmentalization of territory; and fourth, territorial pluralism. Finally, in the concluding section, we offer an overview of the presented issues.

Defining hydrosocial territories

Territories, although often considered natural, are actively constructed and historically produced through the interfaces amongst society, technology and nature. They are the outcomes of interactions in which the contents, presumed boundaries and connections between nature and society are produced by human imagination, social practices and related knowledge systems. This is clearly manifested in how river basin management, water flows, water use systems and hydrological cycles are mediated by governance structures and human interventions that entwine the biophysical, the technological, the social and the political. We therefore conceptualize a ‘hydrosocial territory’ as

the contested imaginary and socio-environmental materialization of a spatially bound multi-scalar network in which humans, water flows, ecological relations, hydraulic infrastructure, financial means, legal-administrative arrangements and cultural institutions and practices are interactively defined, aligned and mobilized through epistemological belief systems, political hierarchies and naturalizing discourses.¹

Hydrosocial territories (imagined, planned or materialized) have contested functions, values and meanings, as they define processes of inclusion and exclusion, development and marginalization, and the distribution of benefits and burdens that affect different groups of people in distinct ways. For instance, prevailing water governance and intervention projects commonly respond to growing urban water needs, globalizing commercial export agriculture and industrial growth sectors (see the contributions in this issue; Duarte-Abadía, Boelens, & Roa-Avendaño, 2016; Swyngedouw, 2015). This leads to processes of resources accumulation and the simultaneous dispossession of vulnerable groups of their livelihoods (Crow et al., 2014; Martínez-Alier, 2002; Vos & Boelens, 2014), creating social and environmental inequities (Bridge & Perreault, 2009; Harris & Roa-García, 2013; Roa-García, 2014). Therefore, the question of how, by which actors, through which strategies and with what interests and consequences the ‘natural’ and the ‘social’ boundaries of hydrosocial territories are conceptualized and materialized through interlinked natural, social and technological elements, is fundamental (Baviskar, 2007; Damonte-Valencia, 2015; cf. Bakker, 2010; Latour, 1993).

Socionature, hydrosocial networks and territorialization

The notion that society and nature are intrinsically linked and interdependent is common amongst geographers (e.g. Castree, 2008; Perreault, 2014; Swyngedouw, 2007). People are strongly involved in the everyday production and re-production of the environment they live in – although not necessarily in the ways they foresee, plan or desire (cf. Agnew, 1994; Baletti, 2012; Winner, 1986). As Duarte-Abadía and Boelens (2016), Hulshof and Vos (2016), and Seemann (2016) show in this issue, people inscribe their life worlds, in particular biophysical environments, by using, inhabiting and/or managing these according to their ideologies, knowledge and socio-economic and political power. In doing so, people generate environments, environmental knowledge systems, and territory.

Creating hydrosocial territories involves humanizing nature and building humanized waters based on social, political and cultural visions of the world-that-is and the world-that-should-be (Boelens, 2015; Swyngedouw, 2015). Therefore the (re)creation of hydrosocial territories (and water) needs to be analyzed in the context of their historical, cultural and political settings (see also Bury et al., 2013; Lansing, 1991; Orlove & Caton, 2010). Consequently, thinking of hydrosocial territories and the processes of their constitution and (re)configuration requires going beyond dichotomizing presentations that separate (or ‘purify’ – Latour, 1993) nature from society. Rather, these should be seen as hybrids that simultaneously embody the natural and the social; the biophysical and the cultural; the hydrological and the hydraulic; the material and the political. As Haraway (1991), Latour (1993), Smith (1984) and Swyngedouw (1999, 2007), amongst others, have elaborated, this also goes beyond a perspective of profound interrelatedness between the realms of nature and society. In fact, “the dialectic between nature and society becomes an internal one” (Swyngedouw, 1999, p. 446), rendering nature as an undivided part of the process of societal or rather “socionatural” production (Haraway, 1991; Latour, 1993; Lefebvre, 1991).

Water and water technologies entwine ecology and society. Water flows through landscapes, technologies and cities, connecting places, spaces and people. The natural and/or human-induced variations in its flow create, transform or destroy social linkages, lived spaces and boundaries as they produce new social, land and water configurations (cf. Hoogesteger, 2013; Mosse, 2008). These in turn create and transform social/political hierarchies, conflicts, and forms of collaboration. Therefore, water, technologies, society and nature are intrinsically interrelated and mutually determining elements that together organize as specific socionatural networks. The networks of relations constituting hydrosocial territories can be termed “hydrosocial networks” (Wester, 2008, p. 21). These networks are intentionally and recursively shaped around water and its use; they are precarious and reversible outcomes of modes of ordering (Law, 1994). Bolding (2004) defines two critical characteristics of hydrosocial networks: span and durability. Span refers to the spatial, social, material and institutional reach or extent of a hydrosocial network and can run from a single small canal to the interlinking of several river basins. This depends on the scale of analysis and the associations that are being traced. Durability refers to the strength of a hydrosocial network, to how strong and stabilized the associations are amongst the heterogeneous elements forming the network. It also refers to the time dimension of the network, to how long the network sticks together before it falls apart. Without water the network literally falls dry.

In the terms of Latour (1993), water as well as water technologies are actants in an actor-network. And it is common to find worldviews and epistemological positions that express how water possesses many properties and faces: powerful, productive, destructive; engineered, natural and supernatural (see e.g. Boelens, 2014; Illich, 1986; Linton & Budds, 2014). Water is thus simultaneously a physical and a social actant in cultural and political processes and can for instance “be and become a border, a resource for regeneration, a foundation for empire, a means of nation building, and a material linkage between past and present” (Barnes & Alatout, 2012, p. 485). Therefore, the examination of water flows, water distribution, hydraulic infrastructure, water-based production, water security, and the historical, geographical and technical-political processes that created and transformed them gives profound insights into who – and based on what imaginaries and knowledge systems – designs(ed), controls(ed) and has(d) the power to (re)produce specific hydrosocial networks and territories (Boelens & Post Uiterweer, 2013; Kaika, 2005; Meehan, 2013; Wester, Merrey, & De Lange, 2003).

To argue that hydrosocial territories are ‘humanized nature’ or ‘socionatures’ is to insist that they are not fixed, bounded, and spatially coherent territorial entities. Rather, it poses that territory and the processes of territorialization are – and should be examined as – spatially bound, subject-built, socionatural networks that are produced by actors who collaborate and compete around the definition, composition and ordering of this networked space (Rodriguez-de-Francisco & Boelens, 2016; Swyngedouw & Williams, 2016; see also Agnew, 1994; Elden, 2010; Escobar, 2008). Therefore, “territory is not external to the society that formed it, but rather is its substance, it also embodies the contradictions, conflicts and struggles of that society” (Baletti, 2012, p. 578).

The notions and strategies of how to make territory profoundly diverge amongst actors, just like the ‘territorialities’ that are produced. For this reason, as Hoogesteger, Baud, and Boelens (2016), Perramond (2016), Romano (2016) and Seemann (2016) show in this issue, the challenge for grass-roots collectives that strive to build and defend their water-based territories, such as local watersheds and irrigation and drinking water systems, is often complex. Apart from the threats posed by powerful outsiders (i.e. state agencies, agro-export chains, mining companies), they face the need to solve water conflicts inside their collectives. In building and defending their hydrosocial territory, a water users collective, although internally differentiated, requires a collective identity connected to its water sources and socio-technical infrastructure system – a shared normative system and a physical, natural and human-bounded territorial water-control space (Boelens, 2015; Hoogesteger, 2013). Grass-roots territorialization is therefore a struggled process that builds on and re-creates mutual dependency through cooperation and the mobilization of its parts towards a common resource control objective (cf. Hoogesteger & Verzijl, 2015).

The politics of scalar territorial reconfiguration

A focus on hydrosocial networks highlights the social relations that connect local human actors and nonhuman actants to broader political, economic, cultural and ecological scales. These scales are neither natural nor fixed but are produced through frictions between social practice, environmental processes and structural forces (Bridge & Perreault, 2009; Heynen & Swyngedouw, 2003). Spatial scales – that is, the geographically constituted ‘levels’ of social interactions and interconnectedness (e.g. household, community, watershed, region, nation, globe) – are produced, contested and reconfigured through myriad state, market, civil-society and individual actions and everyday practices (Neumann, 2009; Swyngedouw, 1999; Warner, Wester, & Hoogesteger, 2014).

Hydrosocial territories at a specific scale exist and are deeply enmeshed in other territories that exist and operate at broader, overlapping, counterpoised and/or hierarchically embedded administrative, cultural, jurisdictional, hydrological and organizational scales. In the (trans)formation of hydrosocial territories, scales and the ways they connect require continual re-production and are therefore subject to negotiation and struggle (e.g. Ferguson & Gupta, 2002; Molle, 2009; Saldías, Boelens, Wegerich, & Speelman, 2012). Groups with divergent territorial interests struggle to define, influence and command particular scales of resource governance, and to determine the ways in which these mutually connect in a given sociospatial conjuncture. As Swyngedouw (2004, p. 33) observes, “Spatial scales are never fixed, but are perpetually redefined, contested and restructured in terms of their extent, content, relative importance and interrelations.” Whether the repatterning of the scale of territories actually takes place in accordance with the desires and interests of a particular group of actors depends not only on the quality of the territorial proposals, but also crucially on the support and power of an interlocked multi-scalar coalition that provides the technical, scientific and discursive support to this reconfiguration (Swyngedouw, 2007, 2015).

Different scalar plans and projections about how to organize hydrosocial territory envision very different ways of patterning local livelihoods, production and regional economic and socionatural development. These projections of how these territories, their water and their people are and ought to be organized may commonly lead to the empowerment of certain groups of actors while disempowering others, and offer arenas for claim-making and contestation. Hoogesteger et al. (2016) show how organizational scales of administrators and water users in the Ecuadorian Highlands determine how the water users claim participation in decision making about how and by whom water is managed in different hydrosocial territories. Vos and Hinojosa (2016) show how, in contexts of growing importance of export production chains and international virtual water trade, new forms of water regulation at local and national scales reshape the communities’ hydrosocial territories. The resulting hydrosocial configurations compromise the political representation, water security, and property structures of local communities and private companies in strongly divergent ways.

These cases illustrate that although the impacts of deterritorialization and repatterning hydrosocial territories may be felt mostly by individuals, households, or water-use collectives and organizations at the local level, the processes are deeply and dynamically interconnected at various scales. Therefore, as also Romano, Hulshof and Vos, Perramond, and Seemann show in their contributions, hydrosocial territories at different interrelated scales are sites of political contestation whereby the production of new (and the defence of existing) socionatural relationships is crucial; the transformation of existing technological, legal, institutional and symbolic arrangements is at stake. In other words, these hydroterritorial struggles and conflicts respond to site-specific processes “through which symbolic formations are forged, social groups enrolled, and natural processes and ‘things’ entangled and maintained” (Swyngedouw, 2007, p. 10).

Governmentalization of territory: from humanized nature to ‘naturalized natures’

As shown for the Colombian highland territories (páramos) by Duarte and Boelens (2016), the Nicaraguan rural water-use communities by Romano, the Spanish desalination plans and infrastructure by Swyngedouw and Williams, the Ecuadorian Highlands by Rodriguez-de-Francisco and Boelens, and the acequias in New Mexico by Perramond, dominant hydrosocial territories blend society and nature in ways that correspond with particular water truths and knowledge claims. In other words, powerful hydrosocial territories envision to position and align humans, nature and thought within a network that aims to transform the diverse socionatural water worlds into a dominant governance system (cf. Baviskar, 2007; Escobar, 2008; Kaika, 2005; Lansing, 1991; Mosse, 2008; Zwarteveen & Boelens, 2014), with ‘dominance’ often characterized by divisions along ethnic, gender, class or caste lines, frequently sustained by modernist water-scientific conventions. In the words of Foucault (1991/1978), such hydro-territorial projects and imaginaries aim to “conduct the conduct” of specific subject populations (what he framed as “governmentality” – government mentality and/or rationality; see also Scott, 1998).

The processes that ‘governmentalize’ territory, and so produce space with new or reinforced hierarchical relationships between water governors and subject water actors and actants, has profound socio-environmental and political consequences. The new territorial configurations commonly entwine technological, industrial, state-administrative and scientific knowledge networks that enhance local–global commodity transfers, resource extraction and development/conservation responding to non-local economic and political interests (Büscher & Fletcher, 2014; Yacoub, Duarte-Abadía, & Boelens, 2015). To do so, they commonly curtail local sovereignty and create a political order that makes these local spaces comprehensible, exploitable and controllable (Bebbington & Bury, 2013; Rodriguez de Francisco & Boelens, 2015).

Territorial governmentalization projects seek to fundamentally alter local water users’ identification with community, neighbourhood, kinship or federative solidarity organization in order to change water users’ ways of belonging and behaving, according to new identity categories and hierarchies. Making such ‘new subjects’ requires these water users to frame their worldviews, needs, strategies and relationships differently, building and believing in new models of agency, causality, identity and responsibility. Simultaneously, such frames exclude other options and thus “delimit the universe of further scientific inquiry, political discourse, and possible policy options” (Jasanoff & Wynne, 1998, p. 5). As shown by Duarte-Abadía et al. (2015), Hulshof and Vos (2016), and Swyngedouw and Williams (2016), to governmentalize territories through ‘new’ discourses and ideologies creates specific forms of consciousness that are called upon (presumably in a self-evident manner) in order to defend particular water policies, authorities, hierarchies, and management practices.

Subtle imposition (or less subtle indoctrination) of particular perspectives on hydrosocial territories can be seen as constituting a politics of truth which legitimates certain water knowledges, practices and governance forms and discredits others. They separate ‘legitimate’ forms of water knowledge, rights and organization from ‘illegitimate’ forms (Forsyth, 2003; Foucault, Sellenart, & Burchell, 2007). As a result, the production of water knowledge and truths – and the ways these inform the shaping of particular water artefacts, rules, rights and organizational structures – concentrates on the issue of how to align local users and livelihoods to the imagined multi-scalar water-power hierarchies (Boelens, 2015). Discourses about ‘hydrosocial territory’ join power and knowledge (Foucault, 1980) to ensure a specific political order as if it were a naturalized system, by making fixed linkages and logical relations amongst a specified set of actors, objects, categories and concepts that define the nature of problems as well as the solutions to overcome them.

Hydrosocial territoriality, as a battle of divergent (dominant and non-dominant) discourses or narratives, has consolidating a particular order of things as its central stake. Though thoroughly mediated in everyday praxis, ruling groups strategically deploy discourses that define and position the social and the material in a human-material-natural network to leave the political order unchallenged and stabilize their ways of “conducting subject populations’ conduct” (Foucault, 1980, 1991/1978).

As various contributions in this issue demonstrate, territorial governmentality projects do not necessarily aim to obliterate alternative territorialities. Most often, modern tactics of territorialization aim to ‘recognize’, incorporate and discipline local territorialities, integrating local norms, practices and discourses into its mainstream government rationality and its spatial/political organization. This subtle strategy to incorporate and marginalize locally existing territorialities in mainstream territorial projects makes use of ‘managed’ or ‘neoliberal multiculturalism’: through ‘participatory’ strategies it recognizes the ‘convenient’ and sidelines ‘problematic’ water cultures and identities.

Territorial pluralism, contested ‘territories-in-territory’ and alternative ways of ordering

New hydrosocial territories result from the intersection and confrontation of divergent territorial projects and the realization of contested political-economic, socio-environmental imaginaries. Such imaginaries, here, can be understood as the socio-environmental world views and aspirations held by particular social groups, as the wished-for patterning of the material and ecological territorial worlds with and through the corresponding values, symbols, norms, institutions and social relationships. As Steger and Paul (2013, p. 23) suggest, “imaginaries are patterned convocations of the social whole. These deep-seated modes of understanding provide largely pre-reflexive parameters within which people imagine their social existence.” They are the historical constructs through which particular actors define and aim to shape their desired territorial whole, often in confrontation with the contrasting images adhered to by competing subject groups. As a consequence, everyday politics over territorial order finds expression in the encounters of diverse political and geographical projects, such as forms of state organization, spatial control over water, and the power relations amongst national and global political and economic alliances. All of these compete, superimpose, and foster their territorial interests to strengthen their water control. Thereby, they continuously transform the territory’s hydraulic grid, cultural reference frames, economic base structures, and political relationships. These overlapping hydropolitical projects tend to generate ‘territorial pluralism’ and make diverse ‘territories-in-territory’ – that is, overlapping, often contested, and interacting hydroterritorial configurations in one and the same space, but with differing material, social and symbolic contents and different interlinkages and boundaries.

As Hoogesteger et al. (2016) show, the complex interplay amongst, for example, state-defined territories and the hydrosocial territories of local user collectives may express outright confrontation, docile alignment, or obedience, but also dynamic mutual recognition. With respect to the latter, in many places around the world, official and customary water management strategies are deeply intertwined in a “shotgun marriage” (Boelens, 2009, p. 315). State and customary modes of territorial ordering depend on each other in complicated (and often confrontational) ways. Unable to provide water for all sectors of society, the state relies on informal/illegal norms, infrastructure and organizations that have the capacity to provide water to the citizenry, as shown for instance by Ioris (2016), Meehan (2013), Romano (2016), and Vos, Boelens, and Bustamante (2006). ‘Recognition’ of customary hydrosocial infrastructure and its context-specific solutions guarantees the state’s legitimacy and stability. Therefore, in everyday water-governance politics, outright repression of local, vernacular and illegal hydrosocial territoriality coexists with strategic allowance and recognition. Some local rules, rights and illegal infrastructure are institutionalized, at the expense of most others and at the cost of intensifying the repression of more contentious, defiant and disloyal norms and hydro-territorial institutions.

In hydro-territorialization policies, it is common to find that this simultaneous legalization and delegitimation of local rights removes important protections for local collectives and occasionally massive resource transfers to newly intervening actors (see e.g. Boelens & Seemann, 2014; Perramond, 2016; Seemann, 2016). Territorial struggles, therefore, entwine battles over natural resources with struggles over meaning, norms, knowledge, decision-making authority, and discourses. For this reason, the struggles of local territorial collectives are about water and economic resources to sustain their livelihoods as much as they are about the discourses that support their claims to self-define their own water rules, nature values, territorial meanings and user identities.

With intensifying universal state formalization policies that aim to ‘recognize’ and reorganize local rights systems, and increased market-based efforts to expand into new territories, local ‘customary’ hydrosocial territories increasingly become sites of political mobilization and resistance to external domination. Given that state agents, agro-commercial enterprises, mining companies, hydropower conglomerates and other dominant players expand their activities into ‘new’ areas that are often intensely used by their local inhabitants, ‘local’ communities and associations also look for responses that extend beyond their home domains. Increasingly, they organize and pursue their objectives at a variety of scales.

The politics of dominant players (who try to align user communities to their frames, rules and scalar hierarchies of power) as well as the resistance strategies of local groups (who aim to localize resource access and decision-making power) are fundamentally related to their power to compose or manipulate patterns of multiple scales (Swyngedouw, 2004, 2009; see also Bebbington, Humphreys-Bebbington, & Bury, 2010; Hoogesteger & Verzijl, 2015). Marginalized water user collectives therefore often challenge the ‘manageable scales’ to which they are confined, “attempting to liberate themselves from these imposed scale constraints by harnessing power and instrumentalities at other scales. In the process, scale is actively produced” (Jonas, 1994, p. 258, quoted by Swyngedouw, 2004, p. 34). For example, Hoogesteger et al. (2016) and Boelens et al. (2014) show how community and regionally based peasant and indigenous organizations in the Ecuadorian Highlands have been able to advance their claims to water because of their connections to multi-scalar networks of development, environmental, and human rights organizations. Their hydrosocial networks, in part, become “counter-geographies” (Brenner, 1998, p. 479; see also Bridge & Perreault, 2009; Hoogesteger, 2012; Romano, 2016). As a consequence, the permanent reorganization of territories, their configurations and spatial scales “are integral to social strategies and serve as the arena where struggles for control and empowerment are fought” (Swyngedouw, 2004, p. 33).

In looking at struggles, most attention is given to blatant water conflicts the encroachment of resources and decision-making powers. But everyday social action may be far more influential (cf. Scott, 1998). Many user collectives extend informal networks as largely invisible undercurrents that actively challenge domination. These ‘undertows’ enable action on broader political scales, constituting flexible trans-local networks. “They evade patrolling by dominant, formal powers, while materially practicing and extending their own water rights and discursively constructing their counter-narratives … to defend local rights and contest encroachment, surveillance and repression” (Boelens, 2015, p. 250). This creation of locally embedded hydrosocial territory is at the heart of collective action in many water-control places and spaces, subtly giving ‘water’, ‘territory’, ‘rights’ and ‘identity’ (new) local meanings. As ‘root-stocks’, such forms of hydroterritoriality connect underground and produce shoots above and roots below – alternatingly operating in the open and under the surface – making them difficult to understand, contain and grab for officialdom and other dominant powers (Boelens, 2015; see also Bebbington, 2012; Meehan, 2013). The outcomes of these hydroterritorial intersections, conflicts and re-orderings are not predetermined and, as Swyngedouw (2007, p. 24) explains, “celebrate the visions of the elite networks, reveal the scars suffered by the disempowered and nurture the possibilities and dreams for alternative visions”.

Concluding remarks

As we have explored here, and as further illustrated and scrutinized by the diverse contributions to this special issue, understanding water governance and territorial planning systems as based on socionatural politics provides opportunities to critically examine the power-laden contents of prevailing hydrosocial regimes and networks. It also offers insights into alternative ways of conceptualizing and building nature–society–power relations, enabling more equitable governance forms that, amongst others, build on transdisciplinary knowledge and more bottom-up modes of decision making.

This article and most of the contributing authors to the special issue use a political ecology focus. This enhances the understanding of how the formulation and implementation of new modes of water governance and the reconstruction of hydrosocial territories may often result in unequal costs and benefits for different actors. It also supports comprehending how the dominant ways of conceptualizing these socionatural configurations and of ‘knowing environmental problems and solutions’ actively depoliticize forms of socio-economic inequality, misrecognition, and political exclusion. The contributions therefore seek to show the political nature of the mechanisms of water access and distribution that are built into hydroterritorial planning, the relations that shape rights and rules regarding water decision making, and the discourses that underpin water policies and hydrosocial territorial reform.

As various articles show, most resource and territorial struggles in water-control systems are rooted in how new water governance proposals undermine, transform, incorporate and/or reorder existing local forms of collective self-governance and territorial autonomy. Classic ‘exclusion-oriented’ and modern ‘inclusion-oriented’ policies – and hybrids – aim to involve local water user communities and territories in ruling groups’ hydroterritorial projections and rationalities and so shape or reinforce the dominant hydroterritorial order. Alignment with these supposedly more rational and efficient schemes generally legitimizes the authority and cultural supremacy of external political-economic power groups and deepens unequal water distribution as well as unsustainable extraction of surpluses and resources from local communities.

However, the articles also show that many ‘local’ (vernacular) or marginalized resource users and management collectives actively challenge and respond to the norms, knowledge, distribution patterns, governance forms, and identities that are imposed on them. Often, a fundamental component of these struggles is the effort to ‘redesign’ and reshape the hydraulic grids, units and artefacts that underlie the structure and logic of dominant hydrosocial territories – the latter frequently being based on gender, ethnic, class, caste or other inequalities and contradictions. This entails transforming the world of technology-embedded cultural and distributional norms and political relations, including the corresponding definitions of proper functioning, social aptness and technical efficiency. Next, such struggles for alternative territoriality often involve building and engaging in new multi-scalar networks, which link local communities to trans-local actors and alliances. Through scalar politics, grass-roots collectives employ material and discursive practices to contest dominant reterritorialization politics and stake claims for economic redistribution, cultural recognition, political legitimacy, and democracy. As such, vernacular, non-dominant hydrosocial territories often are physical, cultural, socio-legal and political spaces that enable water users to manoeuvre in local water worlds as well as in broader political webs that determine water control. Whether, to what extent, and in what ways the dominant or opposing agents are successful in producing, reinforcing, or reordering the hydrosocial territories they envision depends on their capacity to mobilize and exercise power, enforcing negotiation and change through strategic alliances.

Acknowledgements

The research, debates and reflections on which this article and special issue are based form part of the activities organized by the international Justicia Hídrica/Water Justice alliance (www.justiciahidrica.org). The authors wish to thank the alliance’s academic, activist and grass-roots members for sharing their experiences, insights and reflections, which have importantly contributed to this publication.

The views and interpretations in this publication are those of the authors and are not necessarily attributable to their organizations.

Notes

^1. Epistemological belief systems express the nature and scope of knowledge; they conceptualize what knowledge is and how it can be acquired. Naturalizing discourses entwine knowledge claims and social and material practices with power and legitimacy in order to shape particular ‘truths’ (or ‘truth regimes’) and so strategically ‘represent reality’; they aim to convincingly explain (as if it were ‘natural’) how socionatural reality needs to be understood and experienced, thus obliterating alternative modes of representing reality.