Rural water provision at the state-society interface in Latin America

ABSTRACT

Across Latin America, improved water access in rural areas has primarily been secured by residents themselves, bolstered by myriad state and nonstate, domestic and international, entities. In recent decades, the state has lent increasing attention to the rural sector. This article examines recent state interventions towards understanding the evolution of the state’s role in rural water provision vis-à-vis community-based water service providers in Costa Rica, Honduras, and Nicaragua. Recognizing the tensions inherent in a call for state engagement in rural water provision, we propose roles that directly engage the challenges facing community-based water management organizations, emphasizing state engagement with national and transnational water committee governance networks and state-society accountability mechanisms.

KEYWORDS:

• Community-based water management
• rural drinking water provision
• governance
• climate change
• the state
• Latin America

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. See Romano (2019) pages 12–13 for an overview of the limitations to state investments, both human and financial, in rural water provision in Latin America.

2. Two of the cases, Honduras and Nicaragua, are among the countries most affected by extreme weather events during the period 1996–2015 (Kreft et al., 2016). Both are listed in the top five countries in the long-term Climate Risk Index, which reflects a level of vulnerability and exposure to extreme flood and drought events on the basis of fatalities and economic losses.

3. While CBWM organizations are empowered with both de facto and legal decision-making authority by the state, the state still stands in legal frameworks as ultimate guarantor of access to water (see Gentes & Madrigal, 2010; Romano, 2019).

4. While beyond the scope of this paper to discuss at length, the disproportionate impacts of climate change on rural populations are numerous, extending to issues of food insecurity and climate-induced migration, amongst others (Gotlieb et al., 2019).

5. The regional government offices devoted to supporting rural water provision began to close in response to President Enrique Bolaños’ 2004 decree assigning sector responsibility to the Emergency Social Investment Fund (FISE) (Romano, 2019). This shift reflects the neoliberal turn in Nicaragua in the 1990s and parallels Costa Rica’s turn in the 1980s.

6. Cerdas Sánchez (2011) explains this shift as owing to how CAARS were legally subsumed under the country’s Communal Development Associations – meaning that CAARs’ work was not limited to, nor adequately supported in regard to, drinking water provision (122 and 125).

7. The estimated number of community-based water service organizations at a national level vary across sources for the three cases discussed in this paper. These discrepancies reflect inconsistent and underfunded state documentation efforts and the existence of both officially registered and ‘below the radar’ organizations.

8. The norms imposed by the Costa Rican overhaul of CAARS left many of them without either the interest in or the means of pursuing registration as an ASADA (Gentes & Madrigal, 2010).

9. Beyond financial and organizational constraints, issues of trust of state actors and fears of cooptation have impacted the decision of some rural water committees to avoid ‘legalizing’ in the Nicaraguan context (Romano, 2019).