Commoditizing Water Territories: The Clash between Andean Water Rights Cultures and Payment for Environmental Services Policies

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Notes

¹ Territorialization, therefore, is a cultural and political phenomenon, often part of governmentality projects and “counter-conducts” (Foucault, 1991; cf. Escobar 1995; Peluso and Vandergeest 2011).

² For example, Swyngedouw (2005), Bebbington, Humphreys Bebbington, and Bury (2010), cf. Barkin (2012), and Martínez-Alier (2012).

³ For critical reflections on such economicist rationality, see e.g., Goldman (1998), McAfee (1999), Bond (2010), Martínez-Alier (2002, 2012), Igoe and Brockington (2007), and Sullivan (2009).

⁴ The Justicia Hídrica alliance investigates water injustices, conflicts, and water defense strategies, whilst supporting grassroots organizations. The network has annual international meetings in which scholars, grassroots leaders, water users, practitioners and activists establish key research themes, questions, and common concepts and terms of reference. They train young researchers and professionals, and exchange comparative field research findings in order to critically engage with new, upcoming academic and policy debates and advocacy action (www.justiciahidrica.org).

⁵ Europe also had more balanced debates regarding its colonization impacts. See, e.g., Pagden (1982), Grove (1996), and Beinart and Hughes (2009).

⁶ An “inconvenient truth”: liberation hero Simón Bolivar was forerunner in abolishing indigenous collective property. Jeremy Bentham, grandfather of liberalism and utilitarianism, Panopticon's designer, was one of his main intellectual advisors. Bentham firmly believed in the tragic fate of the commons and advocated their active destruction to subdivide them into private properties (Boelens 2009).

⁷ For example, Goldman (1998), Harvey (2003), McCarthy and Prudham (2004), and Igoe and Brockington (2007).

⁸ Genocide and massive starvation helped to preserve this myth. Through decimating the population, natural resources became abundantly available and the continent became a garden for utopian experiments.

⁹ Water “not produced” by human labor was considered open access; water accumulation far beyond personal needs was enhanced; individual control and entitlements were enforced and state protected; and, particularly important, the widespread fundament of Andean user communities to collectively invest in water and infrastructure development and upkeep, which thereby creates and re-affirms collective water rights and hydraulic property, was undermined. Until today, Latin American water laws and policies are reluctant to recognize this fundamental “motor” of peasant and indigenous communities' water management; see, e.g., Boelens and Doornbos (2001), de Vos et al. (2006), Boelens (2009), and Achterhuis et al. (2010).

¹⁰ For example, Rose Johnston (2003), Budds (2010), Boelens and Gelles (2005), and Swyngedouw (2005).

¹¹ For example, Goldman (1998), McAfee (1999), Robertson (2007), and Bond (2010).

¹² For example, McCarthy and Prudham (2004), van der Ploeg (2008), and Barkin (2009).

¹³ For example, Harvey (2003) and Martínez-Alier (2002, 2012).

¹⁴ Normalizing power compares and differentiates individuals according to how they fit the (unspoken) value-giving measure that presents the conformity that must be achieved, separating normality from abnormality (cf. Foucault [1975] 1995).

¹⁵ Foucault (1991). See Boelens et al. (2013) on disciplinary and neoliberal water governmentalities in the Andean region.

¹⁶ PES programs fit into a broader tendency in international development, as, e.g., the anthropology of development has extensively shown (e.g. Ferguson 1990; Rodriguez de Francisco, Budds, and Boelens 2013).

¹⁷ For example, through (inter)national migration and rural-urban interactions, commoditization processes, schooling, modern media, and infrastructure development.

¹⁸ Commoditization is the process of deepening commodity relations within the cycle of production and reproduction, whereby the means of consumption and production and other inter-human exchange relations are increasingly based on monetary exchange-values and are acquired through the market.

¹⁹ See, e.g., Gudeman (2008) and Martínez-Alier (2002, 2012) on the notion of the incommensurability of values.

²⁰ As Martínez-Alier observed, “different interests can be defended either by insisting on the discrepancies of valuation inside the same standard of value, or by resorting to non-equivalent descriptions of reality; that is, to different value standards … The reduction of all goods and services to actual or fictitious commodities, as in cost-benefit analysis, can be recognized as one perspective among several, legitimate as a point of view and as a reflection of real power structures. Who, then, has the power to impose a particular standard of valuation?” (2002, 98).

²¹ Herbert Spencer (1820–1903), the most influential exponent of Social Darwinism, introduced liberal economics into evolutionary theory. “It was Spencer not Darwin who coined the phrase survival of the fittest” (Gray 2007, 88), which he applied to “scientifically justify” that less productive economies need to surrender to more efficient and productive market economies. Spencer argued that societies necessarily experience an evolutionary transformation towards the free market, civilization's ultimate objective.

²² For example, former Peruvian president Alan García attacked peasant communities for “opposing progress”; these “adversaries of modernity” would need to abandon their collective rights systems (El Comercio 28-10-2007).

²³ Contrary to PES rationale, actual volumes of these water services—to define payments—are not quantified.

²⁴ One owner has over 100 hectares, and most members own less than 20 hectares, with extremes of 2 hectares.