摘要:The threats that Andean water user collectives face are ever-growing in a
globalizing society. Water is power and engenders social struggle. In the Andean
region, water rights struggles involve not only disputes over the access to
water, infrastructure and related resources, but also over the contents of water
rules and rights, the recognition of legitimate authority, and the discourses
that are mobilized to sustain water governance structures and rights orders.
While open and large-scale water battles such as Bolivia’s 'Water Wars' or
nationwide mobilizations in Ecuador get the most public attention, low-profile
and more localized water rights encounters, ingrained in local territories, are
far more widespread and have an enormous impact on the Andean waterscapes. This
paper highlights both water arenas and the ways they operate between the legal
and the extralegal. It shows how local collectives build on their own water
rights foundations to manage internal water affairs but which simultaneously
offer an important home-base for strategizing wider water defence manoeuvres.
Hand-in-hand with inwardly reinforcing their rights bases, water user groups aim
for horizontal and vertical linkages thereby creating strategic alliances.
Sheltering an internal school for rights and identity development, reflection
and organisation, these local community foundations, through open and subsurface
linkages and fluxes, provide the groundwork for upscaling their water rights
defence networks to national and transnational arenas.
关键词:Water
rights, legal pluralism, cultural politics, social mobilization, peasant and
indigenous communities, translocal network alliances, Andean countries