Water assemblages in times of drought

Keywords: Drought, Rural Water Committee (CAPR), development, water markets, Chilean neoliberalism, forests
Abstract Type: Virtual Paper Abstract

Abstract

Seasonal droughts have become a recurrent phenomenon in the temperate rainforests of Los Rios Region (Chile), where ecosystems depend on an all-year-round rain supply and whose authorities' primary strategy has been to deliver water by trucks to rural communities. The drought scenario reveals an entire set of socioecological processes that were not fully visible when rain was copious in the region. Here we examine the ones experienced by local communities and related to water access, preservation, and management through an 11-months case study on three rural water committees. While our research shows unstable ways of 'territorializing' water, the efforts carried out by rural committees are crucial to enhance water management in transformative ways (for instance, by implementing new legal arrangements). They offer a path to lowering the adverse outcomes of private water markets and fast-growing forest monocultures. Thinking about the transformative courses enabled by these committees can provide conceptual tools for resilience and adaptation to climate change in communitarian water management.