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Paper short abstract:

My paper explores the socio-legal dynamics of water rights in conflictive contexts. I particularly explore how the contents of local water rights are transformed to encompass the ecological systems that are being threatened by the activities of extractive industries.

Paper long abstract:

Irrigation as well as ethnographic studies have frequently depicted water rights as a settled bundle of rights closely linked to irrigation. Scarce efforts beyond structuralist and functionalist approaches to water rights have been made to describe how they have changed historically in relation to extractive economic activities that risk local comprehension of the ecological system and use of water sources. Through three case studies, my paper explores the socio-legal dynamics of water rights in conflictive settings in Peru. I analyze how indigenous peoples in the Andes and Amazonia reconstruct the content of water rights when confronting corporate interventions that risk their economic activities and livelihoods. These contents usually encompass not only global environmental references to ecological and hydrological systems, and integrated water management but also delve into reconstructions of Andean and Amazonian "traditional" conceptions of water and ecology.

The case studies here show that in contexts of power asymmetries local indigenous peoples reformulate the content of their water rights to encompass ecological concerns and cultural understandings of water in order to guarantee their access to water and their livelihoods. Global, national and local environmental, cultural and political influences produce these legal assemblages of water rights endeavoring to protect their local livelihoods vis-à-vis extractive industries. Here, I contend that in order to understand the historical socio legal transformation of water rights we have to pay attention to the productive consequences of water struggles in terms of upgrading and 'glocalizing' the content of water rights.