Contribution short abstract

Human and more-than-human relations in the Ñuble Basin reveal how extractivism reshapes hydrosocial worlds. River-care practices and community resistance movements defend flowing waters as living beings, opening space for just and multispecies river futures.

Contribution long abstract

Water scarcity in Chile reveals deep inequalities in access, control, and governance of water, intensified by extractive regimes that degrade ecosystems and transform territories. Rather than a natural shortage, it constitutes a political and socioecological problem in which water and rivers become spaces of dispute, intervention, and resistance.

Drawing on political ecology of water and hydrosocial studies, this research examines how hydrosocial governmentality and extractivism reconfigure fluvial territories in south-central Chile through the long-standing Embalse Punilla project on the Ñuble River, designed to support export-oriented agribusiness and integrated with the HidroÑuble hydropower plant.

These reconfigurations alter hydrological regimes, expand control mechanisms, and reshape local livelihoods, driving mobility and rural out-migration that extend the boundaries of the hydrosocial territory and generate new rural–urban interdependencies. The Ñuble River—understood as a socionatural entity—is intervened in and re-signified, shaping subjectivities and experiences of (in)justice.

The Punilla case provides a situated lens to observe these dynamics alongside the resistance of riverine and mountain communities organized in movements such as Ñuble Libre, which advocate alternative ontologies, defend the river’s right to flow freely, and demand protection of the Nevados de Chillán–Laguna del Laja Biological Corridor, designated a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve.

This research adopts an ethnographic approach with relational methodologies to understand how humans and rivers co-produce territories and how processes of conflict, accommodation, and resistance take shape. By articulating hydrosocial governmentality, more-than-human subjectivities, and frameworks of water and multispecies justice, this project contributes to reimagining rivers as territories of life in the Global South.