Paper short abstract:

Indigenous peoples in Peru regard water as part of complex ecological systems. As as result of global processes, the study cases that I describe here account for the interlegal formation of local law on water and ecosystems as inextricably linked.

Paper long abstract:

The cases analyzed here demonstrate that local understandings of water rights have transcended in the midst of environmental-water conflicts, thus becoming ‘glocalized’ in response to the wider ‘glocalization’ of the market and the state. These newly formed contents of water rights can be understood as legal assemblages stressing alignments of relations, nature and culture in contexts of unequal power. They draw not only from local understandings of water and ecological systems, but also from global environmental discourses that simultaneously nest and are appropriated by local indigenous discourses. In this process, indigenous movements have re-appropriated water by representing it not as a national common good but a local-global common they should look after.