Rutgerd Boelens

Wageningen University and CEDLA, University of Amsterdam

Infrastructures and their roles and connections to and in territories and territorialization processes have increasingly become objects of study in political geography scholarship. In this contribution, we build on these emerging insights and advance them by further conceptually disentangling the agential role of infrastructure. We bring together t...

Mega-damming, pollution and depletion endanger rivers worldwide. Meanwhile, modernist imaginaries of ordering ‘unruly waters and humans’ have become cornerstones of hydraulic-bureaucratic and capitalist development. They separate hydro/social worlds, sideline river-commons cultures, and deepen socio-environmental injustices. But myriad new water ju...

In response to capitalist territorial transformations, humans' predatory subjection of nature, and worldwide socio-environmental injustices, a diverse set of eco-centric, other-than-human, and indigenous worldview-inspired perspectives have emerged in water debates and practices. Rights of Nature (RoN) and Rights of Rivers (RoR) approaches are exam...

Adaptation to climate change has become a major policy and project focus for donors and governments globally. In this article, we provide insight into how adaptation projects mobilize distinct imaginaries and knowledge claims that create territories for intervention (the objects) as well as targeted populations (the subjects) to sustain them. Drawi...

Counter-maps have become an increasingly important practice for social movements to claim their rights and to articulate emancipatory actions against extractive intervention plans and dominant territorial reconfiguration projects, especially in the contested field of water governance. Yet the emancipatory nature of these counter-maps should not be...

ABSTRACT This paper develops the methodological concept of river co-learning arenas (RCAs) and explores their potential to strengthen innovative grassroots river initiatives, enliven river commons, regenerate river ecologies, and foster greater socio-ecological justice. The integrity of river systems has been threatened in profound ways over the la...

This article examines territorial disputes in the Palajunoj Valley of Quetzaltenango, Guatemala's second largest city located in the western highlands. Drawing on our field research, we explore how dominant territory-making practices and indigenous-led resistance play out over an emerging municipal territorial ordering plan that gets interwoven wit...

Around the world, the development of large dams has been increasingly contested. India is no exception and has seen the mobilisation of powerful domestic and transnational socio-environmental movements against dams over more than four decades. In this context, the State of Sikkim in northeast India has been entangled in prolonged hydropower develop...

In this paper, we investigate China's vigorously promoted high-efficiency irrigation policies for farmland water conservation, deploying a governmentality framework. The paper explains how the modernist irrigation policies follow global discourses but seek to imbue these with new ambition and the meaning of ecological civilization. At the same time...

In the field of climate change adaptation, the future matters. River futures influence the way adaptation projects are implemented in rivers. In this paper, we challenge the ways in which dominant paradigms and expert claims monopolise the truth concerning policies and designs of river futures, thereby sidelining and delegitimising alternative rive...

The article investigates the evolution of rural water governance in the People's Republic of China through a historical review of its water governance transformations, including the ideology, institutions, and discourses. It is argued that the evolution of agricultural water management and rural drinking water development in China is inextricably l...

This article explores how irrigation farmer (regante) subjectivities are constructed in direct conjunction with the production of modernist–capitalist hydrosocial territories across the Tagus and Segura river basins in central and south-east Spain. We explore the complexities and contradictions of how, at various scales of governance, authorities e...

The Dutch Northeastern province of Groningen has attracted national and international attention for being situated on top of Europe's biggest gas field. Decades of gas extraction have caused human-made gasquakes that have become highly politicized as they have resulted in the damage of thousands of houses, messy compensation policies, unsafe living...

Coastal megacities all over the world face challenges related to climate adaptation, ecosystem protection andinclusive development. In response, governments develop high-level and long-term climate adaptation plans to guide coastal development. In Metro Manila, a consortium of Dutch and Philippine consultants developed the Manila Bay Sustainable De...

Water schemes that rely on user (co-) ownership and collective action have been described in the irrigation sector for a long time. Still, interest in such forms of (co-) investment in the domestic/multiple use sector is more recent. To address the persisting issue of rural water service, (what has been coined) self-supply is proclaimed to be a (su...

As climate change escalates, donors, international organizations, and state actors are implementing adaptation projects. Embedded within these adaptation projects are imaginaries of rural resilience. These imaginaries, however, are contested by individuals and collectives targeted by such initiatives. In this article, we draw on Foucault’s notion o...

In several cities and regions in Spain there has been a fight against privatization of water supply in the past decade. Some cities have decided to re-municipalize water supply and debates about implementing the human right to water and sanitation have been held in many parts of Spain, following the success of the Right2Water European Citizens’ Init...

Grassroots initiatives that aim to defend, protect, or restore rivers and riverine environments have proliferated around the world in the last three decades. Some of the most emblematic initiatives are anti-dam and anti-mining movements that have been framed, by and large, as civil society versus the state movements. In this article, we aim to brin...

Colombia’s Santurbán páramo wetlands are vital water supply sources for highland communities’ livelihoods and downstream cities such as Bucaramanga. Nevertheless, they face strong degeneration because of large-scale mining extraction. Seeking to harmonize divergent interests between conservation policies, domestic water supply and mining–energy dev...

In this article we introduce the notion of imaginaries as a conceptual entry to study and better understand how and why commons recreate and transform. We do so by first exploring imaginaries as assemblages, and second by analytically dividing imaginaries in dominant and alternative imaginaries. While the former refer to how people imagine and live...

How Ecuadorian páramos are perceived has drastically changed over the last five decades. From cold, hostile, and unproductive hinterlands, páramos have changed to become areas for biodiversity conservation and ‘water towers’ that ought to be protected to provide clean and abundant water for cities and irrigation. To understand how these changing pe...

CONTEXT Worldwide farmer managed irrigation systems have provided crops for food, feed and the market for centuries. From high mountain environments to river valleys and deltas, in all continents people have organized to construct, use, maintain, transform and sustain irrigated agro-ecosystems. In this context it is important to better understand h...

An appreciation of the diversity of world water cultures – past and present – is essential to recognizing the conflicts and solutions that exist within water management. This article analyzes the intricacies of water governance and politics. It argues for new ways to recognize and negotiate the value of local water cultures, and proposes the term “...

This article analyzes how smallholders of Subtanjalla, in coastal Peru, conceive irrigation water as a central element and carrier of hydrosocial relations and territories. We base our analysis on an exploration of the local notions of agua nueva and yocle. These two notions bind together time, space, nature and culture into specific understandings...

This paper examines the politics of rural water governance in China through a governmentality lens and village water intervention case. The China Rural Drinking Water Safety Project (RDWSP) was an attempt to control water, while also serving as a tool of power to impel the rural population towards national development goals. The authors analyzed of...

Utopians organized space, nature and society to perfection, including land and water governance -- rescuing society from deep-rooted crisis: “The happiest basis for a civilized community, to be universally adopted” (Thomas More, 1516). These days, similarly, well-intended utopian water governance regimes suggest radical transformations to combat th...

In 2012 public service trade unions and water activists started a European Citizens’ Initiative to get the human right to water implemented in European law. It became the start of the “Right2Water” movement that successfully defended drinking water supply in the European Union against European Commission plans for liberalisation, marketisation and...

In 2013 the European Citizens’ Initiative (ECI) ‘Right2Water’ collected 1.9 million signatures across Europe against water privatization. It became the first ever successful ECI and has built a Europe-wide movement. Right2Water sought for Europe’s legal enforcement of the Human Right to Water and Sanitation (HRWS) as a strategic political tool to c...

The Magdalena River, Colombia’s main river backbone, features multiple tensions and socio-environmental conflicts. They manifest themselves in the river’s ecological degradation and negatively impact the riparian communities and artisanal fishermen, whose productive activities and rights of access to water are restricted. For these communities, the...

Climate change is affecting the availability, distribution, and quality of water around the world. The impacts of climate change are not happening in a vacuum, but rather, are layered onto and exacerbate pre-existing inequalities and injustices. In this chapter, we argue that water justice and climate change are intertwined in three critical ways....

Right2Water movement

El Centro de Estudios Regionales Bartolomé de Las Casas (CBC) comparte el libro Justicia hídrica: Una mirada desde América Latina, publicación que reúne parte de la gran riqueza intelectual acumulada en años de realización del Curso Internacional de Justicia Hídrica, promovido por el CBC y otras importantes instituciones de varios países. Ello ha d...

In the Andes, indigenous communities are being increasingly besieged because their páramos act as water providers for cities and irrigation systems downstream. This has led indigenous communities to protect their hydrosocial territories from external actors and re-create them to contest these threats. In this context, we analyse how the Kayambi com...

We examine the social resistance against large dams as environmental justice movements in four case studies - the Sardar Sarovar Project from India, the Hidrosogamoso from Colombia, the ‘new water culture’ movement in Spain, and the Lesotho Highlands Project from Lesotho - with diverse social, political and environmental contexts. We discuss three...

Este proyecto que inició en diciembre de 2019, nos ha permitido reflexionar sobre once años de un curso, una red, unos pioneros, unos extranjeros y muchos latinoamericanos que han forjado un sentipensar sobre la justicia hídrica y cómo ésta se arraiga en el Abya Yala. Como compiladora y editora de este libro, cada artículo ha sido un proceso de apr...

Strongly dominated by natural science disciplines (as civil and hydraulic engineering, irrigation studies, hydrology, climatology, and soil sciences), conventional thought characterizes water control technology as morally and politically ‘impartial’ – a tool to be used, a means to a desired end. In this paper we challenge this view by showing how t...

This paper analyses the socio-territorial conflict prompted by Los Merinos: a residential–tourism project constructed in an ecological reserve that is vital to Andalusian livelihoods. It examines disputes concerning discourses, authorities and rules in order to understand the struggle over land and water. Using the echelons of rights analysis (ERA)...

With increasing water consumption and pollution in cities and expanding urban areas, impacts on rural areas as water extraction and waste disposal zones are intensifying. To unravel these hydro-territorial dynamics, this paper studies the intersecting and overlapping Foucauldian ‘arts of government’ (‘governmentalities’) deployed to convey water fr...

In 2010 the United Nations General Assembly recognized the human right to water and sanitation in what is seen as a historical vote by water activists. Implementation of the right to water is imperative to achieve sustainable development. In 2011 the regulation for a European Citizens’ Initiative (ECI) entered into force in the European Union. With...

In 2012 – 2013 the European Citizens’ Initiative (ECI) ‘Right2Water’ took place. A broad alliance of social organizations, trade unions and water activists campaigned to put the Human Right to Water and Sanitation on the political agenda of the European Union. They urged the EU to implement this right in European law. At the same time people in Gre...

'Environmental Justice: Key Issues' is the first textbook to offer a comprehensive and accessible overview of environmental justice, one of the most dynamic fields in environmental politics scholarship. The rapidly growing body of research in this area has brought about a proliferation of approaches; as such, the breadth and depth of the field can...

This paper presents an analytical framework to identify and understand grassroots water governance practices, which we call ‘rooted water collectives’ (RWC). RWCs can be multi-scalar organizations that engage in common property resources management or multi-scalar social movements that advocate for common property resources governance. The framewor...

The history of the Pisque watershed in the Ecuadorian Andes is one of local livelihoods and resources being disrupted by external actors: Incas in Pre-Columbian times, Spaniards during the era of Conquest and Colonisation, and, during the Republic, white-mestizo elites followed by international businesses. Local communities have suffered from, rebe...

During the last decades, several regions of the world have experienced an increasingly forceful penetration by commercial service companies into irrigation water management, altering the institutional structures and procedures of common-pool resources management. In many cases, private-sector penetration takes place when water user organizations re...

In the context of globalizing transboundary environmental challenges, strategies to protect and secure the local commons such as water resources have been increasingly scaled up. Consequently, local communities have started to engage in transnational mobilisations to defend their rights and express their concerns. This often implies the adoption an...

This exploration is based on joint fieldwork conducted by an interdisciplinary research team in the city of Quetzaltenango (Xela), Guatemala. It uses the notion of commoning as an analytic lens to understand social transformations in this intermediate city, and in contemporary Latin America at large. The interplay of commoning, de-commoning and rec...

The modernization program launched by the government of the so called 'Citizen Revolution' in Ecuador illustrates the new strategies of global capital penetration and intensification towards new frontiers. Notwithstanding its anti-neoliberal discourse, the government project relies on the expansion of the extractive frontier as well on practices of...

This presentation introduces a special issue that analyzes the new territorial configurations taking shape in the Andean region under the developmentalist governments of the 21st century. The new territorial projects seek to increase the extraction of resources, the transference of crucial products on local level, and economic development. This rem...

Este artículo muestra cómo un moderno proyecto de desarrollo hidráulico desconfiguró la comprensión local del espacio, agua y territorio hidrosocial en la región andina de Ayacucho, Perú. Nuestro análisis se centra en dos lógicas distintas de concebir las estructuras hidroinfraestructurales y prácticas relacionadas, que juegan un papel crucial en l...

Payment for Ecosystem Services (PES) is not only a prominent, globally promoted policy to foster nature conservation, but also increasingly propagated as an innovative and self-sustaining governance instrument to support poverty alleviation and to guarantee water, food, and energy securities. In this paper, we evaluate a PES scheme from a multi-sca...

Comprehending the context and history-based allocation and distribution of water use rights for irrigation is crucial for understanding social and agricultural dynamics in (semi)arid regions. Irrigation water rights are socio-legal constructs that, for their materialization, depend on the legitimacy, authority and powers backing their claims. We sh...

This paper explores how, historically, the utopian thinking built into Spain’s water policies has legitimized profound transformations of the Guadalhorce Valley’s hydro-social territory (in Málaga), also justifying water transfers from rural to urban areas. It analyzes how the ‘regenerationist hydraulic utopia’ has been materialized through differe...

Locally and globally, mega-hydraulic projects have become deeply controversial. Recently, despite widespread critique, they have regained a new impetus worldwide. The development and operation of large dams and mega-hydraulic infrastructure projects are manifestations of contested knowledge regimes. In this special issue we present, analyze and cri...

Mega-dams are commonly designed, constructed, and implemented under governors’ rule and technocrats’ knowledge. Such hydraulic infrastructures are characteristically presented as if based on monolithic technical consensus and unidirectional engineering. However, those who are affected by these water interventions, and eventually governed by the cha...

In India’s Eastern Himalayan State of Sikkim, the indigenous Bhutia communities, Lachungpas and Lachenpas, successfully contested all proposed hydropower projects and have managed to sustain an anti-dam opposition in their home regions, Lachung and Lachen. In this paper, we discuss this remarkable, un-researched, effective collective action against...

The contributions to the Special Issue on Contested Knowledges: Water Conflicts on Large Dams and Mega-Hydraulic Development have looked at the politics of contested knowledge as manifested in the conceptualization, design, development, implementation and governance of large dams and mega-hydraulic infrastructure projects in various parts of the wo...

The Misicuni multipurpose hydraulic project was designed to transfer water from a neighboring watershed to the Cochabamba Valley in the center of Bolivia for domestic, hydropower, and agricultural use. The project involved the construction of a 120 m high large dam and a 19 km transfer tunnel, which negatively affected the rural indigenous host com...

Just as in other parts of Spain, the Guadalhorce Valley, Málaga, has a long history of policies based on ‘hydraulic utopianism’ (regenerationist and Franco-ist), bent on ‘reorganizing’ political, geographic, and human nature. Residents of the neighboring sub-basin, the Río Grande valley, have seen how these policies, designed to transfer rural wate...

Getting public opinion to see 'mining' and 'Nature's Rights' as non-contradictory and even equivalent and harmonious, calls for far-reaching power strategies. Nature was entitled to rights by Ecuador's Constitution at about the same time that the Government began promoting mining as central to Ecuador's future. Building this equivalence to make 'mi...

Este artículo analiza los conflictos por los recursos agua y tierra en Cerro de San Pedro, México, surgidos cuando una empresa minera canadiense inició una mina a cielo abierto en este municipio. Examinamos diferentes posiciones en el conflicto entre la mina de oro y los habitantes locales, y como ambivalentes regulaciones nacionales y organismos g...

This study of the historical development of the Interbasin Irrigation Water Transfer Project Yungas de Vandiola (Proyecto de Riego Trasvase Yungas de Vandiola, PRTYV) analyses the dynamics of hydrosocial territorialisation pursued by rural communities that aim to strategically claim and create water rights. Starting with the project’s initial desig...

Ecuador’s mega-dam project aims to control Chone city’s flooding hazards, but it submerges peasants’ territories – legitimized by ‘modern city/majority benefit’ versus ‘rural backward/sacrifice-able minority’ discourse. Presented as disordered, unruly and needing domestication, peasants must follow urban imaginaries and safeguard modern-urban progr...

Despite all the international attention on urban development, and the changing character of urban life and infrastructure, critical analyses of the entanglement of cities and their surrounds are often missing. Further, the rural–urban binary that scholarly and policy discussions often highlight can be misleading, as the concurrent rise of peri-urba...

In recent decades, an agro-export boom has deeply transformed Peru’s coastal valleys, resulting in dramatic territorial changes and social inequality in the Ica Valley. This article explains how politico-economic and socio-institutional forces have triggered the emergence of a new ‘hydrosocial territory’, transforming the Ica Valley into a virtual-...

In this special issue, we set out to analyze the dynamics, discourses, identities and material conditions that evolve with increasing urbanization and associated transformations of rural–urban (dis)connections. Considering the growing importance of cities, water is a particularly useful lens through which to understand the ways in which rural– urba...

Commercial production of flowers, accumulation of water, and social struggles for equitable distribution and a healthier environment have an intimate relationship. Ecuador is the third world exporter of roses. Cayambe-Tabacundo is the main production region and counts with major water conflicts. Large floriculturists accumulate water, leaving the r...

En las últimas décadas han surgido diversos enfoques para dar respuesta a los desafíos que plantea la gestión del agua. Este artículo presenta, de manera introductoria, las principales aproximaciones teó-ricas desde las cuales se está analizando en la actualidad el uso y la gobernanza del agua: las corrientes neoinstitucionalistas, la teoría de los...

In this article, we analyze the water knowledge struggles and challenges that the Rio Grande sub-basin’s social movement has faced when encountering the different modernistic projects that seek to transfer rural water to Malaga city. The first relates to a large dam construction, the second to the modernization of traditional irrigation systems. We...

Processes of technological change foster the silent penetration of private enterprise in collective irrigation water management in numerous areas of Spain, and in other Mediterranean countries. This paper discusses this phenomenon through a case study of the community of Senyera (València), tracking the privatization and subsequent contestation and...

The construction and implementation of the hydraulic mega-project Chone (coastal Ecuador) was legitimized as a means to promote city development but has flooded and dramatically transformed rural territories. A utilitarian discourse regarding the «benefits of the urban majority» justified this project, at the expense of the ostensible «underdevelo...

A multidisciplinary examination of alternative framings of environmental problems, with using examples from forest, water, energy, and urban sectors. Does being an environmentalist mean caring about wild nature? Or is environmentalism synonymous with concern for future human well-being, or about a fair apportionment of access to the earth's resourc...

There is a forceful new impetus toward mega-hydraulic projects in Latin America, which are booming but also highly controversial. They bring benefits to some social groups while many others are negatively affected. Technocratic discourses are dominant in the region; they strategically mobilize institutions, infrastructure, money, and knowledge to p...

Srinivasan et al. provide an interesting overview of the challenges for long-term socio-hydrological predictions. Although agreeing with most of the statements made, we argue for the need to take socio-hydrological analysis a step further and add some fundamental considerations, especially concerning the crucial importance of many (conscious and un...

By combining scholarship on modernity, urbanization and territory, this paper analyses how urban-based visions and ambitions have been realized in hydropower development and specific water access and control arrangements in the Rímac watershed in Lima, Peru. The discourses that sustained and promoted hydropower plant construction and associated dev...

Academic research and media tend to emphasize the strong opposition to hydropower development in Sikkim, India, and position this as resistance to an environmentally-destructive, trans-local development, particularly by the culturally-rooted, ethnic minority Bhutia and Lepcha communities. There are several accounts of contestations of hydropower de...