Description
This research investigates the dialectical relationships between water and social power. I analyze how the coupled processes of development, water privatization, and climate change have been shaping water struggles in Chile. I focus on how these hydro-struggles are reconfiguring everyday practices of water management at the community scale and the ways in which these dynamics may contribute to more democratic and sustainable modes of water governance at both regional and national scales. Using a historical-geographical and multi-sited ethnographical lens, I investigate how different geographical projects (forestry, irrigated agriculture, and hydropower) were deployed in the Biobio and Santiago regions of Chile during the last 200 hundred years. I analyze how since the 1970s, these hydro-modernization projects have been gradually privatized, which in turn has led to environmental degradation and water dispossession affecting peasants and other rural populations. I frame these transformations using the political-ecological notion of hydrosocial assemblages produced by the different stages of the hydro-modernity—Liberal, Keynesian, Socialist, Neoliberal. I detail how these stages have repeatedly reshaped Chilean hydrosocial processes. I unpack the stages through the analysis of forestry, irrigation and hydropower developments in the central and southern regions of Chile, emphasizing how they have produced both uneven socio-spatial development and growing hydrosocial metabolic rifts, particularly during neoliberal hydro-modernity (1981-2015). Hydrosocial metabolic rifts occur when people have been separated or dispossessed from direct access and control of their traditional water resources. I conclude by arguing that there is a need to overcome the current unsustainable market-led approach to water governance. I propose the notion of a 'commons hydro-modernity', which is based on growing environmental and water social movements that are promoting a socio-spatial project to reassemble Chilean hydrosocial metabolic relations in a more democratic and sustainable way.
Details
Title
- Reassembling hydrosocial metabolic relations: a political ecology of water struggles in Chile
Contributors
- Torres Salinas, Robinson (Author)
- Bolin, Bob (Thesis advisor)
- Manuel-Navarrete, David (Committee member)
- Larson, Kelli (Committee member)
- Arizona State University (Publisher)
Date Created
The date the item was original created (prior to any relationship with the ASU Digital Repositories.)
2016
Subjects
- Environmental Studies
- Geography
- Water resources management
- development
- Hydrosocial Metabolic Rifts
- Scalar Politics
- Water Governance
- Water Privatization
- Water Social Movements
- Water-supply--Social aspects--Chile.
- Water-supply
- Water-supply--Political aspects--Chile.
- Water-supply
- Water-supply--Environmental aspects--Chile.
- Water-supply
- Water resources development--Chile.
- Water resources development
Resource Type
Collections this item is in
Note
- thesisPartial requirement for: Ph.D., Arizona State University, 2016
- bibliographyIncludes bibliographical references (pages 322-342)
- Field of study: Environmental social science
Citation and reuse
Statement of Responsibility
by Robinson Torres Salinas