Disputed water: Competing knowledge and power asymmetries in the Yali Alto basin,Chile

Hydrological information – which plays a crucial role in resolving conflicts over water allocation and distribution – is commonly seen as apolitical. However, this type of information is seldom objective and free of biases. Instead, it is used to position arguments and interests in accordance with the prevailing political agendas. Information is structured by complex and conflicting networks of public and private stakeholder interests, further reconstituted in different periods of time and place. Based on a study of the upper Yali basin in the municipality of San Pedro de Melipilla, Chile, we show how knowledge about water is produced, circulated and applied in the context of water scarcity and emerging conflicts over access to groundwater. Building on the notion of the hydrosocial cycle, the qualitative study shows how the production of hydrological reports and its application in political decision-making have reinforced asymmetrical relationships between the stakeholders locked in water conflicts. The lack of capacity of local farmers and community organizations to translate experiences into codified hydrological knowledge further exacerbates these asymmetries. Agro-industrial companies operating in the basin use hydrological assessments to locate and shift the water scarcity problems to the users, whereas locals blame them for accumulating disproportionately large concentrations of water extraction rights. Results contribute to the existing literature on environmental knowledge, arguing that discourses on water scarcity are not objective but shaped by socio-political contingencies. Overemphasising on data and techno-science based information to support certain decisions may be misleading without first unveiling the knowledge production processes operating across power-laden landscapes.     

Using dual-isotope data to trace the origin and processes of dissolved sulphate: a case study in Calders stream (Llobregat basin,Spain)

Whereas most of the reported δ³⁴S values of dissolved sulphate are positive in the Llobregat basin, Calders stream, which is a tributary of the Llobregat River, is characterised by negative values. Stream waters, sampled monthly between 1997 and 1998, and quarterly in 1999, show an overall increase in δ³⁴S from −10‰ to 0‰, coupled with an increase in Na and Cl concentration. On the other hand, the oxygen isotopic composition of dissolved sulphate, δ¹⁸O, displayed an opposite trend with a slight decrease, from +9‰ to +6‰. Detailed sampling up stream in November 2000 indicated that, contrary to most of the surficial waters of the Llobregat basin with a δ³⁴S_SO4 mainly controlled by evaporites, in Calders stream, sulphate is derived from pyrite oxidation. The dual-isotope approach, coupled with chemical data, allowed us to identify the contribution of ³⁴S-rich sulphate effluents from anthropogenic sources, while mixing models, calculated between natural and anthropogenic sources, enabled us to estimate their contribution. Sudden increases of δ³⁴S and δ¹⁸O of dissolved sulphate in stream waters are believed to be caused by a sulphate reduction process related to oil spillage. The long-term enrichment in δ³⁴S, coupled with a decrease in δ¹⁸O_SO4, from Jan-97 to Aug-99, is interpreted as a progressive increase in the contribution of pig manure.     

Suffering for water, suffering from water: Emotional geographies of resource access, control and conflict

This article argues that resource access, use, control, ownership and conflict are not only mediated through social relations of power, but also through emotional geographies where gendered subjectivities and embodied emotions constitute how nature-society relations are lived and experienced on a daily basis. By engaging the insights from feminist political ecology literatures and emotional geographies literatures, the article demonstrates that resource struggles and conflicts are not just material challenges but emotional ones, which are mediated through bodies, spaces and emotions. Such a focus fleshes out the complexities, entanglements and messy relations that constitute political ecologies of resources management, where practices and processes are negotiated through constructions of gender, embodiments, and emotions. Abstractions of ‘resource struggles’ and ‘resource conflicts’ are thereby grounded in embodied emotional geographies of places, peoples, and resources, enabling us to better understand the ways resources and emotions come to matter in everyday survival struggles. This framing can enrich feminist political ecology theorizations and texture our understandings of commonly-used terms such as access, use, control, conflict and struggles vis-à-vis natural resources in any context. In other words, we are better able to conceptualize and explain how and why people access, use, and struggle over resources the ways they do. A case study of drinking water contamination from Bangladesh is used to develop the theoretical arguments in contributing to existing debates in (feminist) political ecologies.     

Through the aqueduct and the courts: An analysis of the human right to water and indigenous water rights in Northwestern Mexico

This article examines the relationship between the human right to water and indigenous water rights as articulated in the legal strategies of indigenous Yaqui (Yoemem) leadership in Mexico, and in the jurisprudence of the Inter-American Human Rights System. Accelerated urban growth and climate change in the area of study are rekindling historical water conflicts between rural indigenous communities and state authorities encouraging urban development. This configuration is not unique to Northwestern Mexico and, thus, offers an instructive case for exploring contradictions and alignments between indigenous right claims and the human right to water. This article addresses the following questions: What role does the human right to water play in the competing claims of state authorities and indigenous Yaqui leadership in Mexico? To what extent can the human right to water be reconciled with the collective rights of indigenous peoples? And in particular, what can be learned from international jurisprudence in this regard? Through content analysis of legal documents and media sources I show that even when Yaqui claims over water are advanced in the arena of international human rights, the human right to water does not have a primary role in framing their demands. In fact, I show that the human right to water was primarily mobilized to uphold rural-to-urban water transfers and undermine indigenous opposition to large-scale infrastructure development. This article produces new empirical knowledge to contribute to scholarship examining what a human right to water means in practice. This line of research is particularly timely as the human right to water becomes institutionalized in the context of growing public debate and legal discussions on collective indigenous rights.     

Seeing the local in the global: Political ecologies, world-systems, and the question of scale

Scale, as concept, has featured prominently in political ecology and remains, even if implicitly, a crucial point of analytical reference. Recent studies, drawing from both human geography and ecology, have sought to demonstrate how scales, rather than pre-existing ontologically, are both socially and environmentally produced. Given the different scales through which social and environmental processes occur, the study of society-environment relations can be improved by analysing varying scalar configurations of interaction. This recent and promising methodological corrective would greatly benefit from a dialogue with world-systems approaches, which integrate diverse scale-producing processes and to some extent overlap in scope with political ecology. World-systems perspectives, by focusing on the long-term systemic character of people-environment relations, effectively connect micro- to macro-scale social and ecological processes and explain long-term internal dynamics and interrelations of systems at different scales. Conversely, world-systems approaches could learn much from political ecologists’ consideration of nonhuman processes into understandings of scale and society-environment relations, which has a long tradition in geography, as well as from the more context-sensitive analytical framework brought to those understandings. Case studies are discussed to demonstrate not only how these two perspectives could be integrated, but also how explanations of environmental change can be thereby improved. Combining the two approaches provides the basis for a more ecologically oriented world-systems paradigm and, in political ecology, for greater sensitivity to socially large-scale systemic processes and, given the originally anti-capitalist underpinnings of both paradigms, for more political coherence.     

Soil and water pollution derived from anthropogenic activities in the Porsuk River Basin, Turkey

This study aims to investigate the degree of the influence of contaminant sources on both the surface (Porsuk River) and groundwater in the Eskisehir plain, (Turkey) and to determine the changes in groundwater quality after the sewage system was started in 1998. For this purpose surface and groundwater samples were collected from various locations in the Eskisehir plain between May and October, 2001. The Porsuk River is already polluted in the upstream wastewater and by industries such as Nitrogen Fertilizer Factory, Sugar-beet Factory, and Magnesite Factory located around the city of Kutahya. This high-contaminated water forms an eutrophic environment which generates high phosphorus and nitrogen in downstream flow. Agricultural and industrial activities in the Eskisehir plain are an additional source of the pollution of the Porsuk River. The study revealed that some trace elements, Pb, Cr, Mn, Fe, and Cd, are present in high concentrations both in the surface and groundwater besides extremely high quantities of phosphorus, nitrogen and sulfide compounds. In addition, analyses of samples also indicated that there are no considerable contaminations in terms of local pesticides. High concentration of Cd, N and S are found in the groundwater. On the basis of a detailed analysis of the groundwater in the Eskisehir plain, it is concluded that groundwater is not suitable for drinking according to Turkish standards, European Union Standards (EU) and World Health Organization (WHO). An erratum to this article can be found at     

Rainfall and irrigation controls on groundwater rise and salinity risk in the Ord River Irrigation Area,northern Australia

Groundwater beneath the Ord River Irrigation Area (ORIA) in northern Australia has risen in elevation by 10–20 m during the past 40 years with attendant concerns about water logging and soil salinization. Persistent groundwater accession has been attributed to excessive irrigation and surface water leakage; however, analysis of daily water-table records from the past 10 years yielded a contrary result. On a seasonal basis, water-table elevation typically fell during irrigation (dry) seasons and rose during fallow (wet) seasons, conflicting with the conventional view that irrigation and not rainfall must be the dominant control on groundwater accession. Previous investigations of unexpectedly large infiltration losses through the cracking clay soils provide a plausible explanation for the apparent conundrum. Because rainfall is uncontrolled and occurs independently of the soil moisture condition, there is greater opportunity for incipient ponding and rapid infiltration through preferred flow pathways. In contrast, irrigation is scheduled when needed and applications are stopped after soil wetting is achieved. Contemporary groundwater management in the ORIA is focused on improving irrigation efficiency during dry seasons but additional opportunities may exist to improve groundwater conditions and salinity risk through giving equal attention to the wet-season water balance.     

There’s nothing inherent about scale: political ecology, the local trap, and the politics of development in the Brazilian Amazon

This paper argues that research in political ecology would benefit from more explicit and careful attention to the question of scale and scalar politics. Although political ecologists have extensively considered scale as a methodological question, they have yet to develop an explicit theoretical approach to scale as an object of inquiry. We highlight one principal drawback to this underdeveloped approach to scale: what we call “the local trap” in which political ecologists assume that organization, policies, and action at the local scale are inherently more likely to have desired social and ecological effects than activities organized at other scales. Over the past 10 years or so, an increasingly sophisticated literature on scale has been developing among scholars in geography working in the political economy tradition. This literature has argued that scale is socially produced rather than ontologically given. Therefore, there is nothing inherent about any scale, and so the local scale cannot be intrinsically more desirable than other scales. We suggest that a greater engagement with this scale literature offers political ecology a theoretical way out of the local trap. As a first approximation of the kind of scalar analysis we advocate, we present a case study that examines the scalar politics that have shaped environmental change in the Brazilian Amazon.     

Temporal and spatial variations in water flow and sediment load in Narmada River Basin, India: natural and man-made factors

The Narmada River flows through the Deccan volcanics and transports water and sediments to the adjacent Arabian Sea. In a first-ever attempt, spatial and temporal (annual, seasonal, monthly and daily) variations in water discharge and sediment loads of Narmada River and its tributaries and the probable causes for these variations are discussed. The study has been carried out with data from twenty-two years of daily water discharge at nineteen locations and sediment concentrations data at fourteen locations in the entire Narmada River Basin. Water flow in the river is a major factor influencing sediment loads in the river. The monsoon season, which accounts for 85 to 95% of total annual rainfall in the basin, is the main source of water flow in the river. Almost 85 to 98% of annual sediment loads in the river are transported during the monsoon season (June to November). The average annual sediment flux to the Arabian Sea at Garudeshwar (farthest downstream location) is 34.29×10⁶ t year⁻¹ with a water discharge of 23.57 km³ year⁻¹. These numbers are the latest and revised estimates for Narmada River. Water flow in the river is influenced by rainfall, catchment area and groundwater inputs, whereas rainfall intensity, geology/soil characteristics of the catchment area and presence of reservoirs/dams play a major role in sediment discharge. The largest dam in the basin, namely Sardar Sarovar Dam, traps almost 60–80% of sediments carried by the river before it reaches the Arabian Sea.     

Environmental learning and the social construction of an exurban landscape in Fremont County, Colorado

Across the rural American West, the restructuring of rural capitalism has transformed production landscapes into those increasingly structured by the development and consumption of natural and cultural amenities. This project used principles from symbolic interactionism, ethnographic methods, and the analytical framework of regional political ecology to understand the role of environmental learning in negotiating the new management regime associated with amenity-based capitalism in rural Fremont County, Colorado. The study found that most amenity residents participate regularly in social learning about the environment through a variety of interpersonal and organizational behaviors. In addition, they are responding collectively to environmental risks and opportunities associated with wildfire, noxious weeds and invasive grass species, prospective uranium mining, and restoration of cultural-landscape features. Ultimately, the practices of environmental learning concern how private properties and assets will be managed relative to the social construction of the environment as an amenity for personal consumption. Conservation and management prospects in this and other rural areas in the postindustrial world can be enhanced by understanding the microsociology of exurban geographies and by engaging the social forms and processes related to this distinctive landscape construction.     

The public trust doctrine and critical legal geographies of water in California

Legal processes shape how water resources are allocated, regulated, distributed, and governed. This paper examines the public trust doctrine, a legal principle that addresses the state’s role in governing natural resources by requiring states to manage certain bodies of water and their shorelines for the good of the public. The paper focuses on how the public trust doctrine has been used—with varying degrees of success—to protect water bodies by contesting the diversion and transfer of water in California. The paper compares how the doctrine was applied in two cases: Mono Lake and the Salton Sea, two California lakes that have been threatened by water diversions and transfers. Advocates at Mono Lake successfully used the public trust doctrine for environmental protection, while public trust was an unsuccessful strategy at the Salton Sea. The paper examines issues of nonequilibrium ecosystems, natural versus artificial ecosystems, and wasteful versus reasonable uses of water.By investigating why one case was deemed eligible for public trust protections while the other was not, this paper examines how discursive constructions of nature are embedded in and enacted by legal institutions and how these constructions of nature impact the implementation of legal protections of natural resources. In examining the use of the public trust doctrine in California, the paper examines both the potential and the limitations of the public trust in practice, showing how legal processes and institutions can be used to protect public interests in natural resources but also how particular environmental narratives are reinforced through these institutions.     

Greening the Dam: The case of the San Roque Multi-purpose Project in the Philippines

This article aims to illustrate the extent and ways in which a traditional development aid project became the focus of a ‘greening’ process in the 1990s (and beyond). The article examines the San Roque Multi-purpose Project in the Philippines - a major Japanese bilateral international cooperation project - from a political ecology perspective. The analysis highlights how a complex story of contemporary aid dynamics in the bilateral Japan-Philippines relationship influenced this ‘greening’ process. The article interrogates critically and empirically the stated greening of a proto-type development aid project. This specific example of the practices of the Japanese aid industry is set within the context of the wider political economy of both donor and recipient elite interests.     

Geochemical factors controlling the chemical nature of water and sediments in the Gomti River, India

 R-mode factor analysis of the recently acquired data on water and sediment chemistry has been performed. Basic chemical parameters have been merged together which aid in interpreting a few empirical geochemical factors controlling the chemical nature of water and sediments of the Gomti River, a major Himalayan tributary of the Ganges drainage basin. Water chemistry seems to be controlled by three factors: bicarbonate, rainfall and silicate and phosphate factors. Sediment chemistry is largely controlled by the following four factors: clay, adsorption/desorption, Fe-Mn hydroxide and mercury factors. These factors show spatial and temporal variability in terms of their R-scores. Received: 8 September 1997 · Accepted: 15 December 1997     

Acacia exchanges: Wattles, thorn trees, and the study of plant movements

Plants are frequently moved around the world, creating new regional landscapes and environmental imaginaries. Building on previous work in environmental history and geography, we develop a three-part approach to analyzing plant movements and apply it to trees from the Acacia genus (sens. lat.) exchanged between Australia and the rest of the world. First, we investigate the agents, circuits, and frequencies of acacia movements, including transoceanic transfers, regional diffusion, and ecological dispersal. Second, we trace bundles of knowledge or technology that accompany the acacias, highlighting how they help shape regional biogeographies. Finally, we analyze how different societies, with distinct economies, politics, and environmental sensibilities, receive introduced plants. This approach allows us to see transferred plants as active agents in region-forming processes, and to avoid normative tropes like ‘miracle plants’ or ‘alien invasives’. The highlighted species include Acacia colei, Acacia melanoxylon, Acacia mearnsii, Acacia farnesiana, Acacia nilotica, Acacia mangium, and their close relatives.     

Seeding nature, ceding culture: Redefining the boundaries of the marine commons through spatial management and GIS

The oceans are not only being transformed through privatization as management moves towards market mechanisms, the oceans are also being “zoned”, with zoning increasingly proposed as the ideal conduit for weighting different uses of the ocean. This is concomitant with a move towards ecosystem-based management that also partakes in a policy environment imbued with the commodification of nature, in which environmental services are ranked and valued according to neoliberal percepts. Crucial to these projects are the utilization of GIS technologies. This paper considers these zones of preservation and sites of conflict through an ethnographic case study of the scallop fisheries of New England, examining conflicts between harvesters, different projects to map the fishery, and ongoing efforts to reseed scallop beds. The paper explores how participants themselves articulate the changing practices of fishing and farming, redefining boundaries of nature and culture. While reseeding projects, for example, arguably participate in the market logic of neoliberalism, at the same time they may resist and redefine the terms, as communities see themselves sowing the seeds of their own sustainability and changing the terms of what counts, literally, as nature.     

Probing the (in)compatibilities of social theory and policy relevance in Piers Blaikie’s political ecology

One of Piers Blaikie’s most important contributions to the development of political ecology is his critique of land and resource conservation policy in the global South. In this paper I trace the development of Blaikie’s ideas about the policy relevance of political ecology, focusing particularly on the challenges posed by the introduction of poststructural social theory into the field. I begin by revisiting Blaikie’s earlier critiques of environment and development policy. This will provide the departure point to explore how his thinking on the relationship of theory and policy and of academic and development practices has evolved in subsequent writings. I have invented two personas, “early Blaikie” and “late Blaikie”, to facilitate this task. Second, I want to probe some of the challenges that late Blaikie presents for doing political ecology research, to some extent by pitting early Blaikie against late Blaikie and letting them hash it out. Third, I turn to my own and others’ research and consultation experiences as a way to examine the possibilities for reconciling theoretically driven critiques with policy relevant research.     

A political ecology of REDD+: Property rights,militarised protectionism,and carbonised exclusion in Cross River

This paper offers a critical assessment of REDD+ in Nigeria through a political ecology perspective. Focusing on questions of property rights and resource access, it maps the discursive articulations and contestations through which carbon rights are being determined. It also shows how these articulations and contestations are linked to land and forest rights, and how they shape everyday access to the forest. Evidence from the Nigerian case suggests that factors that complicate rights and undermine access to resources for forest communities under REDD+ are immanent to the contested terrain constituted in part by REDD+ proposals, proponents’ discourses and practices geared towards securing the forest for REDD+. Efforts to secure property rights and guarantee the permanence of REDD+ forests align with economic, ecological and ideological aspirations of state and non-state actors to produce a regime of militarised protectionism. I demonstrate how, in addition to its material and symbolic facilitation of the emergent carbon forestry economy, militarised protectionism as a regime of exclusion also constitutes collateral political economies of ‘more-than-carbon’ forest resources (such as timber and non-timber forest products) which perpetuate capital accumulation by the elites. It is this kind of exclusion–accumulation dialectic, legitimised by carbon forestry claims that this paper describes as carbonised exclusion. The paper thus furthers debates on the political ecology of REDD+ and other carbon forestry projects, while productively engaging technocentric literature on REDD+ and property rights.     

Hydrochemistry of reservoirs of Damodar River basin, India: weathering processes and water quality assessment

Water samples collected from the six reservoirs of Damodar River basin in pre- and post-monsoon, have been analysed, to study the major ion chemistry and the weathering and geochemical processes controlling the water composition. Ca, Na and HCO₃ dominate the chemical composition of the reservoir water. The seasonal data shows a minimum concentration of most of the ions in post-monsoon and a maximum concentration in pre-monsoon seasons, reflecting the concentrating effects due to elevated temperature and increased evaporation during the low water level period of the pre-monsoon season. Water chemistry of the reservoirs strongly reflects the dominance of continental weathering aided by atmospheric and anthropogenic activities in the catchment area. Higher concentration of SO₄ and TDS in Panchet, Durgapur and Tenughat reservoirs indicate mining and anthropogenic impact on water quality. The high contribution of (Ca+Mg) to the total cations, high concentration of dissolved silica, relatively high (Na+K)/TZ⁺ ratio (0.3) and low equivalent ratio of (Ca+Mg)/(Na+K) suggests combined influence of carbonate and silicate weathering. Kaolinite is the possible mineral that is in equilibrium with the water, implying that the chemistry of reservoir water favours kaolinite formation. The calculated values of SAR, RSC and sodium percentage indicate the ‘excellent to good quality’ of water for irrigation uses.     

Distribution and evolution of water chemistry in Heihe River basin

Surface- vs. ground-water chemistry in the Heihe River basin, assessed through field sampling of precipitation, surface water and groundwater, allowed geographical zones and chemical types to be differentiated. The geographical zones included: alpine ice-snow (>3,900 m), alpine meadow (3,400–3,900 m), mountain forest and shrub (2,600–3,400 m), mountain grassland (1,900–2,600 m) and desert grassland (1,500–1,900 m). Groundwater chemical types included: (1) mountain fissure and piedmont gravel, bicarbonate, (2) piedmont diluvial, alluvial and lacustrine plain, sulphate, and (3) desert salt-accumulating depression, chloride. Since the 1960s, large volumes of river water diverted for irrigation have been found to re-emerge as spring water at the edge of alluvial fans and then reintegrate the Heihe River. After a number of reuses and re-emergences in the middle reaches, the rivers level of mineralization has doubled. Hydrological changes have resulted in the marked degradation of aquatic habitats, and caused substantial, and expanding, land salinization and desertification. Solving these largely anthropogenic problems requires concerted, massive and long-term efforts.