Water commons as a counter-hegemonic project: New environmental and water social movements in Chile

• In Event: 2251 - Section on Environmental Sociology Roundtables (1 hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: 13. Environmental Social Movements

Abstract

This paper analyzes how water privatization, coupled with the development of extractive activities, has contributed to producing new environmental and water social movements in Chile. I argue that the political agenda of these socio-environmental movements is forcing the transition from water markets to water commons in the country. An historic opportunity is emerging from this new transitional configuration and the result may potentially overcome private ownership over water as the main barrier to radical changes to restore sustainability of the hydrosocial metabolism by collectively and democratically managing water. Through a multi-sited ethnographic approach based on historical analysis, GIS, field observations, and interviews conducted in different periods and regions within Chile (2007–2012 in Aysen; 2014 in Biobio and Santiago; and 2017–2018 in Araucania and Santiago), the socio-historical and geographical processes are reconstructed to understand the social mobilization over water in Chile. Through the lens of Marxist political ecology, I describe the formation and articulation of a new type of social movement that not only wants to recover water as a public good or commons but also questions one of the central social structures associated with neoliberalism in Chile: the water markets created during the Pinochet dictatorship. I conclude by analyzing how this hydro-social mobilization can be seen as a true alternative that puts serious challenges to the private property of water and neoliberalism itself.

Author

• Robinson Torres-Salinas, University of Concepcion