Water Conflicts in the Elqui River Watershed: New Water Territories Challenging Chilean Water Institutional Framework
Résumé
This article aims to analyze the plurality of water conflicts existing at the watershed level in an extractivist context. It is based on ethnography of water organizations from the Elqui River watershed in Chile, realized for my doctoral researches. My purpose is to understand how water governance is associated with a normative and cognitive power structure and generate contradictions between water users. I argue that those conflicts can create new collective actions which may found new spaces of identity and legitimacy, and a new material and ideal definition of water. Those news water territories may become a base for new water governance.