Mercedes Ejarque, CASAS’ member, has published an article with Mariana Schmidt & Melina Tobías in Canadian Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Studies.
Abstract:
This article dives into the way in which productive and territorial transformations have created or increased inequalities in access to drinking water and sanitation in two rural and periurban areas across Argentina: the Chaco region, in the province of Salta in the north of the country, and the central plateau of the province of Chubut, in Patagonia. The approach combines tools from political ecology, critical social geography and recent literature on water infrastructures. In these territories, water supply services are not provided or solely governed by the formal system but, rather, by an heterogeneous set of stakeholders, rules and arrangements that operate on the side, in the form of long-standing practices rooted in the territory. Thus, addressing infrastructures makes it possible to analyze water inequalities, including issues related to quality, maintenance and the involvement of the target population in infrastructure design. We have developed a qualitative methodological approach focused on the analysis of interviews from different stakeholders in each region and cartographic, documentary, legislative, statistical and newspaper sources. The study shows that water infrastructures produce and reproduce historical inequalities that are social, economic and environmental, so when there are production transformations in the territories, conflicts over its forms of appropriation and distribution reemerge. Besides, access to safe water requires not just “technical” improvements but also a social and political acknowledgment by citizens and constant efforts and investments in order to work.
Read the full text here: https://doi.org/10.1080/08263663.2024.2444234
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CASAS
The Collective of Agrarian Scholar-Activists from the Global South (CASAS) is a community of Scholar-Activists working in critical agrarian studies.