This article analyzes different visions and positions in a conflict between the developer of an open-pit mine in Mexico and project opponents using the echelons of rights analysis framework, distinguishing four layers of dispute: contested resources; contents of rules and regulations; decision-making power; and discourses. Complexities in this study manifest how communities' land and water rights are circumvented by governmental bodies and ambivalent regulations favouring the large mining company. This process is importantly reinforced by international trade legislation. Multi-actor, multi-scale alliances may offer opportunities to foster environmental and social justice solutions.
ARTICLE HISTORY
With increasing water consumption and pollution in cities and expanding urban areas, impacts on rural areas as water extraction and waste disposal zones are intensifying. To unravel these hydro-territorial dynamics, this paper studies the intersecting and overlapping Foucauldian ‘arts of government’ (‘governmentalities’) deployed to convey water from rural to urban areas in three Latin American cities: Lima (Peru), San Luis Potosí (Mexico) and Bucaramanga (Colombia). We examine conventional (cemented) water transfers, broadly promoted payment for ecosystem services schemes and their conjunction, combining scholarship about hydrosocial territories and governmentality. We demonstrate how particular urban-based imaginaries about rural areas, their inhabitants, norms, practices and identities become embedded in governmentality schemes, and how these are justified, materialized and sustained, producing particular entwined rural–urban subjectivities. We explore how these are accepted, negotiated or contested. Our application of the governmentalities framework to analyze the material and socio-political effects of rural–urban water transfers contributes to existing scholarship on the (re)shaping of rural–urban hydrosocial territorialities showing the ‘hidden’ and ‘invisible’ workings of subjectification. It also contributes to the literature on governmentalities by scrutinizing the importance of technology (including physical infrastructure) in creating rural subjects.
Este artículo analiza los conflictos por los recursos agua y tierra en Cerro de San Pedro, México, cuando una empresa minera canadiense inició una mina a cielo abierto en este municipio. Examinamos diferentes posiciones en el conflicto entre la mina de oro y los habitantes locales, y cómo ambivalentes regulaciones nacionales y organismos gubernamentales permitieron que una empresa extranjera operara sin los permisos requeridos. Para analizar el conflicto utilizamos el marco de Escalones de Análisis de Derechos, que distingue cuatro capas de disputa: sobre los recursos; el contenido de las normas; el poder de decisión; y los discursos. Discutimos cómo la auto-representación de la empresa extranjera mediante discursos de responsabilidad social empresarial contrasta con las injusticias ambientales, políticas y sociales que infligen a los habitantes locales, exacerbadas por las políticas nacionales y los acuerdos comerciales internacionales. Por último, argumentamos que las alianzas multi-actoras y multi-escalapueden ofrecer oportunidades para fomentar soluciones ambientales y de justicia social.
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