Community aqueducts in Colombia and their struggle for legal recognition

Abstract

In Colombia there are thousands of community aqueducts that supply water to remote rural communities and peripheral urban settlements. These community aqueducts have united in a National Network to fight for legal recognition and support, since Colombia’s neoliberal policies don’t acknowledge their communitarian nature and have imposed legal requirements that push them towards privatization. Departing from a Latin American political ecology perspective, the paper discusses how this struggle is part of a broader regional movement in which a different rationality between humans and nature, not mediated by economic interests, is fighting to survive and advance in contestation to the hegemonic capitalist model. I argue that community aqueducts put in practice the defense of water as a common in an autonomous exercise of governance that contributes to the construction of territories in Latin America.