Sharing water: micro political confl icts in the access and distribution of water. The case of Amantaní island (Lake Titicaca, Peru)

Abstract

This article examines the dynamic between three actors in confrontation that use three different discourses in their struggles, and where the object of the conflict is water. The case study are the communities of Amantaní island that face a change in the organization of the management, supply and use of domestic water as a result of the implementation of the Project Water for All promoted by the national government. In this context, the struggle between these actors is waged from the standpoint of dissimilar traditions of water rights given that the comuneros (community members) use the resource under different legal orders (the municipal, the indigenous communities’, and the formal water systems). The paper describes and analyses the negotiation processes that take place drawing on Foucault’s concept of “programmes of power”, which refers to the fact that legal orders produce and reproduce discourses and practices that are geared towards their “forms” of exercising power. The article argues that as a result of these struggles and confrontations, and mainly through rhetoric, a new map for the distribution of water rights is established.