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Commoditizing Water
Territories: The Clash between
Andean Water Rights Cultures
and Payment for Environmental
Services Policies
Rutgerd Boelens, Jaime Hoogesteger & Jean Carlo
Rodriguez de Francisco
Published online: 10 Jan 2014.
To cite this article: Rutgerd Boelens, Jaime Hoogesteger & Jean Carlo Rodriguez de
Francisco , Capitalism Nature Socialism (2014): Commoditizing Water Territories: The
Clash between Andean Water Rights Cultures and Payment for Environmental Services
Policies, Capitalism Nature Socialism, DOI: 10.1080/10455752.2013.876867
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Capitalism Nature Socialism, 2014
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10455752.2013.876867
Commoditizing Water Territories: The Clash between
Andean Water Rights Cultures and Payment for
Environmental Services Policies
Rutgerd Boelens*, Jaime Hoogesteger and Jean Carlo Rodriguez de Francisco
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Introduction
In the Andean region, the growing water demand of expanding cities, extractive
industries, and local and transnational agribusiness puts increasing pressure on the
land and water resources of peasant and indigenous communities. Since the 1980s,
neoliberal privatization policies have often supported strategies of economically
powerful actors to control more water, enacted at the expense of small holders and
community-controlled water use systems (Gelles 2000; Achterhuis, Boelens, and
Zwarteveen 2010). However, it is common to see indigenous and peasant groups
defending their “water territories,” considering them to be their home bases in terms
of cultural belonging and as socio-productive spaces for creating and recreating
livelihood, while simultaneously forming a “political community.”
By nature, the definition of “water territories” as socio-natural or hydro-social
spatial networks is contested and differs according to discourse and discipline.
Governments tend to define such a territory as a geopolitical space clearly delimited
by their water bureaucracy’s unit boundaries. Positivist science disciplines tend to
conflate the concept with the units comprised by watershed or catchment
boundaries. Others (e.g. indigenous or anthropological currents) would emphasize
the fact that a geopolitical space constitutes a sociocultural construction, based on a
group’s historical, context-based appropriation of space and place constituted by
socio-hydrological relations. Rather than presenting a fixed definition, we argue
that it is precisely the (divergent) material and discursive production of the concept
that gives insight into the field of water control processes and water-power
structures.1
In most Andean countries, though threats linger on—and with ambiguous
positions of “left-leaning governments” in the region (Arsel 2012; Boelens,
Hoogesteger, and Baud 2013)—grassroots communities and federations have largely
*[email protected]
1
Territorialization, therefore, is a cultural and political phenomenon, often part of governmentality projects and
“counter-conducts” (Foucault, 1991; cf. Escobar 1995; Peluso and Vandergeest 2011).
© 2014 The Center for Political Ecology www.cnsjournal.org
2
RUTGERD BOELENS ET AL.
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halted privatization and marketization projects through multi-scalar popular resistance.2 A recent development that contributes far more subtly to influencing water
rights and resource flows through market mechanisms is the introduction of Payment
for Environmental Services (PES) policies. This is part of a wider neoliberal process
inducing universal economic rationality in water management (cf. McAfee 1999;
Swyngedouw 2005; Boelens and Vos 2012).
Currently, PES schemes are strongly promoted in Latin America as innovative
solutions to environmental degradation and rural poverty, said to generate economically
self-sustaining systems in order to preserve “environmental assets” (e.g. Pagiola, Arcenas,
and Platais 2005; Engel, Pagiola, and Wunder 2008). Watershed services, according to
this logic, are about relationships among people who own or manage certain ecosystems
and provide services to others who want to maintain, enhance, and/or receive these
services (i.e. water quality and quantity provision). Economic valuation is a desired
prerequisite for PES systems to function, as it would enable measurement, ranking, and
development of watershed services. Once assessed in accordance with commensurable
values and universal economic instruments, it is assumed that development planners
can make technical comparisons among multiple development options, calculate costs
and benefits, and establish the most efficient projects.3 Economic valuation also enables
economic transactions among PES system stakeholders, such as between “water
consumers” downstream and “those providing this service” in the upper watershed.
Consumers pay the providers who, as “owners of water territories,” conserve the
environment and its “water services.” This paper, however, aims for critical reflection.
The research in Ecuador outlined here started with the Water Law and
Indigenous Rights (WALIR) program (2001–2007) and is currently being followed
up by the interdisciplinary field research program, Struggling for Water Security:
Social Mobilization for the Defense of Water Rights in Peru and Ecuador (2008–
2013), and the international Justicia Hídrica research alliance (since 2009).4 In-depth
research for the case illustration was undertaken in 2008, 2009, and 2010.
In this paper, we argue that generic PES strategies fail to recognize the cultural
and cohesive function of Andean communities’ land and water institutions, their
complex rights, and their management relationships. These are rooted in, among
others, the historical evolution of local communities’ socio-natural relationships that
2
For example, Swyngedouw (2005), Bebbington, Humphreys Bebbington, and Bury (2010), cf. Barkin (2012),
and Martínez-Alier (2012).
3
For critical reflections on such economicist rationality, see e.g., Goldman (1998), McAfee (1999), Bond
(2010), Martínez-Alier (2002, 2012), Igoe and Brockington (2007), and Sullivan (2009).
4
The Justicia Hídrica alliance investigates water injustices, conflicts, and water defense strategies, whilst
supporting grassroots organizations. The network has annual international meetings in which scholars, grassroots
leaders, water users, practitioners and activists establish key research themes, questions, and common concepts
and terms of reference. They train young researchers and professionals, and exchange comparative field research
findings in order to critically engage with new, upcoming academic and policy debates and advocacy action
(www.justiciahidrica.org).
COMMODITIZING WATER TERRITORIES
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link people, place, and production while shaping local water territories, organizations,
identities, and cultures. Universalistic PES strategies that impose commensurable
values and a commodity-biased worldview tend to undermine existing noncommodity exchange and collaboration mechanisms that are crucial to local peasant
economies and sustainable land and water management.
The paper is structured as follows: The section below presents some historical
groundwork of the political–philosophical debate on environmental property and the
appropriation of nature in the Americas. It also includes a conceptual background to
examine the discursive power play at work in PES policies and the construction of its
“inevitability.” This helps to understand why PES is expanding. Section three examines
Andean water cultures, peasant economies, and their relation to local territories and
identities. In the fourth section, we analyze the ideological foundations of the PES
discourse and strategy. The watershed services scheme in Pimampiro, Ecuador, serves
as an illustration of how PES may ultimately affect local communities’ territorial
autonomy and power balances in a negative manner. In the discussion and conclusion,
we review the discursive power of PES approaches. We conclude that strategies aiming
to enhance local environmental and livelihood systems should build upon local
collective knowledge, values, and organizations, while simultaneously paying critical
attention to local-global power relations instead of relying on objectified expert-led
models and reductionist global water valuation myths.
From Expropriating the “Inhabitants of Unproduced Nature” to
Including the “Managers of Commoditized Ecosystems”
For centuries, the Americas have been conceptualized as virgin territory, open for
experimenting with how best to organize society and order property relations (Wolf
1982; Boelens and Gelles 2005; Achterhuis, Boelens, and Zwarteveen 2010). The
current market-environmentalist project had many predecessors. Philosophers and
politicians discursively constructed the Americas’ property foundations essentially to
promote their own ideas—and to present the European civilized Self as opposed to
the indigenous barbarian (or noble) Other. The 16th-century debate between Juan
Ginés de Sepúlveda and Bartolomé de las Casas is well-known: the latter defended
that the Indians were humans with a God-given relation to Nature (making them apt
for Christianization (de las Casas [1552] 1999)). Sepulveda, instead, in his Treaty on
the Just Causes of the War against the Indians (de Sepúlveda [1550] 1996) pictured
them as natural slaves and that “the perfect should rule over the imperfect” (19).
Indians were animal-like; “… they do not have written laws, but barbaric institutions
and customs … They do not even have private property … How can we doubt that
these people—so uncivilized, so barbaric, contaminated with so many impieties and
obscenities—have been justly conquered …?” (105–113).
Appropriation of “secure” (private) property rights, indeed, assumed a
central place in the debate, symbolizing civilization or, its opposite,
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RUTGERD BOELENS ET AL.
downfall.5 From Thomas More to Rousseau, Locke, Bentham,6 Marx, Engels,
and many others, the Americas served as an imaginary mirror, without accurate
empirical basis, resulting in utopian/dystopian missions (e.g. Gray 2007;
Achterhuis, Boelens, and Zwarteveen 2010). As Flores Galindo (1988, 33)
stated, “Europe creates the ideas, the Americas perfect them by means of their
materialization; the territory par excellence for practical utopias.” Even critical
philosopher Hannah Arendt ([1990] 1963) went along with portraying the
Americas as virgin territory. She argued that the “natural abundance found in
America” made the social question of redistribution less relevant, as if abundance
was not the result of dispossession (167). Neoliberals like Friedman have
contently contributed to this myth (“land was unproductive before” ([1980]
1990, 3)) to preach the link between freedom and private initiative and property
rights: “The fecundity of freedom is demonstrated most clearly in agriculture …
Unquestionably, the main source of the agricultural revolution was private
initiative operating in a free market open to all” (Friedman [1980] 1990, 3).
In relation to the Americas’ mirror function and current “neoliberalizing nature”
debates,7 John Locke’s seminal ideas on human appropriation of nature, possessive
individualism, and legitimization of commons enclosures are fundamental (e.g.
McCarthy and Prudham 2004; Beinart and Hughes 2009). Locke ([1690] 1970)
directly relates human labor investment with the right to privately appropriate nature:
Europeans could legitimately take the Indians’ natural resources because the latter
would not efficiently and productively mix their labor with their territory. Therefore,
no value was conferred on this “unproduced nature” and Indians could not claim
rightful property, hence his famous phrase, “In the beginning, all the world was
America” (par. 49). Resources were considered openly accessible, and existing property
systems were regarded as primitive or nonexisting.8 Locke’s legacy—legitimization of
possessive individualism—strongly resonates in the last decades’ (neo)liberal legislation
and policies, actively undermining Andean water control practice.9
5
Europe also had more balanced debates regarding its colonization impacts. See, e.g., Pagden (1982), Grove
(1996), and Beinart and Hughes (2009).
6
An “inconvenient truth”: liberation hero Simón Bolivar was forerunner in abolishing indigenous collective
property. Jeremy Bentham, grandfather of liberalism and utilitarianism, Panopticon’s designer, was one of his
main intellectual advisors. Bentham firmly believed in the tragic fate of the commons and advocated their active
destruction to subdivide them into private properties (Boelens 2009).
7
For example, Goldman (1998), Harvey (2003), McCarthy and Prudham (2004), and Igoe and Brockington (2007).
8
Genocide and massive starvation helped to preserve this myth. Through decimating the population, natural
resources became abundantly available and the continent became a garden for utopian experiments.
9
Water “not produced” by human labor was considered open access; water accumulation far beyond personal
needs was enhanced; individual control and entitlements were enforced and state protected; and, particularly
important, the widespread fundament of Andean user communities to collectively invest in water and
infrastructure development and upkeep, which thereby creates and re-affirms collective water rights and
hydraulic property, was undermined. Until today, Latin American water laws and policies are reluctant to
recognize this fundamental “motor” of peasant and indigenous communities’ water management; see, e.g.,
Boelens and Doornbos (2001), de Vos et al. (2006), Boelens (2009), and Achterhuis et al. (2010).
COMMODITIZING WATER TERRITORIES
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Obviously, Locke’s postulates also informed current liberal and neoliberal natural
resource management foundations and developments—“securing” and creating
private use rights10; commoditization of natural resources and services11; detachment
of nature from history and social structures through (free) marketization12—that, in
practice, lead to overarching political-economic processes like “accumulation by
dispossession,” rapid growth of inequality, and globalization of environmental
degradation.13
In relation to PES and related market-environmentalist ideologies, the echo of
Locke’s ideas is particularly strong in the proclaimed need to commoditize natural
resources and ecosystem services, the profound belief in “self-regulating markets” (e.g.
Polanyi [1944] 2001), and the conceptualization of (private and individualized)
natural resource “ownership” and “property rights claims,” which, as we show, may
easily lead to new enclosures. In various ways, PES and market environmentalism
also go beyond Locke. The same population groups whose natural resources were,
according to Locke, legitimately expropriated because of “not improving nature” are
now approached as potential nature rescuers and are “positively” included. PES portrays
them as potential pioneers in extending the commodity frontiers, as managers of
commoditized nature, as co-beneficiaries in a win-win construction, and as serviceproviders in the “self-regulating” market.
For this to happen, these ecosystem service-providing actors (in the Andean
countries, often peasant and indigenous small holders) need to be included in the
game, not excluded. A modern power mode based on positive approaches, productive
values, rewarding “good behavior,” and emphasizing participation and inclusion is
key to PES. Top-down imposition, as has happened in Andean history, would be
counterproductive. As Foucault remarked, nobody would consistently obey only
oppressive, prohibitive power: “We must cease once and for all to describe the effects
of power in negative terms. … In fact, power produces; it produces reality; it
produces domains of objects and rituals of truth. The individual and the knowledge
that may be gained of him belong to this production” (Foucault [1975] 1995, 194).
In this way, modern, “capillary” power aims to both produce and control reality and
its subjects. Here, the more powerful rules and norms are those that do not appear to
come from outsiders; they are implicit perceptions of what is normal, what is marked
as abnormal, and about how people should behave, feel, and think. Water-based PES
schemes, seeking to provide the norms for everyday environmental management
interactions, have a large stake in presenting these rules and institutions as if they
were of the users’ own making, shaped in a decentralized, self-regulating market
(Boelens 2009; Büscher 2012; Muradian and Rival 2012).
10
For example, Rose Johnston (2003), Budds (2010), Boelens and Gelles (2005), and Swyngedouw (2005).
11
For example, Goldman (1998), McAfee (1999), Robertson (2007), and Bond (2010).
12
For example, McCarthy and Prudham (2004), van der Ploeg (2008), and Barkin (2009).
13
For example, Harvey (2003) and Martínez-Alier (2002, 2012).
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RUTGERD BOELENS ET AL.
In the Andean countries, indeed, substantial efforts are made to “include”
peasant and indigenous water user collectives in modern water regimes and for them
to adopt the norms of “progress” (see Boelens 2009). As Foucault (1980, [1975]
1995) stated, normality is not a fixed condition, but the imperative mirror that
creates a forceful desire to belong to the dominant society and resemble its image.
Consequently, in the regime of modern, inclusive power, the art of correcting
“abnormal and undesired” behavior is not based on laws and regulations alone, but
on subtle self-correction and conformation to dominant water reasoning and
rationality.14 While suggesting support for the local poor and their environment,
PES rationale considers environmental degradation to be the result of local
misconduct due to a lack of economic incentives to conserve ecosystems (Pagiola,
Arcenas, and Platais 2005)—an issue to be solved by externally induced yet subtly
“self-adopted” new conservation and management norms. PES governmentalities15
discursively rework poor upstream households and communities into service
providers who, whenever participatorily self-correcting and internalizing the PES
contract conditions, will be economically empowered.
Policymakers and development institutes in the Andean countries enthusiastically embrace the PES approach, even when actual field results are largely absent.16
The paradigm’s positive, positivist, and nearly utopian flavor tend to legitimize farreaching interventions into people’s lives and livelihoods. “By considering the global
ecosystem as the provider of indispensable goods and services (i.e. natural capital), we
are just one step away from creating markets for the flows of services that nature
provides. If doing so can yield positive results for both people and nature, why hold
back?” (UNEP/IUCN 2007, 2).
In order to confront this new, rapidly expanding environmental discourse and
policy practice with existing water control relationships in the Andean region, the
section below first presents a brief account of the latter.
Peasant Economies, Livelihoods, and Territories
Local water rights systems in the Andean region take shape as context-specific
mixtures, combining an array of rules, cultural values, and meanings from diverse
normative sources, ranging from ancestral laws, State law, Catholic and Protestant
dogmas, market laws, up to development project norms. Water user collectives
reconstruct these norms in order to occupy their own place in territory-grounded
14
Normalizing power compares and differentiates individuals according to how they fit the (unspoken) valuegiving measure that presents the conformity that must be achieved, separating normality from abnormality (cf.
Foucault [1975] 1995).
15
Foucault (1991). See Boelens et al. (2013) on disciplinary and neoliberal water governmentalities in the
Andean region.
16
PES programs fit into a broader tendency in international development, as, e.g., the anthropology of
development has extensively shown (e.g. Ferguson 1990; Rodriguez de Francisco, Budds, and Boelens 2013).
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local law. Collective principles and rights, embedded in production systems, reinforce
the social group’s cohesiveness and, implicitly or explicitly, are often part of
ideological-political strategies to challenge policies and interventions that threaten
local decision-making autonomy, albeit in disguised manners (Boelens 2009; cf.
Scott 1990).
Local water allocation and distribution practices are entwined within a multitude
of community institutions. For example, household contributions to acquiring rightsholder status in water supply systems may include “performing all duties,” i.e., taking
part in community-service positions, cultural festivals, organizing civil society
activities, and taking part in mobilizations to defend collective rights. Thus, water
rights are embedded in political, economic, and cultural relationships, which
determine the nature, value, and function of water.
In the highlands where users face unstable geophysical conditions, unpredictable
climates, and unequal power structures, water use is grounded in mutual dependence.
Labor-intensive highland water control systems force people to work collectively
at inter- and intra-community scales. This obligatory reciprocity, giving users a
“hydraulic identity” in which they identify with the water sources, the system, and
each other, is at the heart of collective action (Boelens and Doornbos 2001). Thus,
far from just ideological constructs based on presumed solidarity, water community
and territory are both founded on the material creation of collective water property
systems, which link individual action to collective ownership and reflect a logic of
defense and reproduction in the harsh Andean context.
Irrigation water has often functioned as a central factor bonding different
communities and diverse ecological/altitudinal zones in the Andes. In small basins,
communities commonly worked to build canals that would cross higher- and loweraltitude zones so as to have irrigated plots in different agro-climatic areas. This
vertical ecological zoning enabled them to incorporate several agricultural sub-sectors,
diversify crops, better cope with drought and frost periods, and distribute risks.
Production and exchange systems were elaborated whereby families and communities
aimed to control diverse ecosystems, integrating management of water, land, and
biodiversity with inter- and intra-communal labor exchange (Zimmerer 2000; Mayer
2002). Hydrological/hydraulic interdependence, combined with nonmercantile
community links between “upstream” and “downstream” through feasts, rites, family
bonds, communal work, etc., have often constituted the backbone of community
economies; this interdependence factors into the exchange of agricultural products as
well as labor, services, people (e.g. marriage), materials, and knowledge. Thus, waterbased bonds have played, and often still play, a dynamic role as they foster livelihood
strategies, generate inter/intra-community organization, and weave together socionatural water territories.
Grounded analysis of Andean peasant economies provides insight into water use
practices, local organizational forms, and how rationalities, potentials, and obstacles
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are interconnected within a wider multi-scalar (local-global) framework. Such analysis
shows, for example, that outcomes of peasant water control processes are not simply
the sum of individual users’ economic interests, “rationally” calculating costs and
benefits of collective actions as if operating in a free market. Local institutions result
from conscious and unconscious acts, location-specific trial and error, adaptation,
culturally embedded patterns, power constraints and opportunities, and the use of
neighboring, national, or transnational institutions (Perreault 2008; van der Ploeg
2008; Hoogesteger 2012a, 2012b).
Though colored by extreme diversity, an important feature of Andean peasant
economies is their co-constitution/co-determination by both the mercantile and
nonmercantile exchange spheres. According to Golte and de la Cadena (1983), the
two spheres compete for the same space and social actors. Households optimize their
production process through looking at both income generation via the general market
and at what can be arranged through nonmercantile spheres (cf. Gudeman 2008). As
Mayer (2002) argues, the two spheres are mutually interdependent and subsidize
each other, but they can also deplete each other.
In the last decades, scale politics and intensified interactions17 have rapidly
changed and sometimes broken down existing boundaries between community
and market spheres. These are the processes on the backs of which PES rides,
which means that PES effects cannot be isolated from the wider context. Still, in
spite of capitalist market penetration and ongoing accumulation, dispossession,
and theft, nonmercantile exchanges and interactions in the Andean communities
have resisted—and will resist in the future—displacement by predominantly
commoditized relationships18 (see, e.g., van der Ploeg 2008; Gudeman 2008;
Boelens, Hoogesteger, and Baud 2013). This becomes particularly clear in the field
of community water control (e.g. Gelles 2000; de Vos, Boelens, and Bustamante
2006). One main reason is that neither peasant families/communities nor their
water control systems will be able to survive amidst exclusively mercantile
relationships. Another reason is that many exchanges and activities in Andean
livelihood strategies and irrigation systems simply cannot be reduced to exchangevalues and market economy issues.19 For example, rituals, agricultural feasts,
mutual support, and reciprocal labor and product exchanges are considered
necessary for sustaining the irrigation system and the community. These keep the
nonmercantile community economy alive in a system constantly under pressure to
become part of the commodity economy. Peasant economy is part of, subordinated to, and simultaneously a bastion against commoditized market exploitation.
17
For example, through (inter)national migration and rural-urban interactions, commoditization processes,
schooling, modern media, and infrastructure development.
18
Commoditization is the process of deepening commodity relations within the cycle of production and
reproduction, whereby the means of consumption and production and other inter-human exchange relations are
increasingly based on monetary exchange-values and are acquired through the market.
19
See, e.g., Gudeman (2008) and Martínez-Alier (2002, 2012) on the notion of the incommensurability of
values.
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The awareness that “community” and “socio-territory” form a central axis for the
defense and effective use of a community’s productive resources, both collective
and individual, is a powerful mainstay of peasant livelihoods. Households perceive
that noncommodity relationships ensure long-term reproduction and offer a
protective framework against the vicious circles of poverty, debt, and exploitation
(Mayer 2002; Gudeman 2008; van der Ploeg 2008).
By contrast, mercantile relationships—which certainly do offer important shortterm solutions and opportunities—cannot guarantee stability within a (strongly
fluctuating) economy of subsistence producers. Families actively engage with the
market but, due to the disadvantageous features of Andean peasant agriculture (small,
fragmented plots often in fragile hillside terrain) and the unequal exchange
relationship in the market place, do not receive sufficient value for their products
and labor in order to subsist in an overall commodity economy. In all their diversity
and interrelatedness with a broad spectrum of agrarian/urban activities, in local/
transnational contexts, Andean communities exist because their collective noncommoditized institutions (including their common water rights frameworks) are
indispensable to continuing and defending the livelihoods of mutually dependent
families. Though differentiated by class, gender, status, and often by ethnicity, they
try to construct and re-affirm social and territorial bonds. This is particularly true for
their water control institutions, which respond to the “collective nature” of this
resource in the Andean highlands. These institutions, therefore, cannot be supplanted
by individual, State, or market solutions.
This is also closely related to valuation practices and powers.20 Local social
relationships give value and meaning to reciprocal exchange, and local assessment is
conducted according to the prevailing, culturally constructed moral standards and
norms of “acceptability,” whereas market transfers are seen as impersonal and general
(e.g. Mayer 2002; Gudeman 2008). For instance, unlike the de-personalized
irrigation obligations in State-managed systems (fees) or market-based “service
payment” arrangements, contributions in community systems, in varying expressions,
take the particularities of households into account. Often, for example, the elderly
and ailing are excused from labor obligations. These aspects, fundamental to Andean
water user communities and their notions of water territory, identity, and
interdependence, are entirely different in market-based development approaches
such as the one advocated by PES policies.
20
As Martínez-Alier observed, “different interests can be defended either by insisting on the discrepancies of
valuation inside the same standard of value, or by resorting to non-equivalent descriptions of reality; that is, to
different value standards … The reduction of all goods and services to actual or fictitious commodities, as in
cost-benefit analysis, can be recognized as one perspective among several, legitimate as a point of view and as a
reflection of real power structures. Who, then, has the power to impose a particular standard of valuation?”
(2002, 98).
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Universal Prescription versus Local Contexts: Watershed Services as an
Illustrative Example
PES schemes emphasize the formalization and often the individualization of
property relations and water rights, as well as a direct monetary (market-based)
relationship between “service providers” and “service consumers”: “By offering
economic incentives for maintaining ecosystems services, PES operates on the basis
that market forces can offer an efficient, effective means of supporting sustainable
development objectives” (UNEP/IUCN 2007, 2). PES rationality thereby assumes
that the matrix of exchanges, collaborations, and water rights repertoires that
constitute Andean water cultures can be reduced to an act of conferring monetary
values to ecosystem services. Watershed exchanges and interactions become
commoditized services that should be traded; water rights must therefore be “real
and secure,” and preferably private or at least legally formalized (cf. de Soto 2000).
FAO, for example, explains that the capturing of ecosystems’ values “is easier when
land is under private property” (FAO 2007, cited by Sullivan 2009, 23). Market
environmentalism asks for a reformulation of nature, different claim-making relations
among humans and between humans and nature, and renders the power to formulate
nature’s “value” in the terms of external scientific and development-related
institutional discourse.
International PES scholars view Ecuador as having many success stories (e.g.
Wunder and Albán 2008). Despite lack of evidence and the fact that claimed
successes are highly questionable, the discursive image is enough to persuade other
“progress-seeking” governments (such as those of Peru, Colombia, and Bolivia) to
include PES prescriptions in their policies. Problematic impacts, however, are
becoming increasingly evident and contested (e.g. Isch and Gentes 2006; Rodríguez
de Francisco, Budds, and Boelens 2013).
For example, the monetary rationality generates tensions among users and
threatens to undermine existing collective arrangements on which peasant and
indigenous communities base their water and livelihood strategies. Context-based
water rights, values, and territorial and property notions, strongly interwoven in local
networks, are imperiled by market rules and national regulations that advocate
individualized and/or transferable property rights and monetized services (cf. Mayer
2002; Swyngedouw 2005; Martínez-Alier 2012). Individual rights can be bought by
outside players or are found to be concentrated in the hands of a few users. For
instance, based on market economy rationality, upstream users now have a strong
incentive to consider themselves as the commodity owners of sources and services
(beyond merely the stewards of natural sources) and demand financial compensation
from the downstream communities, forcefully breaking with that which is outlined
above—reciprocal relationships based on the collective ownership of resources.
Other threats emerge when powerful “service consumers,” after signing the
contract with the “providers” (not necessarily communities, but well-connected
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COMMODITIZING WATER TERRITORIES
11
representatives), claim strong influence in local ecosystem and water management. In
the Ecuadorian provinces of Chimborazo, Tungurahua, and Pichincha, for example,
this created fierce tensions among downstream cities and upstream communities. The
social engineering rationale—inherent to positivist, often-utopian PES policies—
suggests that anomalies from the desired situation must be radically transformed by
intervention (cf. Rodríguez de Francisco, Budds, and Boelens 2013; Gray 2007).
FAO, for instance, recommends that local livelihoods based on extensive grazing
practices should be re-directed from subsistence and food production and turned
toward provision of environmental services and biodiversity (FAO 2007)—as if
highland pastoralists were the culprits and livelihoods could be removed without
creating social dramas. Such universalistic recommendations tend to reinforce the
idea of “disposable communities,” which was introduced with the liberal economics
of early Social Darwinism21 and extended during the past decades’ proliferation of
neoliberal governmentalities in the Andes (Boelens and Vos 2012; Boelens,
Hoogesteger, and Baud 2013). Corresponding recommendations are indeed
welcomed by those governors who outright question whether Andean communities
and their communal lands and water territories have a right to exist.22
The illustration below, from Pimampiro, northern Ecuador, figures prominently
in international policy debates that promote market-based conservation rationality
and this PES case as an example to be followed. The case, however, shows how PES
may catalyze processes of commoditization, internal community struggles, enclosures
of common property, and unequal distribution of benefits and costs.
In 2000, with NGO support, the Pimampiro municipality started a PES system
for its upper-watershed to secure drinking water provision. The system works by
charging drinking water users a 20 percent consumption surcharge, which is used to
pay individual landowners of the Nueva América Cooperative a fixed payment per
hectare for cloud forest protection (Wunder and Albán 2008). After initial
agreements, 19 families signed perpetual duration contracts with the municipality
in 2005. Payments are based on assumed water-related services23 that the different
land use forms provide, and they are established according to land cover
characteristics. Compensations range between USD 6 and 12/hectare/year.
After a prolonged inter-communitarian struggle over land, the Cooperative got
its communal land title in 1991. The members worked collectively to clear the lower
21
Herbert Spencer (1820–1903), the most influential exponent of Social Darwinism, introduced liberal
economics into evolutionary theory. “It was Spencer not Darwin who coined the phrase survival of the fittest”
(Gray 2007, 88), which he applied to “scientifically justify” that less productive economies need to surrender to
more efficient and productive market economies. Spencer argued that societies necessarily experience an
evolutionary transformation towards the free market, civilization’s ultimate objective.
22
For example, former Peruvian president Alan García attacked peasant communities for “opposing progress”;
these “adversaries of modernity” would need to abandon their collective rights systems (El Comercio 2810-2007).
23
Contrary to PES rationale, actual volumes of these water services—to define payments—are not quantified.
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RUTGERD BOELENS ET AL.
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parts of the area and establish common pastures and agricultural fields. Nevertheless,
internal struggles arose; they were strongly influenced by the individualizing interests
of one powerful landholding family group with several members and a majority
landholding share in the Cooperative. Contrary to the wishes of the (majority of)
poorer families, they worked toward private land titling and acquisition based on
financial investments. This created a marked difference in landownership within the
Cooperative.24 This same group of powerful families pushed for the PES scheme,
which neatly fit their individual and privatizing interests.
Wunder and Albán (2008) conclude that the scheme is “likely to have improved
PES recipients’ welfare, mostly through higher income” (685). However, in practice,
farming in the same area yields far higher income than PES conservation. Average
payment for landowners is estimated at USD 252 (Wunder and Albán 2008, 690),
but this does not consider the huge landownership differences. The wealthy minority
(each owning over 30 hectares) has the largest profits, especially as they own the most
land with cloud forest and can get a reasonable profit for “not working their land.”
In fact, PES payments are extremely low when compared to the missed benefits
of cultivating this land. Therefore, PES is unattractive for poor Pimampiro
households and favors large-landholding families (inside and outside the scheme)
and landowners who do not depend on agriculture in the PES areas. It presents huge
disadvantages for poor households with land only in PES intervention areas and no
alternative income; their major source of income (cultivation of precisely these lands)
is undermined just as are the noncommoditized social relations that are especially
important for these families who are unable to purchase most production factors at
the market.
The project demanded a majority vote by the PES suppliers to start. As
Cooperative directors, the powerful farmers arranged all PES contacts and contracts,
often without properly informing other members (Dauriac 2007). Next, through
asymmetrical dependency, they exerted extra pressure to get a sufficient number of
small holders on board. This way, the PES scheme got access to the Association’s land.
But it was not just oppressive force, or legal threats to fine nonwilling farmers,
that convinced several poorer farmers. The scheme’s discursive power was an
important factor, too. The NGOs promoted PES as bringing progress and modernity
to a backward area. They explained in training and conversations that subsistence
agriculture has no value when compared to the commodity value of nature. As an
NGO professional explained—apparently blind to the fact that farmers with no other
income cannot eat from a few dollars per hectare—“they talk about their potatoes
and beans, but you don’t see a significant land use in these environmentally
important areas.” Or, eager to convince about commoditization needs: “PES makes
24
One owner has over 100 hectares, and most members own less than 20 hectares, with extremes of 2 hectares.
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farmers realize other, more important values of nature.” This discourse gains force,
expressed by a PES participant who excuses himself for his “misunderstanding” and
“backwardness,” when compared to modern green market notions: “We thought that
agriculture was the only value of the mountain,” and, “We as farmers don’t have a
great deal of experience developing productive matters, we are just farmers.” What
farmers fundamentally expressed in meetings was that not measuring up to the moral,
“self-evident” principles of economic water use rationality goes beyond violating the
national or municipal laws—it means violating one’s own capacity for reason, and
one’s own opportunities to progress and join modern water and environmental
management (see Boelens 2009).
This scheme is often presented as a success and a model for other municipalities
(Wunder and Albán 2008, 685; Carrión 2009; Ministerio del Ambiente 2009). The
implementing organizations are setting up new schemes elsewhere to “institutionalize
the Pimampiro experience in municipal governments in the Ecuadorian Coast,
Highlands and Amazon regions” (Carrión 2009, 28). Nevertheless, the scheme raises
many doubts. It was implemented in a community where a dominant family
group—fostering private titling—was able to acquire most of the land. It has also
triggered more private property claims by individual members of adjacent communities (Dauriac 2007; Rodríguez de Francisco, Budds, and Boelens 2013). Here,
private property claims are made at the expense of communal lands and collective
management forms, whereby poorer families relying on common property arrangements lose out. Locke’s ideas continue to color property discourses, and collective
property is seen as backward, illegally owned no-man’s land.
For example, in 2008, a new PES scheme was implemented in Pimampiro’s
Chamachan watershed, which caused communal property to be converted into
private property and remaining parts into a protected area (Rodríguez de Francisco,
Budds, and Boelens 2013). PES professionals explained, “Communal lands—
without land titles—cannot join: we don’t want to reward illegality.” The real
beneficiaries of this PES system are those who have accumulated land at the expense
of others, transforming communal forests and pastures into individualized commodities. This way, PES development leads to modern “enclosures of the commons,”
implying exclusion of access by the community at large (Rodríguez de Francisco,
Budds, and Boelens 2013; cf. Sullivan 2009). Groups of “losers” emerge through
this shift from use- to commodity-values without access to vital water territories,
facing more difficulties in leaning on the eroding, noncommoditized labor and
exchange relationships so crucial for them.
However, in Nueva América, PES modernization discourse has no hegemonic
power; not all residents were seduced by the discursive strategies. Those who rejected
the scheme are precisely many small landowners. Besides PES driving them into
poverty, another reason for nonparticipation is that they strongly identify with
farming lives and livelihoods: “We do not want to live on a pension.” Moreover,
most community members expressed that they feared growing conflicts because of
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PES implementation, stating that community reciprocity relations have weakened as
disagreements over the PES scheme have polarized its members. They argue that
monetary compensation has undermined the structures, rules, and motivations for
collective action. Next, nonparticipants do not want “other people” to decide about
their land and livelihood arrangements: “We don’t want to sell our autonomy.” The
communities who resisted PES in Pimampiro are but one example; the same happens
in other provinces.
PES projects neglect to see that in many Andean watersheds there are already
multiple ways to compensate for watershed services, based on local forms of “vertical
economies” and multiple other relationships with exchange labor, products, and
services among the upstream and downstream agro-ecological zones (Saldías
et al. 2012).
In this regard, despite anti-neoliberal discourses, the current Rafael Correa
governmental policy is reason for great concern (Arsel 2012). The new “socialism of
the twenty-first century” discourse that has been set since 2007 included far-reaching
water (and environmental) reforms. The government promised to deconstruct the
neoliberal project; it aims to reclaim water governance control that was given away,
not just to the private sector, but also to local water user collectives. For this, it
applies new governmentality discourses and tactics based on a presumed Citizens
Revolution (Boelens, Hoogesteger, and Baud 2013). In its National Plan for Living
Well, PES was labeled a “neoliberal strategy”: “… environmental services cannot be
appropriated, their production, provision, use and exploitation, will be regulated by
the State” (Constitution of Ecuador: Art. 74). But at the same time, it has inherited a
large part of the neoliberal legacy, has intensified collaboration with capitalist
enterprises, and is convinced by the PES modernization discourse. Paradoxically, the
government has started its own PES-type programs, Socio-Páramo and Socio-Bosque.
Herein the State, not local entities, sets the rules of the commoditization and marketenvironmental game—very similar to original PES concepts.
Discussion
Going beyond the scope of this paper, many experiences show that it is also
possible to support Andean water territories and community livelihoods based on
community-embedded values, rights, and organizations (see, e.g., Isch and Gentes
2006; Hoogesteger 2012a, 2012b). They may be funded through mechanisms by
which the economically stronger water users (cities, industry) support rural
development and environmental protection in the water-providing watersheds.
Through indirect investments in collective property facilities (instead of direct,
market-based payments), communities are enabled to strengthen their collective
rights frameworks (see Saldías et al. 2012; de Vos, Boelens, and Bustamante 2006).
But all too often, local methods of managing and setting the value of natural
resources are not judged in their own right, but in terms of ideal universal models.
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They tend to be viewed as obstacles to modern livelihoods and land and water
development. Modernist NRM policies such as PES provide the norms—presented
as “natural” and “inevitable”—which are the primary mechanisms through which
water users are measured and are to measure themselves.
PES schemes, under the banner of “participation,” form part of a tendency
whereby the production of water knowledge, disciplines, and truths increasingly
concentrates on the effort to align local user groups, mindsets, identities, and
resources with the interests and imagined water world of globalizing policies. The
capillary power of these environmental service discourses is pervasive; by means of
strategic inclusion, the marginalized are incorporated into a globalizing system of
thought and transaction, coined by market ontology and rationality. Top-down
privatization and outright legal and policy impositions have not disappeared, but have
been complemented by the inclusive policy language of United Nations institutes
and international environmental agencies. The latter characteristically affirm “the
attractiveness of the ‘watershed services’ concept is largely due to its capacity to
provide a unifying language among economic, business and environmental communities” (UNEP/IUCN 2007, 2).
Conclusions
Growing pressure on land and water resources in the Andes marks that
downstream water users are becoming increasingly aware that their water supply
depends largely on what happens further upstream. Neoliberal-oriented policy
discourses such as PES see in this relationship a new possibility of inducing market
forces and commoditizing water, land, and their forms of control. As this paper
shows, such strategies may effectively dis-embed local water rights and undermine
water communities’ territorial foundations: a process of de-identifying with the local
and aligning with national or outside rules and interests.
De-contextualizing and commoditizing watershed and territorial management
threatens collective rights systems’ stability. Livelihood security is threatened,
particularly for poorer households and communities that depend on noncommodity
forms of collective resource ownership and cooperation for their sustenance. PES
theories, policies, and intervention projects, moreover, close their eyes to the
consequences for both upstream and downstream parties and the ecosystem itself in
the case that the “service” is cancelled (by State, market, or local causes)—in such an
instance, returning to a noncommoditized compensation modality will prove almost
impossible because the logic of individualized, monetary rights claims is too powerful
and perverse.
Evidence presented from the Ecuadorian highlands shows that PES rationality
seriously misrepresents the local dynamics of water control and property rights. In
order to function, PES projects need to establish enforceable property rights and
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RUTGERD BOELENS ET AL.
clearly identifiable service—readily available or, if not, externally installed—that
match market-based commodity exchanges. The values of nature and its “services,”
and the methods to universally quantify and exchange them, also need to be induced
in the local context, as well as the institutions and regulations that enable marketbased management and exchange of resources and services. So, under PES experts’
leadership, use-values are dissolved, rendered obsolete, and ultimately deprived of
their dynamic contextual nature. Local communities’ relationships and water
territories are muddled or shattered and their rights frameworks are profoundly
transformed. As we have shown, this process of value-setting, rule-making, and
establishing “optimal exchange,” far from being just rational or neutral, takes place
among players with huge power differences. Moreover, rather than empowering local
management and exchange systems, PES strategies may disable communities and
engender dependence on outside arrangements and institutes. The modern mechanisms to value property reflect a process of expert-thinking based on the remodeling of
livelihood practices according to outside-driven design, intimately linking peasant
economies’ reproductive cycles and water management with general market rules
(Boelens and Vos 2012).
In this regard, the market-environmental strategy tends to be very subtle. New
policies equate “water control modernization” not just with material progress but also
with moral progress and ethical innovation. The material and discursive techniques of
governance they deploy are endowed with strong foucauldian power-knowledge; they
shape and claim truth, steer social behavior, and give normative meaning to particular
water practices. They are powerful since they have the capacity to legitimize the
practices of some while delegitimizing those of others—separating those legitimate
forms of water knowledge and rights from those that are illegitimate. PES projects
often present their normative understandings and myths as “hard evidence” that
should lead to “inevitable conclusions.”
Nevertheless, as we argue, this is not a deterministic process. There are
promising examples of communities, water user federations, and committed NGOs
collaborating to strengthen user-controlled water territories, building on a critical
understanding of local dynamics and strategizing forms of mutual acompañamiento.
They often entwine with local struggles to defend and reconstruct “territory.” Here,
water and water rights, rather than entailing a commoditized services exchange, have
integrated functions in doubly determined peasant economy livelihoods. Such
practices demonstrate that policymakers and development planners have to relinquish
the Babylonian myth that they can devise universally valid criteria for comparing and
exchanging the fundamental values of water and ecosystems. Land and water
struggles are also struggles for local autonomy, for the right to self-define the nature
of problems, and the direction for solutions. They challenge the very rationality and
superiority of market-driven development approaches. They show that behind the
mask of neutrality, these policies commonly have actual outcomes that are far from
“objective” and rather benefit the better-off.
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