Abstract:One of the many dimensions of globalization is climate change that in recent years has caused much concern in the developed world. The aim of this article is to explore how people living on the margins of the global world conceive climate change. Drawing on ethnographic field data from the 1980s and today it examines how the ritual practice and the religious belief of a rural community in the Peruvian Andes has changed during the last 27 years and how the villagers perceive this change. It argues that the villagers traditionally conceive the environment as co-habited by humans and non-humans but that recent environmental change in the Andes has caused a shift in this world-view. Today, many villagers have adopted the global vocabulary on climate change and are concerned with their own impact in the environment. However, the villagers reject the idea that it is human activities in other parts of the world that cause environmental problems in their community and claim that these must be addressed locally. It suggests that even though the villagers' reluctance to subscribe to the global discourse of climate change makes them look like the companions of climate skeptics in the developed world, their reasons are very different.

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Water is important not only as a natural resource but also as an object of political empowerment, social meaning, and cultural imagination. To unpack the social nature of water, the article examines it as “a total human‐material fact” which implies enquiring into water's fundamental properties, that is, its transgressive, transmutable, transparent characteristics, and exploring how the different forms of powers they engender impinge on human life. One such power is the power in water (its physical force), another the power of water (its social and political bearings), and a third the power as water (its cultural and imaginary potential). The article argues that regions suffering from chronic water scarcity are particularly pertinent to the study of water's agentive powers. The Peruvian Andes constitutes such a field site. Reviewing regional literature on Andean history and contemporary culture the article explores how water's multiple forces impact Peru's current water crisis and shape Andean people's struggle for social recognition. Moreover, the article employs the notion of the hydrosocial cycle to examine the author's own ethnographic data discussing two cases that in opposite ways illustrate people's perceptions of water and the way the convergence of its agentive powers constitutes a “total fact” in the Andes. It concludes that even though the discussion is focused on the regional context that shapes Andean water struggles, the two cases document something universal about water: its unique quality to represent raw physical power, malleable social and political power, and soft imaginative power at one and the same time. WIREs Water 2018, 5:e1270. doi: 10.1002/wat2.1270 This article is categorized under: Human Water > Water Governance Human Water > Water as Imagined and Represented Science of Water > Water Extremes

What are the lessons from development practice that adaptation interventions can use to engage vulnerable people? To answer this question, the paper reviews field data on perceptions of environmental and climatic change in a Peruvian mountain community and discusses the possibilities and limitations of using local climate voices to prepare for climate change adaptation. The data comprise two complementary household surveys. The first survey provides information on the community's socioeconomic situation, whilst the second survey documents the villagers' climate perception. The data reveal a paradox in the way the community understands global climate change. The villagers who live on the margin of the global world and belong to the poorest economic strata in Peru are deeply concerned about global climate change that is impacting their environment. Yet when locating the cause of climate change they point to their own community rather the industrialized world and suggest mitigation actions rather than adaptation initiatives as answer to the problems it entails. The paper suggests that adaptation initiatives must understand this paradox within the larger socioeconomic and discursive context that shapes the villagers' agency and climate perceptions. It proposes an informed participation approach that listens to the local voices but that also informs them about the global dimensions of climate change and engages them in a critical dialogue about the importance of sustainable development and the possibilities of taking advantage of the new opportunities that the changing environment offers.

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