Democratizing discourses: conceptions of ownership, autonomy and ‘the state’ in Nicaragua’s rural water governance

Challenges to Water Security along the “Emerald Coast”: A Political Ecology of Local Water Governance in Nicaragua

“…Rossing [2] provided a compelling example of success in Brazil, where national-level water reform empowered basin-level committees and other stakeholders to secure water, despite obstacles of drought, conflicting interests, and clientelism. Further, numerous CAPS have proven successful in other parts of Nicaragua despite lack of national level support [10,47,48]. Our point is not to address the overall efficacy of IWRM, but to say, in the instance of Gigante, that a combination of factors is at play when explaining water insecurity.…”

“…In some respects, water laws fall short because they fail to be implemented adequately. This has been well-documented in the Nicaraguan case [5,44,46,48]. (See [49] for discussion of the challenges associated with wastewater governance across Latin America).…”

“…Both laws are also similar in their genesis in terms of the role civil society actors played in developing and promoting each prior to their passing. For example, Law 722 passed unanimously in 2010 in the wake of transcommunity mobilization on the part of the country's grassroots water committees, or CAPS, who advocated their formal political recognition [47,48] (see [81,82] for a discussion of the emergence of Law 620 during anti-water privatization protests in the mid-2000s). This role of diverse popular sectors in promoting the modification of legal frameworks indicates broad public support in Nicaragua for strengthening water governance-as well as a high level of public awareness of and attention towards issues of freshwater governance.…”

“…As one resident described it, "there is no more water anywhere, and the poor people are the ones who suffer" (23 March 2015). This hardship takes on discrete significance in national contexts like Nicaragua's (and many other Latin American countries) where responsibilities for rural water management are shouldered primarily by residents themselves, albeit oftentimes in coordination with state agencies and officials [48,[78][79][80].…”

Water community networks and the appropriation of neoliberal practices: social technology, depoliticization, and resistance

“…In this approach, scale is meant as a social construct shaped by actors' representations and interactions (Smith 1993, Harvey 1996, Swyngedouw 2004, MacKinnon 2011. Various studies have applied this perspective through the analysis of discourses linked to the case of hydroelectricity megainfrastructures in Colombia (Duarte-Abadía et al 2015); the involvement of water community organizations in multiscale networks to increase their power and influence over water sectoral reforms in Ecuador ; the production of discourses for the democratization of water community governance in Nicaragua (Romano 2016); the production of counternarratives based on cosmological water representations in Peru (Boelens 2014); and the "grassroots scalar politics" of water community organizations in the Andes (Hoogesteger and Verzijl 2015).…”