Tactically interweaving fiction with reality, Andean water communities ‘are often not what they appear to be’. They strategically fuse and confuse at once. Alternatingly, they turn to open resistance and to disguise; to speech and silence; to formal lawsuits and local codes; to difference and equality; to high-profile protest and undertow action. As multilayered entities they shield themselves under fictitious reality: they hybridize their rights as local–national–global constructs; they differentiate between in-house usage rules and external usage rules; they consciously appropriate and imitate the dominant order; they present contradictory identities as strategic self-representations; they refuse containment but defend and invest in boundaries, etc. Moreover, they bind together supra-community networks, enveloping their projects intermittently inside and outside their territories, with local water battles increasingly involving global players. Protected by their home-based undertow, they upscale their defense and maneuvering space in broader political-legal arenas.
‘Resistance as con-fusion’ involves confluence—fusion
melding plurality of identities, rights, and creative resistance—as well as
strategic confusion— entanglement and disorientation of formal order—to
challenge both coercive and capillary forms of power and localize control over
water and rights development. Notwithstanding their internal contradictions,
communities actively network, con-fuse and dynamically mobilize or spring up
unexpectedly from apparent invisibility through diverse real and fictitious
appearances. Not to fuel normalizing powers and governance techniques, rather
than going against the current (i.e. opposite to the mainstream) undertows may
flow in any direction. Con-fusion is not so much based on anti-modernity
or counter-rights, counter-identities and counter-discourses (directly
containing heterogeneity), but on elaborating alternative orders of
nonconformity. Nonconformist plurality, beyond comprising reactive weapons of
the weak, actively ignores domesticating laws and modernist rights
institutions: by definition, defying their actual, repetitive use (which is
their sole substance and legitimization) is the greatest challenge institutions
can face. This way, local user collectives aim to escape these disciplining
rights and assigned identities by defying the very principles that ‘other
them’. By choosing their own, multiple, disobedient directions they aim to
remain outside categories that classify them, and also outside techniques and
methods of classification and governance.
Opposing forces
What is ‘the balance’? Throughout the book it has become
clear that highland water-user collectives confront (inter)national policy
models and intervention strategies that vehemently strive to make them and
their rights ‘formal and normal’. Intentionally or not, water laws, recognition
policies, expert networks and elites, from different angles, seek to disembed,
tangible-ize and/or take over water rights and/or align users, rights and
identities to outside control. Interestingly, while boundaries of modernist
hydrosocial territories expand to ever more global levels and their
vocabularies are increasingly ‘integrated’, rights definitions, truth claims
and rationality boundaries become increasingly uniform and narrow. However, not
all accept these individualistic, mercantile or bureaucratic standards of being
‘equal’ that file them in ‘anomalous’ or ‘backward’ categories. Not suiting
policy models is often intentional. Rather than narrowing, they precisely
extend the context-rooted rights definitions universe. Ongoing water-rights
creation and subsurface multilayered normative repertoires’ proliferation
broadens and deepens legal pluralism, inevitably questioning exclusiveness and
self-evidence of State- and market-based water rules.
Water rights and identities are shaped materially and
discursively in distributive strategies and recognition policies, constituting
both functional tools and strategic weapons, devised and employed as
control-externalizing projects’ tools and, alternatively, as arms to contest
them. The most ingenious, subtle strategies—of both dominant and subordinate
players—use each other’s resources and seemingly imitate and ‘recognize’ each
other’s normative and political-symbolic orders. Rulers presumably accept local
rights, but to secure their compliance and capture their resources;
subordinates apparently conform to officialdom, but to seal off their own
rights repertoires, shop in the rulers’ power factory, and capture public
resources. Imitation and adaptation tactics may reinforce the ruling system’s
legitimacy or serve resistance against it (moreover, the line dividing
‘mimesis’ and ‘mimicry’ is dynamic and may be quite thin). Thus, rather than
just focusing on nominal expressions of water rights and identities, the
fundamental question involves control over their constitution and enforcement,
including the degree of conscious control over ‘imitation’ and ‘hybridization’.
Therefore, beyond questions of ‘truthful representation’ or ‘academic
accuracy’, Andean water rights and identities’ analysis vitally inquires about
their political design, use and convenience for either supra-local rulers and
interveners or for user groups struggling to defend their water territories.
In this game, there are only temporary balances of forces
but no final outcomes. Water-rights normalization critically depends on
stabilizing and reproducing political, sociotechnical networks for water
governance and, though hydropolitical dream schemes are an illusion, moral
modernization missions (and powerful interest groups) will forcefully continue.
So will the forces of con-fusion. Water-user collectives know their existence
depends on defending their water rights and rule-making spaces and will
continue to create nonconformity and expand on their complexities, while at the
same time trying to conquer representation and changes in policy institutes,
intervention projects, and State governance networks. The latter are dominated
by ruling classes but also constituting a track of social conquests, as current
Andean governments’ ‘leftward shifts’ testify. Rather than simply resisting,
user collectives also aim to creatively take over intervention in their water
worlds.
- Boelens, 2015
