Abstract

Latin America is considered rich in water resources, yet the heterogeneous realities across this vast continent include conflicts, dispossession, and contamination of water, that compromise its availability, especially for rural communities. States and international organizations frame water problems as the result of climate change and population growth, while they promote extractivist and neoliberal politics that permit water accumulation by productive sectors like agriculture or mining. In this chapter we critically analyze water availability in Latin America, considering the physical processes, as well as economic interests, and political decisions involved in water’s distribution. We first present our theoretical understanding of scarcity, demonstrating the evolution of its framing from a hydrometeorological to a political question, focusing on the political ecology literature. We then describe hydroclimatic conditions in Latin America to explain the physical distribution of water, before contrasting this with an overview of how scarcity has been tackled in Latin American countries. The analysis of six emblematic case studies of water scarcity production, that complement our review, illustrate how flows of power and inequality are factors in the construction of water scarcity, and point to the need to address scarcity as a complex and hybrid problem in its broadest, multidimensional sense—the result of both physical and social conditions.