Abstract

This paper contributes to scholarship on the political ecology of drinking water, water commodification, and its social and environmental effects by looking at Chile’s Rural Drinking Water (Agua Potable Rural or APR) program. The APR program was created in 1964 to deliver drinking water to rural populations. I explore the actions a group of people undertake to secure drinking water in rural Northern Chile, an area experiencing a decade-long drought. I map how their efforts in securing drinking water coordinate with those of others at different institutional levels. This research relies on Dorothy Smith’s Institutional Ethnography (IE), a bottom-up feminist sociology explaining how the social world is organised through the active work of people whose doings are coordinated through texts, language, and discourse. Using methodological devices such as the construction of ‘facts’ and ‘ideological codes’ this research shows how the categories of ‘water rights’, and ‘vulnerability’ are essential in ruling differential access to drinking water. Thus, the research unpacks the social organisation of ‘community water management’ which although discursively based on mutual aid and solidarity, is part of the larger neoliberal institution governing access to water in the country. This research expands knowledge about the institutional mechanisms preventing rural people from accessing a basic human right, going beyond the naming of phenomena as ‘commodification’ or ‘neoliberalisation’ to explaining how these are organised and implemented, through texts and people’s work, with detrimental effects for communities and their environments. Thus, it contributes to institutional transformation efforts towards sustainable and fair water allocation.