Abstract

Scholars studying socio-ecological systems often explore the concepts of resilience and complexity in efforts to stimulate transformations towards more sustainable trajectories (Moore et al., 2014). However the structures and transformations going on in our society are not observable in the same way we can observe the self-organisation patterns of ecological systems (Stone-Jovicich, 2015). Social and environmental changes in capitalist societies do not normally arise out of a logic of organisation from within communities, as the processes that organise people’s everyday lives often lie beyond their control and outside their local worlds (Smith, 1975). In this Chapter, I introduce Institutional Ethnography (IE) to the study of natural resource management as a useful approach for analysing complex forms of organisation such as the community-based government programme of rural drinking water in Chile. This approach allowed me to show how the socially constructed category of ‘water rights’ is fundamental in ruling differential access to drinking water in Chile. I argue that the community water management programme reproduces the business of drinking water and the commodification of a natural feature via a seemingly objective process where the systematic use of water for profit making is naturalised. Avenues for securing the human right to water will require amendments to the Chilean Water Code and to the Constitution.