vol. 11 núm. 1 (2023): ambiente y sociedad

This document analyzes the discourses of water allocation to the hydropower sector in Colombia within the framework of water justice. It begins with a critical analysis of the language used in the environmental impact assessments of 22 hydropower plants, which due to their power generation capacity required an environmental license from the National Environmental Licensing Authority - (hereinafter ANLA), in contrast with academic literature and social expression to identify specific contexts in each project. Based on the concept of water justice and the discourses identified in the literature, the hydroelectric projects were characterized to construct the following categories of analysis: i) Limitations in recognition, ii) Legitimation and participation processes s and iii) Prioritization in water distribution. As a result, it is evident that water allocation does not include criteria of equity, efficiency and sustainability and that the granting environmental licenses for hydropower projects is not carried out with principles of water justice. 

The problems of environmental pollution, coupled with conditions of social inequality, have generated a growing awareness of the need to change and renew patterns of production-consumption and social behavior. Sustainable development requires creative innovative processes that help create socially inclusive processes, meet needs, solve local problems, respect the environment, and conserve natural resources. The objective of this work is to identify sustainable innovation projects in Mexico in order to distinguish key factors and the role of organizations contributing to local development and the conservation of natural resources. The methodology is quantitative, based on the analysis of 87 case studies found in specialized books, peer-reviewed journals, and official websites.  The conclusion is that 40% of the projects are driven by the government through public policies, 15% by universities, 14% by civil associations, and the remaining 31% by other organizations such as rural communities, companies with different social missions, private assistance institutions, and cooperatives. The central region of the country is the one that promotes sustainable projects the most. The projects are primarily oriented towards the construction, technology, and agriculture sectors. Mexico lacks public policies to create ecosystems, address crises, and develop frugal, endogenous, and inclusive innovations that contribute to local development and overall well-being. Therefore, it is urgent to implement sustainability and eco-innovation studies aimed at achieving sustainable local development, preserving natural resources, and achieving social cohesion and economic growth. 

The advance of the extractive frontier is generating serious rifts in the society-nature metabolism on the Earth, especially in the Global South. Latin American peasant territories and cultures are being besieged by various primary economic activities for export that fracture their life’s sustainability cycles. This paper focuses on analyzing multiple territorial rifts produced by forestry extractivism. From a conceptual framework based on environmental sociology and political ecology, and evidence based on interviews and quantitative documents from the rural area of Tomé in southern Chile, we argue that forestry extractivism has rifted the socio-environmental metabolism in multiple ways. The results show the metabolic rifts through four interrelated processes: appropriation of land and soil degradation, water uncertainty, contamination through fumigation and agrochemicals, and the growing threat of forestry fires. It is concluded that forestry monoculture has fractured the socio-environmental metabolism between peasant communities and the natural conditions of their existence, generating a growing separation of the peasantry from their lands, water resources, threatening the reproduction of life due to the contamination of the territory because of use of agrochemicals, and forestry fires associated with both the lack of water and territorial extension of monocultures

The perspective of environmental governance has been widely disseminated and incorporated into the debates and proposals of various political actors, international cooperation agencies and academic spheres regarding the contemporary forms acquired by the direction, management and governance of the society-nature relationship in the global framework of constant changes, risks and uncertainties associated with the growing environmental and ecological crisis. This popularity has been accompanied by a significant polysemy of the term, with the definition of environmental governance varying according to the disciplinary perspectives, theoretical traditions and/or empirical approaches adopted. The latter has had direct implications at the moment of establishing a research proposal on environmental governance, where a theoretical-methodological advance has been observed, still incipient, with essentially deontological and normative research perspectives. In this sense, we intend to review the contributions from environmental, territorial and water governance under a critical perspective that problematizes the relationships between nature, society and technology in search of an analytical perspective that allows us to advance in the ways in which the interactions between individuals, mechanisms, instruments and institutional arrangements of environmental governance are related and co-constituted with different historical-political-economic aspects of other scales and temporalities.  

This article analyzes young people’s participation in socioenviromental issues in the Argentine Patagonia with a special emphasis on discourse changes, taking account of the articulation between the language of contention of environmentalism and  the discourse of feminist and indigenous movements. We examined the case of the young members of the group Pu Choyün, who, together with the socio-environmental assembly Jacobacci in defense of water and territory, face the threat of a gold and silver mining extraction project in Calcatreu area, in Ing Jacobacci (Rio Negro, Argentina). From an ethnographic approach and using some tools from Critical Discourse Analysis, we studied the reformulation of the circulation of meanings about activism underlying young people’s discourse. This analysis reveals the construction of a new way of  environmental activism and how demands are justified and political subjectivizations are displayed.

Experiences of commons economies have diversified steadily in recent decades: agriculture, cooperatives, water, fishing, vineyards. They have also been seen as initiatives that function as alternatives to the dominant forms of economic organisation. One of the main characteristics of the commons is that they operate - whether in principle or in practice - seeking autonomy from the state and the market. To what extent is this possible? We intend to answer this departing from the case of time banks, a more recent type of commons and less addressed as such. In answering, we intend to 1) explain the relational economic rationalities of time banks and 2) reflect on how commons deal with the state and the market and exist in spite of them. This happens in the community -beyond a territorial location - and the economy, both understood in a relational way. To illustrate this point and to place it in the context of the Global South, we will take the case of the Time Bank in the city of Talca, Maule, Chile, which has managed to establish operational relationships with other time banks, particularly in the context of the socio-health crisis.

This article is based on the reflections of an interdisciplinary project that articulates the link between migration, gender and climate change, and explores the reality faced by thousands of migrant women workers living in the environmentally degraded lower basin of the Reconquista River (CCR), Argentina. Despite the high level of contamination, this area is a destination for international and internal migrants - from Paraguay and Bolivia, as well as from the northern provinces of Argentina - who settle along the banks of the second most polluted river in the country in search of a better quality of life. As part of a set of research activities linked to the demands of the women themselves, our team set out to investigate the uses of public space and urban structure from the perspective of migrant women in the territory. This objective is oriented to know how migrant women make use of their neighborhood space, understood as the space where their daily life is developed. With the collective re-elaboration of the maps between urban planners, architects, social scientists, referents and migrant women residents in six neighborhoods of the basin, we sought to reconstruct the link between gender, migration and accessibility in the urban space.

The province of La Pampa, located in the arid and semi-arid strip of the Argentine Republic, is no stranger to the problems caused by water scarcity. To the geomorphological and climatic condition of these territories, historical processes of social and political intervention on their surface waters are added. These refer to technocratic decisions in relation to the regulation of rivers, which affect the territory and generate changes that are not only socio-environmental. In this article, we propose to interpret the emerging social imaginaries and representations in the peasant communities that live in the northwest of the province of La Pampa, where the Atuel and Salado rivers converge, of the Desaguadero-Salado-Chadileuvú-Curacó basin. In particular, we analyze the significance built by the population residing on the banks of the Atuel, currently characterized by desertification processes, due to the damming of the river at its source in the neighboring province of Mendoza. Perceptions related to two planes of meaning: a specific one linked to water as a vital resource and opportunity for the future, and another imaginary, where water is conceived from senses of desire and rejection, make up imaginaries and emerging social representations. To carry out the analysis, we used a qualitative methodology, taking tools from hermeneutics. In the end, we consign the presence of emerging meanings of forgetfulness and denial of water. These are related to fears due to negative experiences and new social practices, motivated, on the one hand, by moments of flooding of water channels blurred by progressive drying and, later, temporarily flooded, and the scarcity to which the communities were forced to confront each other in the long period from the late forties of the 20th century to the present. 

The book Protests, Collective Action and Citizenship. Volume II arises from the participation and collaboration of the working group "Processes of political participation" of the Mexican Association of Political Sciences (AMECIP), made up of the coordinators of the project Rosa Ynés Alacio García and Jesús Alberto Rodríguez Alonso, doctor in Social Studies with line in Political Processes and PhD in Political Science and Administration, respectively. The chapter authors present research results from two Latin American countries. For Brazil, Cristina Buarque de Hollanda and Carlos Federico Domínguez Ávila write, and for Mexico, Roberto Holguin Carrillo, Sergio Pacheco González, Rosa Ynés Alacio García and Jesús Alberto Rodríguez Alonso participate.The logic of the book is built through the concept of political participation analyzed from contexts of weak democracy -as presented by the authors through the set of texts-, political participation is subjected to certain processes of formality and informality in which different actors participate. . The characteristic of formal and informal participation refers to the multiplicity of contexts and scenarios in which the different actors develop, to promote or generate transformation, and possible improvement of what the public detects as inappropriate, where, the same Civil society resorts to different mechanisms of political participation, either from what is established in the legal framework (electoral processes and laws) or those that are developed in what is named, the repertoire of collective action: protests, mobilizations, marches .