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Commoditizing WaterTerritories: The Clash betweenAndean Water Rights Culturesand Payment for EnvironmentalServices PoliciesRutgerd Boelens, Jaime Hoogesteger & Jean CarloRodriguez de FranciscoPublished online: 10 Jan 2014.

To cite this article: Rutgerd Boelens, Jaime Hoogesteger & Jean Carlo Rodriguez deFrancisco (2014) Commoditizing Water Territories: The Clash between Andean WaterRights Cultures and Payment for Environmental Services Policies, Capitalism NatureSocialism, 25:3, 84-102, DOI: 10.1080/10455752.2013.876867

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Commoditizing Water Territories: The Clash betweenAndean Water Rights Cultures and Payment for

Environmental Services Policies

Rutgerd Boelens*, Jaime Hoogesteger and Jean Carlo Rodriguez de Francisco

Introduction

In the Andean region, the growing water demand of expanding cities, extractiveindustries, and local and transnational agribusiness puts increasing pressure on theland and water resources of peasant and indigenous communities. Since the 1980s,neoliberal privatization policies have often supported strategies of economicallypowerful actors to control more water, enacted at the expense of small holders andcommunity-controlled water use systems (Gelles 2000; Achterhuis, Boelens, andZwarteveen 2010). However, it is common to see indigenous and peasant groupsdefending their “water territories,” considering them to be their home bases in termsof cultural belonging and as socio-productive spaces for creating and recreatinglivelihood, while simultaneously forming a “political community.”

By nature, the definition of “water territories” as socio-natural or hydro-socialspatial networks is contested and differs according to discourse and discipline.Governments tend to define such a territory as a geopolitical space clearly delimitedby their water bureaucracy’s unit boundaries. Positivist science disciplines tend toconflate the concept with the units comprised by watershed or catchmentboundaries. Others (e.g. indigenous or anthropological currents) would emphasizethe fact that a geopolitical space constitutes a sociocultural construction, based on agroup’s historical, context-based appropriation of space and place constituted bysocio-hydrological relations. Rather than presenting a fixed definition, we arguethat it is precisely the (divergent) material and discursive production of the conceptthat gives insight into the field of water control processes and water-powerstructures.1

In most Andean countries, though threats linger on—and with ambiguouspositions of “left-leaning governments” in the region (Arsel 2012; Boelens,Hoogesteger, and Baud 2013)—grassroots communities and federations have largely

*Rutgerd.Boelens@wur.nl1Territorialization, therefore, is a cultural and political phenomenon, often part of governmentality projects and“counter-conducts” (Foucault, 1991; cf. Escobar 1995; Peluso and Vandergeest 2011).

© 2014 The Center for Political Ecology www.cnsjournal.org

Capitalism Nature Socialism, 2014Vol. 25, No. 3, 84–102, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10455752.2013.876867

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halted privatization and marketization projects through multi-scalar popular resist-ance.2 A recent development that contributes far more subtly to influencing waterrights and resource flows through market mechanisms is the introduction of Paymentfor Environmental Services (PES) policies. This is part of a wider neoliberal processinducing universal economic rationality in water management (cf. McAfee 1999;Swyngedouw 2005; Boelens and Vos 2012).

Currently, PES schemes are strongly promoted in Latin America as innovativesolutions to environmental degradation and rural poverty, said to generate economicallyself-sustaining systems in order to preserve “environmental assets” (e.g. Pagiola, Arcenas,and Platais 2005; Engel, Pagiola, and Wunder 2008). Watershed services, according tothis logic, are about relationships among people who own or manage certain ecosystemsand provide services to others who want to maintain, enhance, and/or receive theseservices (i.e. water quality and quantity provision). Economic valuation is a desiredprerequisite for PES systems to function, as it would enable measurement, ranking, anddevelopment of watershed services. Once assessed in accordance with commensurablevalues and universal economic instruments, it is assumed that development plannerscan make technical comparisons among multiple development options, calculate costsand benefits, and establish the most efficient projects.3 Economic valuation also enableseconomic transactions among PES system stakeholders, such as between “waterconsumers” downstream and “those providing this service” in the upper watershed.Consumers pay the providers who, as “owners of water territories,” conserve theenvironment and its “water services.” This paper, however, aims for critical reflection.

The research in Ecuador outlined here started with the Water Law andIndigenous Rights (WALIR) program (2001–2007) and is currently being followedup by the interdisciplinary field research program, Struggling for Water Security:Social Mobilization for the Defense of Water Rights in Peru and Ecuador (2008–2013), and the international Justicia Hídrica research alliance (since 2009).4 In-depthresearch for the case illustration was undertaken in 2008, 2009, and 2010.

In this paper, we argue that generic PES strategies fail to recognize the culturaland cohesive function of Andean communities’ land and water institutions, theircomplex rights, and their management relationships. These are rooted in, amongothers, the historical evolution of local communities’ socio-natural relationships that

2For example, Swyngedouw (2005), Bebbington, Humphreys Bebbington, and Bury (2010), cf. Barkin (2012),and Martínez-Alier (2012).3For critical reflections on such economicist rationality, see e.g., Goldman (1998), McAfee (1999), Bond(2010), Martínez-Alier (2002, 2012), Igoe and Brockington (2007), and Sullivan (2009).4The Justicia Hídrica alliance investigates water injustices, conflicts, and water defense strategies, whilstsupporting grassroots organizations. The network has annual international meetings in which scholars, grassrootsleaders, water users, practitioners and activists establish key research themes, questions, and common conceptsand terms of reference. They train young researchers and professionals, and exchange comparative field researchfindings in order to critically engage with new, upcoming academic and policy debates and advocacy action(www.justiciahidrica.org).

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link people, place, and production while shaping local water territories, organizations,identities, and cultures. Universalistic PES strategies that impose commensurablevalues and a commodity-biased worldview tend to undermine existing noncommod-ity exchange and collaboration mechanisms that are crucial to local peasanteconomies and sustainable land and water management.

The paper is structured as follows: The section below presents some historicalgroundwork of the political–philosophical debate on environmental property and theappropriation of nature in the Americas. It also includes a conceptual background toexamine the discursive power play at work in PES policies and the construction of its“inevitability.” This helps to understand why PES is expanding. Section three examinesAndean water cultures, peasant economies, and their relation to local territories andidentities. In the fourth section, we analyze the ideological foundations of the PESdiscourse and strategy. The watershed services scheme in Pimampiro, Ecuador, servesas an illustration of how PES may ultimately affect local communities’ territorialautonomy and power balances in a negative manner. In the discussion and conclusion,we review the discursive power of PES approaches. We conclude that strategies aimingto enhance local environmental and livelihood systems should build upon localcollective knowledge, values, and organizations, while simultaneously paying criticalattention to local-global power relations instead of relying on objectified expert-ledmodels and reductionist global water valuation myths.

From Expropriating the “Inhabitants of Unproduced Nature” toIncluding the “Managers of Commoditized Ecosystems”

For centuries, the Americas have been conceptualized as virgin territory, open forexperimenting with how best to organize society and order property relations (Wolf1982; Boelens and Gelles 2005; Achterhuis, Boelens, and Zwarteveen 2010). Thecurrent market-environmentalist project had many predecessors. Philosophers andpoliticians discursively constructed the Americas’ property foundations essentially topromote their own ideas—and to present the European civilized Self as opposed tothe indigenous barbarian (or noble) Other. The 16th-century debate between JuanGinés de Sepúlveda and Bartolomé de las Casas is well-known: the latter defendedthat the Indians were humans with a God-given relation to Nature (making them aptfor Christianization (de las Casas [1552] 1999)). Sepulveda, instead, in his Treaty onthe Just Causes of the War against the Indians (de Sepúlveda [1550] 1996) picturedthem as natural slaves and that “the perfect should rule over the imperfect” (19).Indians were animal-like; “… they do not have written laws, but barbaric institutionsand customs … They do not even have private property … How can we doubt thatthese people—so uncivilized, so barbaric, contaminated with so many impieties andobscenities—have been justly conquered …?” (105–113).

Appropriation of “secure” (private) property rights, indeed, assumed acentral place in the debate, symbolizing civilization or, its opposite,

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downfall.5 From Thomas More to Rousseau, Locke, Bentham,6 Marx, Engels,and many others, the Americas served as an imaginary mirror, without accurateempirical basis, resulting in utopian/dystopian missions (e.g. Gray 2007;Achterhuis, Boelens, and Zwarteveen 2010). As Flores Galindo (1988, 33)stated, “Europe creates the ideas, the Americas perfect them by means of theirmaterialization; the territory par excellence for practical utopias.” Even criticalphilosopher Hannah Arendt ([1990] 1963) went along with portraying theAmericas as virgin territory. She argued that the “natural abundance found inAmerica” made the social question of redistribution less relevant, as if abundancewas not the result of dispossession (167). Neoliberals like Friedman havecontently contributed to this myth (“land was unproductive before” ([1980]1990, 3)) to preach the link between freedom and private initiative and propertyrights: “The fecundity of freedom is demonstrated most clearly in agriculture …Unquestionably, the main source of the agricultural revolution was privateinitiative operating in a free market open to all” (Friedman [1980] 1990, 3).

In relation to the Americas’ mirror function and current “neoliberalizing nature”debates,7 John Locke’s seminal ideas on human appropriation of nature, possessiveindividualism, and legitimization of commons enclosures are fundamental (e.g.McCarthy and Prudham 2004; Beinart and Hughes 2009). Locke ([1690] 1970)directly relates human labor investment with the right to privately appropriate nature:Europeans could legitimately take the Indians’ natural resources because the latterwould not efficiently and productively mix their labor with their territory. Therefore,no value was conferred on this “unproduced nature” and Indians could not claimrightful property, hence his famous phrase, “In the beginning, all the world wasAmerica” (par. 49). Resources were considered openly accessible, and existing propertysystems were regarded as primitive or nonexisting.8 Locke’s legacy—legitimization ofpossessive individualism—strongly resonates in the last decades’ (neo)liberal legislationand policies, actively undermining Andean water control practice.9

5Europe also had more balanced debates regarding its colonization impacts. See, e.g., Pagden (1982), Grove(1996), and Beinart and Hughes (2009).6An “inconvenient truth”: liberation hero Simón Bolivar was forerunner in abolishing indigenous collectiveproperty. Jeremy Bentham, grandfather of liberalism and utilitarianism, Panopticon’s designer, was one of hismain intellectual advisors. Bentham firmly believed in the tragic fate of the commons and advocated their activedestruction to subdivide them into private properties (Boelens 2009).7For example, Goldman (1998), Harvey (2003), McCarthy and Prudham (2004), and Igoe and Brockington (2007).8Genocide and massive starvation helped to preserve this myth. Through decimating the population, naturalresources became abundantly available and the continent became a garden for utopian experiments.9Water “not produced” by human labor was considered open access; water accumulation far beyond personalneeds was enhanced; individual control and entitlements were enforced and state protected; and, particularlyimportant, the widespread fundament of Andean user communities to collectively invest in water andinfrastructure development and upkeep, which thereby creates and re-affirms collective water rights andhydraulic property, was undermined. Until today, Latin American water laws and policies are reluctant torecognize this fundamental “motor” of peasant and indigenous communities’ water management; see, e.g.,Boelens and Doornbos (2001), de Vos et al. (2006), Boelens (2009), and Achterhuis et al. (2010).

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Obviously, Locke’s postulates also informed current liberal and neoliberal naturalresource management foundations and developments—“securing” and creatingprivate use rights10; commoditization of natural resources and services11; detachmentof nature from history and social structures through (free) marketization12—that, inpractice, lead to overarching political-economic processes like “accumulation bydispossession,” rapid growth of inequality, and globalization of environmentaldegradation.13

In relation to PES and related market-environmentalist ideologies, the echo ofLocke’s ideas is particularly strong in the proclaimed need to commoditize naturalresources and ecosystem services, the profound belief in “self-regulating markets” (e.g.Polanyi [1944] 2001), and the conceptualization of (private and individualized)natural resource “ownership” and “property rights claims,” which, as we show, mayeasily lead to new enclosures. In various ways, PES and market environmentalismalso go beyond Locke. The same population groups whose natural resources were,according to Locke, legitimately expropriated because of “not improving nature” arenow approached as potential nature rescuers and are “positively” included. PES portraysthem as potential pioneers in extending the commodity frontiers, as managers ofcommoditized nature, as co-beneficiaries in a win-win construction, and as service-providers in the “self-regulating” market.

For this to happen, these ecosystem service-providing actors (in the Andeancountries, often peasant and indigenous small holders) need to be included in thegame, not excluded. A modern power mode based on positive approaches, productivevalues, rewarding “good behavior,” and emphasizing participation and inclusion iskey to PES. Top-down imposition, as has happened in Andean history, would becounterproductive. As Foucault remarked, nobody would consistently obey onlyoppressive, prohibitive power: “We must cease once and for all to describe the effectsof power in negative terms. … In fact, power produces; it produces reality; itproduces domains of objects and rituals of truth. The individual and the knowledgethat may be gained of him belong to this production” (Foucault [1975] 1995, 194).In this way, modern, “capillary” power aims to both produce and control reality andits subjects. Here, the more powerful rules and norms are those that do not appear tocome from outsiders; they are implicit perceptions of what is normal, what is markedas abnormal, and about how people should behave, feel, and think. Water-based PESschemes, seeking to provide the norms for everyday environmental managementinteractions, have a large stake in presenting these rules and institutions as if theywere of the users’ own making, shaped in a decentralized, self-regulating market(Boelens 2009; Büscher 2012; Muradian and Rival 2012).

10For example, Rose Johnston (2003), Budds (2010), Boelens and Gelles (2005), and Swyngedouw (2005).11For example, Goldman (1998), McAfee (1999), Robertson (2007), and Bond (2010).12For example, McCarthy and Prudham (2004), van der Ploeg (2008), and Barkin (2009).13For example, Harvey (2003) and Martínez-Alier (2002, 2012).

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In the Andean countries, indeed, substantial efforts are made to “include”peasant and indigenous water user collectives in modern water regimes and for themto adopt the norms of “progress” (see Boelens 2009). As Foucault (1980, [1975]1995) stated, normality is not a fixed condition, but the imperative mirror thatcreates a forceful desire to belong to the dominant society and resemble its image.Consequently, in the regime of modern, inclusive power, the art of correcting“abnormal and undesired” behavior is not based on laws and regulations alone, buton subtle self-correction and conformation to dominant water reasoning andrationality.14 While suggesting support for the local poor and their environment,PES rationale considers environmental degradation to be the result of localmisconduct due to a lack of economic incentives to conserve ecosystems (Pagiola,Arcenas, and Platais 2005)—an issue to be solved by externally induced yet subtly“self-adopted” new conservation and management norms. PES governmentalities15

discursively rework poor upstream households and communities into serviceproviders who, whenever participatorily self-correcting and internalizing the PEScontract conditions, will be economically empowered.

Policymakers and development institutes in the Andean countries enthusiastic-ally embrace the PES approach, even when actual field results are largely absent.16

The paradigm’s positive, positivist, and nearly utopian flavor tend to legitimize far-reaching interventions into people’s lives and livelihoods. “By considering the globalecosystem as the provider of indispensable goods and services (i.e. natural capital), weare just one step away from creating markets for the flows of services that natureprovides. If doing so can yield positive results for both people and nature, why holdback?” (UNEP/IUCN 2007, 2).

In order to confront this new, rapidly expanding environmental discourse andpolicy practice with existing water control relationships in the Andean region, thesection below first presents a brief account of the latter.

Peasant Economies, Livelihoods, and Territories

Local water rights systems in the Andean region take shape as context-specificmixtures, combining an array of rules, cultural values, and meanings from diversenormative sources, ranging from ancestral laws, State law, Catholic and Protestantdogmas, market laws, up to development project norms. Water user collectivesreconstruct these norms in order to occupy their own place in territory-grounded

14Normalizing power compares and differentiates individuals according to how they fit the (unspoken) value-giving measure that presents the conformity that must be achieved, separating normality from abnormality (cf.Foucault [1975] 1995).15Foucault (1991). See Boelens et al. (2013) on disciplinary and neoliberal water governmentalities in theAndean region.16PES programs fit into a broader tendency in international development, as, e.g., the anthropology ofdevelopment has extensively shown (e.g. Ferguson 1990; Rodriguez de Francisco, Budds, and Boelens 2013).

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local law. Collective principles and rights, embedded in production systems, reinforcethe social group’s cohesiveness and, implicitly or explicitly, are often part ofideological-political strategies to challenge policies and interventions that threatenlocal decision-making autonomy, albeit in disguised manners (Boelens 2009; cf.Scott 1990).

Local water allocation and distribution practices are entwined within a multitudeof community institutions. For example, household contributions to acquiring rights-holder status in water supply systems may include “performing all duties,” i.e., takingpart in community-service positions, cultural festivals, organizing civil societyactivities, and taking part in mobilizations to defend collective rights. Thus, waterrights are embedded in political, economic, and cultural relationships, whichdetermine the nature, value, and function of water.

In the highlands where users face unstable geophysical conditions, unpredictableclimates, and unequal power structures, water use is grounded in mutual dependence.Labor-intensive highland water control systems force people to work collectivelyat inter- and intra-community scales. This obligatory reciprocity, giving users a“hydraulic identity” in which they identify with the water sources, the system, andeach other, is at the heart of collective action (Boelens and Doornbos 2001). Thus,far from just ideological constructs based on presumed solidarity, water communityand territory are both founded on the material creation of collective water propertysystems, which link individual action to collective ownership and reflect a logic ofdefense and reproduction in the harsh Andean context.

Irrigation water has often functioned as a central factor bonding differentcommunities and diverse ecological/altitudinal zones in the Andes. In small basins,communities commonly worked to build canals that would cross higher- and lower-altitude zones so as to have irrigated plots in different agro-climatic areas. Thisvertical ecological zoning enabled them to incorporate several agricultural sub-sectors,diversify crops, better cope with drought and frost periods, and distribute risks.Production and exchange systems were elaborated whereby families and communitiesaimed to control diverse ecosystems, integrating management of water, land, andbiodiversity with inter- and intra-communal labor exchange (Zimmerer 2000; Mayer2002). Hydrological/hydraulic interdependence, combined with nonmercantilecommunity links between “upstream” and “downstream” through feasts, rites, familybonds, communal work, etc., have often constituted the backbone of communityeconomies; this interdependence factors into the exchange of agricultural products aswell as labor, services, people (e.g. marriage), materials, and knowledge. Thus, water-based bonds have played, and often still play, a dynamic role as they foster livelihoodstrategies, generate inter/intra-community organization, and weave together socio-natural water territories.

Grounded analysis of Andean peasant economies provides insight into water usepractices, local organizational forms, and how rationalities, potentials, and obstacles

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are interconnected within a wider multi-scalar (local-global) framework. Such analysisshows, for example, that outcomes of peasant water control processes are not simplythe sum of individual users’ economic interests, “rationally” calculating costs andbenefits of collective actions as if operating in a free market. Local institutions resultfrom conscious and unconscious acts, location-specific trial and error, adaptation,culturally embedded patterns, power constraints and opportunities, and the use ofneighboring, national, or transnational institutions (Perreault 2008; van der Ploeg2008; Hoogesteger 2012a, 2012b).

Though colored by extreme diversity, an important feature of Andean peasanteconomies is their co-constitution/co-determination by both the mercantile andnonmercantile exchange spheres. According to Golte and de la Cadena (1983), thetwo spheres compete for the same space and social actors. Households optimize theirproduction process through looking at both income generation via the general marketand at what can be arranged through nonmercantile spheres (cf. Gudeman 2008). AsMayer (2002) argues, the two spheres are mutually interdependent and subsidizeeach other, but they can also deplete each other.

In the last decades, scale politics and intensified interactions17 have rapidlychanged and sometimes broken down existing boundaries between communityand market spheres. These are the processes on the backs of which PES rides,which means that PES effects cannot be isolated from the wider context. Still, inspite of capitalist market penetration and ongoing accumulation, dispossession,and theft, nonmercantile exchanges and interactions in the Andean communitieshave resisted—and will resist in the future—displacement by predominantlycommoditized relationships18 (see, e.g., van der Ploeg 2008; Gudeman 2008;Boelens, Hoogesteger, and Baud 2013). This becomes particularly clear in the fieldof community water control (e.g. Gelles 2000; de Vos, Boelens, and Bustamante2006). One main reason is that neither peasant families/communities nor theirwater control systems will be able to survive amidst exclusively mercantilerelationships. Another reason is that many exchanges and activities in Andeanlivelihood strategies and irrigation systems simply cannot be reduced to exchange-values and market economy issues.19 For example, rituals, agricultural feasts,mutual support, and reciprocal labor and product exchanges are considerednecessary for sustaining the irrigation system and the community. These keep thenonmercantile community economy alive in a system constantly under pressure tobecome part of the commodity economy. Peasant economy is part of, subordi-nated to, and simultaneously a bastion against commoditized market exploitation.

17For example, through (inter)national migration and rural-urban interactions, commoditization processes,schooling, modern media, and infrastructure development.18Commoditization is the process of deepening commodity relations within the cycle of production andreproduction, whereby the means of consumption and production and other inter-human exchange relations areincreasingly based on monetary exchange-values and are acquired through the market.19See, e.g., Gudeman (2008) and Martínez-Alier (2002, 2012) on the notion of the incommensurability ofvalues.

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The awareness that “community” and “socio-territory” form a central axis for thedefense and effective use of a community’s productive resources, both collectiveand individual, is a powerful mainstay of peasant livelihoods. Households perceivethat noncommodity relationships ensure long-term reproduction and offer aprotective framework against the vicious circles of poverty, debt, and exploitation(Mayer 2002; Gudeman 2008; van der Ploeg 2008).

By contrast, mercantile relationships—which certainly do offer important short-term solutions and opportunities—cannot guarantee stability within a (stronglyfluctuating) economy of subsistence producers. Families actively engage with themarket but, due to the disadvantageous features of Andean peasant agriculture (small,fragmented plots often in fragile hillside terrain) and the unequal exchangerelationship in the market place, do not receive sufficient value for their productsand labor in order to subsist in an overall commodity economy. In all their diversityand interrelatedness with a broad spectrum of agrarian/urban activities, in local/transnational contexts, Andean communities exist because their collective noncom-moditized institutions (including their common water rights frameworks) areindispensable to continuing and defending the livelihoods of mutually dependentfamilies. Though differentiated by class, gender, status, and often by ethnicity, theytry to construct and re-affirm social and territorial bonds. This is particularly true fortheir water control institutions, which respond to the “collective nature” of thisresource in the Andean highlands. These institutions, therefore, cannot be supplantedby individual, State, or market solutions.

This is also closely related to valuation practices and powers.20 Local socialrelationships give value and meaning to reciprocal exchange, and local assessment isconducted according to the prevailing, culturally constructed moral standards andnorms of “acceptability,” whereas market transfers are seen as impersonal and general(e.g. Mayer 2002; Gudeman 2008). For instance, unlike the de-personalizedirrigation obligations in State-managed systems (fees) or market-based “servicepayment” arrangements, contributions in community systems, in varying expressions,take the particularities of households into account. Often, for example, the elderlyand ailing are excused from labor obligations. These aspects, fundamental to Andeanwater user communities and their notions of water territory, identity, andinterdependence, are entirely different in market-based development approachessuch as the one advocated by PES policies.

20As Martínez-Alier observed, “different interests can be defended either by insisting on the discrepancies ofvaluation inside the same standard of value, or by resorting to non-equivalent descriptions of reality; that is, todifferent value standards … The reduction of all goods and services to actual or fictitious commodities, as incost-benefit analysis, can be recognized as one perspective among several, legitimate as a point of view and as areflection of real power structures. Who, then, has the power to impose a particular standard of valuation?”(2002, 98).

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Universal Prescription versus Local Contexts: Watershed Services as anIllustrative Example

PES schemes emphasize the formalization and often the individualization ofproperty relations and water rights, as well as a direct monetary (market-based)relationship between “service providers” and “service consumers”: “By offeringeconomic incentives for maintaining ecosystems services, PES operates on the basisthat market forces can offer an efficient, effective means of supporting sustainabledevelopment objectives” (UNEP/IUCN 2007, 2). PES rationality thereby assumesthat the matrix of exchanges, collaborations, and water rights repertoires thatconstitute Andean water cultures can be reduced to an act of conferring monetaryvalues to ecosystem services. Watershed exchanges and interactions becomecommoditized services that should be traded; water rights must therefore be “realand secure,” and preferably private or at least legally formalized (cf. de Soto 2000).FAO, for example, explains that the capturing of ecosystems’ values “is easier whenland is under private property” (FAO 2007, cited by Sullivan 2009, 23). Marketenvironmentalism asks for a reformulation of nature, different claim-making relationsamong humans and between humans and nature, and renders the power to formulatenature’s “value” in the terms of external scientific and development-relatedinstitutional discourse.

International PES scholars view Ecuador as having many success stories (e.g.Wunder and Albán 2008). Despite lack of evidence and the fact that claimedsuccesses are highly questionable, the discursive image is enough to persuade other“progress-seeking” governments (such as those of Peru, Colombia, and Bolivia) toinclude PES prescriptions in their policies. Problematic impacts, however, arebecoming increasingly evident and contested (e.g. Isch and Gentes 2006; Rodríguezde Francisco, Budds, and Boelens 2013).

For example, the monetary rationality generates tensions among users andthreatens to undermine existing collective arrangements on which peasant andindigenous communities base their water and livelihood strategies. Context-basedwater rights, values, and territorial and property notions, strongly interwoven in localnetworks, are imperiled by market rules and national regulations that advocateindividualized and/or transferable property rights and monetized services (cf. Mayer2002; Swyngedouw 2005; Martínez-Alier 2012). Individual rights can be bought byoutside players or are found to be concentrated in the hands of a few users. Forinstance, based on market economy rationality, upstream users now have a strongincentive to consider themselves as the commodity owners of sources and services(beyond merely the stewards of natural sources) and demand financial compensationfrom the downstream communities, forcefully breaking with that which is outlinedabove—reciprocal relationships based on the collective ownership of resources.

Other threats emerge when powerful “service consumers,” after signing thecontract with the “providers” (not necessarily communities, but well-connected

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representatives), claim strong influence in local ecosystem and water management. Inthe Ecuadorian provinces of Chimborazo, Tungurahua, and Pichincha, for example,this created fierce tensions among downstream cities and upstream communities. Thesocial engineering rationale—inherent to positivist, often-utopian PES policies—suggests that anomalies from the desired situation must be radically transformed byintervention (cf. Rodríguez de Francisco, Budds, and Boelens 2013; Gray 2007).FAO, for instance, recommends that local livelihoods based on extensive grazingpractices should be re-directed from subsistence and food production and turnedtoward provision of environmental services and biodiversity (FAO 2007)—as ifhighland pastoralists were the culprits and livelihoods could be removed withoutcreating social dramas. Such universalistic recommendations tend to reinforce theidea of “disposable communities,” which was introduced with the liberal economicsof early Social Darwinism21 and extended during the past decades’ proliferation ofneoliberal governmentalities in the Andes (Boelens and Vos 2012; Boelens,Hoogesteger, and Baud 2013). Corresponding recommendations are indeedwelcomed by those governors who outright question whether Andean communitiesand their communal lands and water territories have a right to exist.22

The illustration below, from Pimampiro, northern Ecuador, figures prominentlyin international policy debates that promote market-based conservation rationalityand this PES case as an example to be followed. The case, however, shows how PESmay catalyze processes of commoditization, internal community struggles, enclosuresof common property, and unequal distribution of benefits and costs.

In 2000, with NGO support, the Pimampiro municipality started a PES systemfor its upper-watershed to secure drinking water provision. The system works bycharging drinking water users a 20 percent consumption surcharge, which is used topay individual landowners of the Nueva América Cooperative a fixed payment perhectare for cloud forest protection (Wunder and Albán 2008). After initialagreements, 19 families signed perpetual duration contracts with the municipalityin 2005. Payments are based on assumed water-related services23 that the differentland use forms provide, and they are established according to land covercharacteristics. Compensations range between USD 6 and 12/hectare/year.

After a prolonged inter-communitarian struggle over land, the Cooperative gotits communal land title in 1991. The members worked collectively to clear the lower

21Herbert Spencer (1820–1903), the most influential exponent of Social Darwinism, introduced liberaleconomics into evolutionary theory. “It was Spencer not Darwin who coined the phrase survival of the fittest”(Gray 2007, 88), which he applied to “scientifically justify” that less productive economies need to surrender tomore efficient and productive market economies. Spencer argued that societies necessarily experience anevolutionary transformation towards the free market, civilization’s ultimate objective.22For example, former Peruvian president Alan García attacked peasant communities for “opposing progress”;these “adversaries of modernity” would need to abandon their collective rights systems (El Comercio 28-10-2007).23Contrary to PES rationale, actual volumes of these water services—to define payments—are not quantified.

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parts of the area and establish common pastures and agricultural fields. Nevertheless,internal struggles arose; they were strongly influenced by the individualizing interestsof one powerful landholding family group with several members and a majoritylandholding share in the Cooperative. Contrary to the wishes of the (majority of)poorer families, they worked toward private land titling and acquisition based onfinancial investments. This created a marked difference in landownership within theCooperative.24 This same group of powerful families pushed for the PES scheme,which neatly fit their individual and privatizing interests.

Wunder and Albán (2008) conclude that the scheme is “likely to have improvedPES recipients’ welfare, mostly through higher income” (685). However, in practice,farming in the same area yields far higher income than PES conservation. Averagepayment for landowners is estimated at USD 252 (Wunder and Albán 2008, 690),but this does not consider the huge landownership differences. The wealthy minority(each owning over 30 hectares) has the largest profits, especially as they own the mostland with cloud forest and can get a reasonable profit for “not working their land.”

In fact, PES payments are extremely low when compared to the missed benefitsof cultivating this land. Therefore, PES is unattractive for poor Pimampirohouseholds and favors large-landholding families (inside and outside the scheme)and landowners who do not depend on agriculture in the PES areas. It presents hugedisadvantages for poor households with land only in PES intervention areas and noalternative income; their major source of income (cultivation of precisely these lands)is undermined just as are the noncommoditized social relations that are especiallyimportant for these families who are unable to purchase most production factors atthe market.

The project demanded a majority vote by the PES suppliers to start. AsCooperative directors, the powerful farmers arranged all PES contacts and contracts,often without properly informing other members (Dauriac 2007). Next, throughasymmetrical dependency, they exerted extra pressure to get a sufficient number ofsmall holders on board. This way, the PES scheme got access to the Associa-tion’s land.

But it was not just oppressive force, or legal threats to fine nonwilling farmers,that convinced several poorer farmers. The scheme’s discursive power was animportant factor, too. The NGOs promoted PES as bringing progress and modernityto a backward area. They explained in training and conversations that subsistenceagriculture has no value when compared to the commodity value of nature. As anNGO professional explained—apparently blind to the fact that farmers with no otherincome cannot eat from a few dollars per hectare—“they talk about their potatoesand beans, but you don’t see a significant land use in these environmentallyimportant areas.” Or, eager to convince about commoditization needs: “PES makes

24One owner has over 100 hectares, and most members own less than 20 hectares, with extremes of 2 hectares.

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farmers realize other, more important values of nature.” This discourse gains force,expressed by a PES participant who excuses himself for his “misunderstanding” and“backwardness,” when compared to modern green market notions: “We thought thatagriculture was the only value of the mountain,” and, “We as farmers don’t have agreat deal of experience developing productive matters, we are just farmers.” Whatfarmers fundamentally expressed in meetings was that not measuring up to the moral,“self-evident” principles of economic water use rationality goes beyond violating thenational or municipal laws—it means violating one’s own capacity for reason, andone’s own opportunities to progress and join modern water and environmentalmanagement (see Boelens 2009).

This scheme is often presented as a success and a model for other municipalities(Wunder and Albán 2008, 685; Carrión 2009; Ministerio del Ambiente 2009). Theimplementing organizations are setting up new schemes elsewhere to “institutionalizethe Pimampiro experience in municipal governments in the Ecuadorian Coast,Highlands and Amazon regions” (Carrión 2009, 28). Nevertheless, the scheme raisesmany doubts. It was implemented in a community where a dominant familygroup—fostering private titling—was able to acquire most of the land. It has alsotriggered more private property claims by individual members of adjacent commu-nities (Dauriac 2007; Rodríguez de Francisco, Budds, and Boelens 2013). Here,private property claims are made at the expense of communal lands and collectivemanagement forms, whereby poorer families relying on common property arrange-ments lose out. Locke’s ideas continue to color property discourses, and collectiveproperty is seen as backward, illegally owned no-man’s land.

For example, in 2008, a new PES scheme was implemented in Pimampiro’sChamachan watershed, which caused communal property to be converted intoprivate property and remaining parts into a protected area (Rodríguez de Francisco,Budds, and Boelens 2013). PES professionals explained, “Communal lands—without land titles—cannot join: we don’t want to reward illegality.” The realbeneficiaries of this PES system are those who have accumulated land at the expenseof others, transforming communal forests and pastures into individualized commod-ities. This way, PES development leads to modern “enclosures of the commons,”implying exclusion of access by the community at large (Rodríguez de Francisco,Budds, and Boelens 2013; cf. Sullivan 2009). Groups of “losers” emerge throughthis shift from use- to commodity-values without access to vital water territories,facing more difficulties in leaning on the eroding, noncommoditized labor andexchange relationships so crucial for them.

However, in Nueva América, PES modernization discourse has no hegemonicpower; not all residents were seduced by the discursive strategies. Those who rejectedthe scheme are precisely many small landowners. Besides PES driving them intopoverty, another reason for nonparticipation is that they strongly identify withfarming lives and livelihoods: “We do not want to live on a pension.” Moreover,most community members expressed that they feared growing conflicts because of

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PES implementation, stating that community reciprocity relations have weakened asdisagreements over the PES scheme have polarized its members. They argue thatmonetary compensation has undermined the structures, rules, and motivations forcollective action. Next, nonparticipants do not want “other people” to decide abouttheir land and livelihood arrangements: “We don’t want to sell our autonomy.” Thecommunities who resisted PES in Pimampiro are but one example; the same happensin other provinces.

PES projects neglect to see that in many Andean watersheds there are alreadymultiple ways to compensate for watershed services, based on local forms of “verticaleconomies” and multiple other relationships with exchange labor, products, andservices among the upstream and downstream agro-ecological zones (Saldíaset al. 2012).

In this regard, despite anti-neoliberal discourses, the current Rafael Correagovernmental policy is reason for great concern (Arsel 2012). The new “socialism ofthe twenty-first century” discourse that has been set since 2007 included far-reachingwater (and environmental) reforms. The government promised to deconstruct theneoliberal project; it aims to reclaim water governance control that was given away,not just to the private sector, but also to local water user collectives. For this, itapplies new governmentality discourses and tactics based on a presumed CitizensRevolution (Boelens, Hoogesteger, and Baud 2013). In its National Plan for LivingWell, PES was labeled a “neoliberal strategy”: “… environmental services cannot beappropriated, their production, provision, use and exploitation, will be regulated bythe State” (Constitution of Ecuador: Art. 74). But at the same time, it has inherited alarge part of the neoliberal legacy, has intensified collaboration with capitalistenterprises, and is convinced by the PES modernization discourse. Paradoxically, thegovernment has started its own PES-type programs, Socio-Páramo and Socio-Bosque.Herein the State, not local entities, sets the rules of the commoditization and market-environmental game—very similar to original PES concepts.

Discussion

Going beyond the scope of this paper, many experiences show that it is alsopossible to support Andean water territories and community livelihoods based oncommunity-embedded values, rights, and organizations (see, e.g., Isch and Gentes2006; Hoogesteger 2012a, 2012b). They may be funded through mechanisms bywhich the economically stronger water users (cities, industry) support ruraldevelopment and environmental protection in the water-providing watersheds.Through indirect investments in collective property facilities (instead of direct,market-based payments), communities are enabled to strengthen their collectiverights frameworks (see Saldías et al. 2012; de Vos, Boelens, and Bustamante 2006).But all too often, local methods of managing and setting the value of naturalresources are not judged in their own right, but in terms of ideal universal models.

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They tend to be viewed as obstacles to modern livelihoods and land and waterdevelopment. Modernist NRM policies such as PES provide the norms—presentedas “natural” and “inevitable”—which are the primary mechanisms through whichwater users are measured and are to measure themselves.

PES schemes, under the banner of “participation,” form part of a tendencywhereby the production of water knowledge, disciplines, and truths increasinglyconcentrates on the effort to align local user groups, mindsets, identities, andresources with the interests and imagined water world of globalizing policies. Thecapillary power of these environmental service discourses is pervasive; by means ofstrategic inclusion, the marginalized are incorporated into a globalizing system ofthought and transaction, coined by market ontology and rationality. Top-downprivatization and outright legal and policy impositions have not disappeared, but havebeen complemented by the inclusive policy language of United Nations institutesand international environmental agencies. The latter characteristically affirm “theattractiveness of the ‘watershed services’ concept is largely due to its capacity toprovide a unifying language among economic, business and environmental commu-nities” (UNEP/IUCN 2007, 2).

Conclusions

Growing pressure on land and water resources in the Andes marks thatdownstream water users are becoming increasingly aware that their water supplydepends largely on what happens further upstream. Neoliberal-oriented policydiscourses such as PES see in this relationship a new possibility of inducing marketforces and commoditizing water, land, and their forms of control. As this papershows, such strategies may effectively dis-embed local water rights and underminewater communities’ territorial foundations: a process of de-identifying with the localand aligning with national or outside rules and interests.

De-contextualizing and commoditizing watershed and territorial managementthreatens collective rights systems’ stability. Livelihood security is threatened,particularly for poorer households and communities that depend on noncommodityforms of collective resource ownership and cooperation for their sustenance. PEStheories, policies, and intervention projects, moreover, close their eyes to theconsequences for both upstream and downstream parties and the ecosystem itself inthe case that the “service” is cancelled (by State, market, or local causes)—in such aninstance, returning to a noncommoditized compensation modality will prove almostimpossible because the logic of individualized, monetary rights claims is too powerfuland perverse.

Evidence presented from the Ecuadorian highlands shows that PES rationalityseriously misrepresents the local dynamics of water control and property rights. Inorder to function, PES projects need to establish enforceable property rights and

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clearly identifiable service—readily available or, if not, externally installed—thatmatch market-based commodity exchanges. The values of nature and its “services,”and the methods to universally quantify and exchange them, also need to be inducedin the local context, as well as the institutions and regulations that enable market-based management and exchange of resources and services. So, under PES experts’leadership, use-values are dissolved, rendered obsolete, and ultimately deprived oftheir dynamic contextual nature. Local communities’ relationships and waterterritories are muddled or shattered and their rights frameworks are profoundlytransformed. As we have shown, this process of value-setting, rule-making, andestablishing “optimal exchange,” far from being just rational or neutral, takes placeamong players with huge power differences. Moreover, rather than empowering localmanagement and exchange systems, PES strategies may disable communities andengender dependence on outside arrangements and institutes. The modern mechan-isms to value property reflect a process of expert-thinking based on the remodeling oflivelihood practices according to outside-driven design, intimately linking peasanteconomies’ reproductive cycles and water management with general market rules(Boelens and Vos 2012).

In this regard, the market-environmental strategy tends to be very subtle. Newpolicies equate “water control modernization” not just with material progress but alsowith moral progress and ethical innovation. The material and discursive techniques ofgovernance they deploy are endowed with strong foucauldian power-knowledge; theyshape and claim truth, steer social behavior, and give normative meaning to particularwater practices. They are powerful since they have the capacity to legitimize thepractices of some while delegitimizing those of others—separating those legitimateforms of water knowledge and rights from those that are illegitimate. PES projectsoften present their normative understandings and myths as “hard evidence” thatshould lead to “inevitable conclusions.”

Nevertheless, as we argue, this is not a deterministic process. There arepromising examples of communities, water user federations, and committed NGOscollaborating to strengthen user-controlled water territories, building on a criticalunderstanding of local dynamics and strategizing forms of mutual acompañamiento.They often entwine with local struggles to defend and reconstruct “territory.” Here,water and water rights, rather than entailing a commoditized services exchange, haveintegrated functions in doubly determined peasant economy livelihoods. Suchpractices demonstrate that policymakers and development planners have to relinquishthe Babylonian myth that they can devise universally valid criteria for comparing andexchanging the fundamental values of water and ecosystems. Land and waterstruggles are also struggles for local autonomy, for the right to self-define the natureof problems, and the direction for solutions. They challenge the very rationality andsuperiority of market-driven development approaches. They show that behind themask of neutrality, these policies commonly have actual outcomes that are far from“objective” and rather benefit the better-off.

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