Ensuring access to water in an emergency context: Towards an overexploitation and contamination of water resources?
| Author | Chloé Nicolas-Artero |
| Published date | 01 June 2022 |
| DOI | 10.1177/09646639211031626 |
| Date | 01 June 2022 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Ensuring access to water
in an emergency context:
Towards an
overexploitation and
contamination of water
resources?
Chloé Nicolas-Artero
Center for Climate and Resilience Research, Chile
Abstract
This article shows how geo-legal devices created to deal with environmental crisis situa-
tions make access to drinking water precarious and contribute to the overexploitation
and contamination of water resources. It relies on qualitative methods (interviews,
observations, archive work) to identify and analyse two geo-legal devices applied in
the case study of the Elqui Valley in Chile. The first device, generated by the
Declaration of Water Scarcity, allows private sanitation companies to concentrate
water rights and extend their supply network, thus producing an overexploitation of
water resources. In the context of mining pollution, the second device is structured
around the implementation of the Rural Drinking Water Programme and the distribu-
tion of water by tankers, which has made access to drinking water more precarious
for the population and does nothing to prevent pollution.
Keywords
Water, emergency, environmental crisis, geo-legal devices, legal geography, Chile
Introduction
The extent of the world environmental crisis has led governments to adopt political posi-
tions on climate change and its consequences. To date, 1830 jurisdictions and local
Corresponding author:
Chloé Nicolas-Artero, Center for Climate and Resilience Research, Blanco Encalada 2002, Santiago, Chile.
Email: chloenicolasartero@gmail.com
Article
Social & Legal Studies
2022, Vol. 31(3) 459–476
© The Author(s) 2021
Article reuse guidelines:
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DOI: 10.1177/09646639211031626
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governments in 31 countries have declared a climate emergency.
1
Although the legal effect-
iveness of these declarations is limited (Jouayed and Guittard, 2020), their proximity to the
creation of a legal regime of the state of emergency or exception (Agamben, 2003) invites
reflection upon the role of law in environmental crisis situations (Rrapi, 2017).
Chile is one of the few countries in the Global South to have declared a climate
emergency. It is an interesting case since, due to its climate, it is typical of the
nations that have established a state of water emergency (for example the United
States and Spain), which is akin to the state of emergency theorised by Agamben
(Martin, 2020). The environmental crisis in Chile has multiple facets, but the recur-
rence of long-lasting droughts clearly generates serious concern (Gonzalez et al.,
2018). Media coverage of water scarcity situations and conflicts over water has
called into question both the State Constitution and the Water Code. Following the
social mobilisation in October 2019, now more than ever there is a political consensus
on the need to modify these legal texts which established private property over water,
separating it off from ownership of the land. Article 19 of the Constitution recognises
the right to purchase and sell water rights, while at the same time authorising the unre-
stricted purchase, sale, and lease of water titles. The Water Code, on the other hand,
reduces the role of the state in the administration of water resources and does not rec-
ognise priority access for human consumption (Bauer, 2002).
The neoliberal character of the Chilean water legal framework has been discussed at
length (Bauer, 2015; Budds, 2013). Indeed, many studies have examined the conditions
for the formation of a water market and shown how the current legal framework produces
inequalities in access to water (Prieto, 2017; Urquiza and Billi, 2020). Moreover, it has
been pointed out that scarcity is in fact a social construction, produced by the type of
land occupation, the overexploitation of the resource by certain users in a position of
dominance, and the dispossession of rural communities (Aravena et al., 2018; Budds,
2012; Prieto, 2015; Alvarez-Garreton et al., 2019). Inequalities in access to water in
Chile are increasingly visible and scrutinised. They are based not only on the existing
legal framework but also on unequal power relations between users, or between represen-
tatives of the state and local inhabitants, and on situations of epistemic violence (Prieto,
2017). Conflicts over water have multiplied since 2013, revealing the existence of
inequalities in access to water resources, not only in terms of sufficient quantity but
also in terms of quality, thereby producing water injustices (Bottaro et al., 2014;
Romero-Toledo, 2019).
Within the existing literature, issues related to drinking water services have been rela-
tively less studied. The political processes that have legitimised the privatisation of urban
services are well known (Pflieger, 2008; Jouravlev, 2004). In this context, water service
concessions to private companies have created socio-spatial inequalities of access in dif-
ferent territories (Nicolas-Artero, 2015; Lukas et al., 2020) and a deficiency of access in
informal settlements (Ojeda et al., 2020). More recently, the challenges of desalination of
water for human consumption in the cities of the north of the country have been analysed
(Fragkou and McEvoy, 2016; Fragkou and Budds, 2019). In rural areas, research has
highlighted the weakening of Rural Drinking-Water Committees because of state
demands that they modernise their management and also because of urban expansion,
which brings with it the threat of privatised water supply services (Nicolas-Artero,
460 Social & Legal Studies 31(3)
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