Engaged Universals and Community Economies: The (Human) Right to Water in Colombia

Abstract

While the United Nations’ sanctioning of the human right to water was widely celebrated, many debate the adequacy and political potency of the rights discourse to frame water justice. Drawing on multi-sited, ethnographic-based fieldwork in Colombia in 2010 and 2011, and prioritizing activists’ reflexivity, the paper explores how water activists in the 2007–2011 referendum campaign engaged the universal human right while making user-run community aqueducts more visible as place-based, not-for-profit, culturally attuned, and valid alternatives to the corporate model of water supply. This case study suggests that the human right to water cannot be separated from water commons, and that communal users and activists engage the universal under their own terms. It also suggests we think of these water models as “economic communities�? in Gibson-Graham’s sense: ethical spaces to make explicit our social relations with water, and to cultivate selves and practices that enact alternative socio-natural relations through water’s circulations.