WATER IN IBERO-AMERICA: THE POLITICAL CYCLE OF WATER, MANAGEMENT AND GOVERNANCE UNDER TENSION.
Water is a strategic resource that embodies the central paradox of the contemporary world: physically and ecologically indivisible, politically fragmented. In the Americas, for example, where more than four hundred river basins and aquifers cross at least one international border, water management challenges national institutional frameworks and reveals with unusual clarity the power asymmetries, legal fragilities and possibilities for cooperation that structure relations among states, peoples and territories. This symposium proposes a space for interdisciplinary analysis to examine the conflicts and forms of cooperation that emerge around water in Ibero-America.
Continuing the work begun in the symposium “Conflicts and Cooperation over Water in Latin America” presented at the 58th ICA (Novi Sad, Serbia, 2025), this proposal advances three priority analytical dimensions. The first is that of flows: given the insufficiency of approaches centered on fixed territorial units — basins, aquifers, irrigation districts — we propose a perspective oriented toward the analysis of the political cycle of water, that is, of the trajectories followed by water, pollutants, rights and conflicts across territories, jurisdictions and scales of governance. This perspective, articulated for example in Earth Sciences through Groundwater Gravitational Flow System Theory and through the political geography of water, makes it possible to render visible interdependencies that national regulatory frameworks systematically render invisible. The second dimension is that of legal frameworks: from the regulatory asymmetries among the countries that share the Maya Aquifer (Mexico, Guatemala and Belize) to the tensions of the 1944 Water Treaty between Mexico and the United States, the case studies that make up this symposium demonstrate that regulatory fragmentation is not a technical accident but a political device that unevenly distributes risks, costs and rights. The third is the dimension of governance: what institutional arrangements — River Basin Councils, International Commissions, environmental agreements, social movements — have managed, or could manage, to articulate collective responses to scarcity, pollution and water conflict in the Americas?
The symposium calls for contributions addressing, from any discipline or disciplinary combination, some of the following thematic axes: conflicts over access to surface and groundwater in basins and aquifers; legal and institutional asymmetries in the management of shared water; the Human Right to Water and Sanitation as a framework of dispute and political articulation; over-concessioning and its effects on water availability and social conflict; geospatial and environmental methodologies applied to the study of diverse hydrological systems; and experiences of cooperation — successful or failed — in the management of transboundary basins and aquifers.
In this vein, the aim is to identify the characteristics of conflicts among different political actors, such as indigenous peoples and local communities, forms of territorial appropriation that have repercussions on the boundaries of the territories they inhabit, and the limits of water privatization and its impact on the population’s access to this resource.
