Interculturality in Territorial Planning: Ranco Rural Drinking Water Project, Saavedra.

The socioecological processes of recent decades affect water availability for human consumption and for the reproduction of ecological and cultural activities. These changes are significant in the Lafkenche coastal communities of the Saavedra commune, south of Chile. The Lafkenche People have cohabited the territory in a process where territory and society mutually (re)create in space and time. However, the Nation-State has reconfigured the relationship of Indigenous Peoples with their territory, with the State and among themselves, which is reflected in the implementation of policies and in the prevailing development model. These relationships influence the way state officials and indigenous communities interpret and implement public policies, reinforcing the exclusion of indigenous peoples. This situation poses challenges, both semantic and material, in the relationship between the State and communities.

My presentation explores, through Institutional Ethnography, the social relations that organise the ways in which a Rural Drinking Water system is built. Preliminary results map those “contact zones” (Porter and Barry, 2016) in which different spatio-legal worlds meet, territories imbued with both lafkenche and wingka legality.