Actors, Social Mobilisation and Water Conflicts in Colombia

River ecosystems globally face increasing extraction, pollution and transformation by agro-industry, mineral extraction processes, fishing, energy production, and their use for the transport of goods. This situation is driving conflicting stakeholder interactions in hydro-social territories that tend to be aggravated by the scarcity of aquifers due to climate change.

This context has led to new social mobilisation agendas that build water-related identities through collective action. In the case of Colombia, water scarcity due to climate change is a problem that combines access to water for some communities, pollution and the reduction in water quality with energy supply, which in almost the entire territory depends on hydroelectric plants, generating resistance on the part of different actors.

The research question is: What types of collective actions do socio-environmental movements develop around conflicts related to water management and what types of identities emerge in such conflicts?

My objective is to systematise information on the collective actions developed by socio-environmental movements in water conflicts and to analyse the types of identities that are being generated.

As a methodology I use the EJ Atlas database because it contains a taxonomy of different conflicts that have global relevance. Specifically, I plan to take the information on collective actions developed by socio-environmental movements and then reorganise it in SPSS software. This allows us to systematise the data using an ordinal scale (López and Fachelli, 2016) based on the frequency of the different forms of mobilisation.

In addition to providing a theoretical framework that unites concepts from political ecology, environmental sociology and social movement theory, this paper aims to present the construction of identities based on the collective actions of socio-environmental movements in the Colombian case, in order to understand the dispute over public policies with an integral vision of the socio-natural in hydro-social territories.