Latin America has entered a new political era. The election of left-leaning, populist governments in Brazil, Venezuela, Chile and Bolivia has prompted speculation particularly from conservative commentators in the United States that public policy in those countries will now be driven more by outmoded ideological convictions than by sound social goals and proven economic principles.
Yet, how the Bolivian government of Evo Morales, the country's first indigenous president, is tackling the contentious issue of water rights suggests that a very different dynamic is at work. The Morales administration, extending a process initiated under a former government, has used citizen engagement supported by scientific reasoning and hard quantitative, evidence-based policy work to try to achieve a long overdue goal in Bolivia: equitable access to water.
Water has long been a source of bitter conflict in Bolivia. Poor campesinos and indigenous people (about 60 per cent of the country's population) struggle for a small share of this precious resource. The powerful mining, industrial and hydroelectric sectors have been free to take what they want, a surefire recipe for social unrest.
Bolivia's explosive water politics made news in North America during the infamous Cochabamba water war in 2000. At that time, masses of people descended on Bolivia's third-largest city to protest against plans by Aguas del Tunari, a subsidiary of the U.S.-based Bechtel Corp., to raise water rates. The company had taken over Cochabamba's water utility in a privatization plan called for by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. The ensuing protests brought mayhem to the streets and destabilized the government, forcing it to cancel its contract with the private water firm. Bolivian water was again in the news in 2005, when social mobilization over the private concession of water to a French company, Aguas del Illimani, in the city of El Alto forced the government to cancel the contract.
Despite these clashes, a lot of positive changes have occurred. Dialogue has been encouraged and consensus brokered between the political left and right, between competing social and economic sectors whose divergent world views have more often been given expression in street protests, strikes and other forms of public confrontation.
The first steps toward consensus began under a previous government. In the wake of the Cochabamba water war, then-president Jorge Quiroga began an experiment with an inclusive approach to policy-making. The Consejo Interinstitutional del Agua was created and charged with drafting a water management law based on consultation with a broad range of social groups, including those that had protested against privatization in 2000.
Indigenous and peasant organizations had always been excluded from policy-making and had good reason to distrust this new consultation process. What gave them reassurance, however, was the inclusion of scientific research as the cornerstone of decision-making. The research process (supported by Canada's International Development Research Centre, and of which I was a part) employed a state-of-the-art mathematical water rights simulation model known as Mike Basin, developed by the Danish Hydrological Institute and used in many countries. This model allowed us to compare competing proposals for water distribution that had been offered as the basis of a new water law and, consequently, as a means of ending feuding over water.
The first proposal was to grant individual campesino families a certain water entitlement (measured in litres per second). The second proposal was to formalize the traditional, communal water distribution system that existed in indigenous communities with water use regulated by the communities themselves.
