Journal article Open Access
Water-power: underground water management in Mexico, and its forgotten transboundary dimension, 1948-2018 (in Spanish)
Hatch-Kuri, Gonzalo; Schmidt Nedvedovich, Samuel; Carrillo-Rivera, JoseJoel
In Mexico, there is no specific policy for the governance of transboundary groundwaters.
In fact, these groundwaters have been governed almost entirely from a national-domestic
perspective with disregard for transboundary groundwater flows. This article analyses
the links between water and political power in the management, administration and
allocation of groundwater rights; the State has developed different instruments to
politically control water, imposing a clientelistic policy approach to its distribution. From
1948 to 2018, more than 100 legal decrees on groundwater management were passed.
These decrees are marked by scientific limitations in relation to the management of
groundwater, but have allowed the State to control these waters, and to implement a
policy framework for the allocation of water rights. In this context, the article examines
the links between “aquifers”, and the practice of “free pumping” to analyse Mexico’s
groundwater rights policies. It concludes that the State enforces its control over the
allocation of groundwater rights e through a rhetorical discourse that has scant
consideration for the crucial challenge of ensuring groundwater preservation and has
never given specific consideration to transboundary groundwaters.
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- Publication date:
- December 1, 2021
- DOI:
-
- Keyword(s):
- Groundwater clientelism public policy power government decrees public water management transboundary waters Mexico
- Communities:
- License (for files):
- Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International