Beyond quality. Towards integral community water monitoring (in Spanish)

This publication belongs to Volume 6, No 2, of the WATERLAT-GOBACIT Network Working Papers Series (http://waterlat.org/publications/working-papers-series/)

That community water monitoring (CWM) exercises are embedded in the hydro-social cycles of the communities in which they are implemented and, therefore, need to be problematized at the epistemic, ethical and political levels is the main argument in this article. Although MCA initiatives have gained relevance in recent decades, they are often conceived as technical-scientific undertakings of Citizen Science, in which the measurement of water quality is emphasized and, derived from this, attention is placed on the systematic production of large-scale data and their organization over time. As an alternative to this approach, I argue that there is a need to move towards a form of integral community water monitoring (ICWM), especially when we work in context that can be characterized as mined fields. In order to achieve this goal, I propose to generate an epistemic reflection around monitoring so that it is understood as a territory of speculative experimentation that favors the production of post-abysmal knowledge and, in addition, that it is seen as an ethical-collaborative, political, transdisciplinary and situated process of integration and production of experiences, knowledge(s), practices, values and interests that, with its implementation, could favor the efforts of community water governance and the movements in favor of the care and defense of water.