Billions of people around the world rely for their everyday existence on aquifers, geological forms containing water sources deep underground. However, overexploitation and pollution of aquifer systems are threatening their sustainability, jeopardizing future water security, particularly in arid and semi-arid regions. The invisibility of these waters, in this context, poses formidable challenges for those who rely on them: locating, measuring and controlling aquifers is complex and precarious, yet of utmost importance for human survival in many parts of the world. By being both scientifically innovative and policy relevant, this project advances contemporary academic discussions on water-society connections. Through extensive ethnographic fieldwork in the Atacama Desert of Northern Chile, as well as a return phase at the host institution IHE DELFT, Institute for water education, this project developed an analytical framework to understand how social relations are affected by various groundwater practices, giving a special focus on the effects that the visualization of aquifers has on existing socio-economic and eco-political inequalities.
The overall aim of the proposed project was to explore the vital connections between humans and aquifers in everyday life. The objectives of this qualitative project were threefold:
1) To study the groundwater practices that connect humans to aquifers, and the (dis)connections and inequalities among different groundwater users that ensue (empirical goal).
2) To develop an original theoretical framework to understand how social relations are affected by various groundwater practices (analytical goal).
3) To draw lessons that contribute to a more sustainable use of aquifers (social goal).
In order to respond to these objectives, the project empirically assessed one of the pivotal premises currently shaping groundwater governance, namely, the conviction that the earth’s groundwater resources ‘are falling victim to a lack of effective governance’. Ethnographic, empirical research on groundwater as a local resource in Atacama Desert, critically questioned this premise and its foundational proposition stating that ‘effective governance should be built from realities on the ground’ and, thus, that understandings of local human connections with aquifers are prerequisites for the design of effective groundwater regulations. The project has contributed to develop such understandings of human connections with aquifers by revealing how ‘realities on the ground’ cannot be studied without attending to the geopolitics and the global connections in which groundwater is involved. In the case of Atacama, the project has concluded that, groundwater practices in particular, and groundwater depletion more generally, cannot be understood without considering the geopolitical reasons why aquifers are being over-exploded.
