Custom and Contradiction: Rural Water Governance and the Politics of <i>Usos y Costumbres</i> in Bolivia's Irrigators' Movement
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In recent years, water governance has emerged as a conflictive political issue in Bolivia, leading to major protests and the rise of influential social movements. Although conflicts over urban water services have received more attention, rural water issues have been an important if underexamined contributor to processes by which water governance is being reinstitutionalized in Bolivia. Rural water conflicts have given rise to a well-organized and influential peasant irrigators' movement, rooted in the department of Cochabamba but with national membership. The irrigators' movement has successfully promoted a vision of water governance based on traditional customary practices of water management, or usos y costumbres. In addition to being material practices associated with agricultural production, usos y costumbres are symbolic of livelihood strategies specific to Quechua- and Aymara-speaking peoples in the Bolivian Andes. This article examines the material and symbolic importance of these usos y costumbres for the livelihoods and political claims of Bolivia's peasant irrigators. Irrigators have successfully mobilized a politicized and symbolic discourse of usos y costumbres, as well as dense associational networks that have together allowed them to renegotiate the institutionalization of rural water governance in Bolivia: who makes resource decisions, for the benefit of whom, at whose expense, at what sociospatial scales, and through what institutional arrangements. The reinstitutionalization of Bolivian water governance is reflective of historically rooted cultural systems that seek to reconfigure long-standing power asymmetries.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.026 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".