The invention of "Blue Gold": from grassroots mobilizations for water to the internationalization of environmental policies: a multilevel analysis

Abstract

By all standards, water is today and tomorrow's most coveted resource. Observers agree that environmental conflicts around water management are likely to harden and entail severe risks of social and political unrest in overpopulated cities, both in the South and in the North. Worrying trends include recurring droughts and flooding, increasing volatility of resource availability, the melting of glaciers, and resource contamination due to industrial pollution, intensive farming and lack of adequate sanitation. The BLUEGRASS project sets out to understand the evolving logics of water conflicts in a context of new environmental challenges. It will do so, in particular, by analyzing the vagaries of the exportation of the "French model" with its two basic dimensions (i.e. a focus on management at the level of the water catchment area, and the promotion of the private sector to address environmental challenges) in the Americas. The research will focus on the way environmental problems are socially perceived and constructed, but also strategically exploited by a wide range of actors. Case studies include cities and their surrounding rural area in the West of the United States, Mexico, Colombia, Bolivia and Brazil. This comparative project seeks to highlight the interplay between various multi-level coalitions, by analyzing both the fabrication of a global model, different national appropriations of, and reactions to, this model, and the way water conflicts play out at the local level. (AU)