Beyond water justice and water security: Debates on water, women, and climate change in Latin America

Actors at various scales approach their relation to water differently in the context of environmental and climate crises. Multilateral agencies conceptualize water as a quantifiable element that can be managed efficiently. For them, climate change and water scarcity hinder economic growth and widen drinking water access gaps. Consequently, financial and technical resources focus on promoting water security in the context of environmental crisis. In contrast, different social movements centering peasant, Indigenous and Afro-descendant women, argue that climate change, in addition to affecting water availability or quality, results from the intersection of capitalism, colonialism, and patriarchy. In tandem with activist researchers, Latin American social movements propose ontologically diverse explanations and solutions to the environmental crisis based on other ways of understanding the relationships with water, namely the concepts of water justice and water-body-territory. Through an activist researcher perspective, this chapter explores how social movements have embraced the concepts of water justice and water-body-territory as an alternative to the concept of water security. In dialogue with the social movements in the region, the chapter argues that water needs to be conceptualized beyond its quantification to favor a participatory policy-making process that includes a discussion about bodies and everyday lives.