UC Santa Cruz

The converging impacts of climate change and economic globalization are driving adaptive resource governance through both conflict and institutional innovation on Peru's Pacific slope. Linking social and ecological systems, freshwater is particularly critical and becoming more scarce in this region due to both supply and demand-side pressures related to global change. As accelerating glacial recession reduces vital reserves stored in the natural water towers of the Andean cryosphere, the burgeoning Peruvian economy exerts growing demand on existing hydrologic supplies while causing severe impacts on water quality. In this setting, diverse actors are increasingly connected across geographic and political scales and economic sectors through reliance on shared flows that know no such boundaries. In a context of mounting hydrologic crisis, the Peruvian state passed a new water law in 2009 that restructured and rescaled national water governance through a model of integrated management at the level of the country's principal watersheds. The implementation of this model has proven difficult and remains incipient, however, and water conflicts continue to rise. This dissertation research examines global change and contemporary resource governance in one of Peru's most important Pacific-draining basins, the Santa River watershed. Drawing upon the research tradition of political ecology, the study employs interdisciplinary and participatory approaches to explore shifting resource access and institutional innovation and the implications of these processes for resource governance and social vulnerability. Through examination of theoretical perspectives from diverse disciplines coupled with the findings of more than two years of empirical fieldwork, the dissertation research highlights the socio-natural character of resource governance and social vulnerability and analyzes the complex governance networks and processes emerging through adaptation to linked processes of global change in the Santa River basin.