abstract: This research investigates the dialectical relationships between water and social power. I analyze how the coupled processes of development, water privatization, and climate change have been shaping water struggles in Chile. I focus on how these hydro-struggles are reconfiguring everyday practices of water management at the community scale and the ways in which these dynamics may contribute to more democratic and sustainable modes of water governance at both regional and national scales. Using a historical-geographical and multi-sited ethnographical lens, I investigate how different geographical projects (forestry, irrigated agriculture, and hydropower) were deployed in the Biobio and Santiago regions of Chile during the last 200 hundred years. I analyze how since the 1970s, these hydro-modernization projects have been gradually privatized, which in turn has led to environmental degradation and water dispossession affecting peasants and other rural populations. I frame these transformations using the political-ecological notion of hydrosocial assemblages produced by the different stages of the hydro-modernity—Liberal, Keynesian, Socialist, Neoliberal. I detail how these stages have repeatedly reshaped Chilean hydrosocial processes. I unpack the stages through the analysis of forestry, irrigation and hydropower developments in the central and southern regions of Chile, emphasizing how they have produced both uneven socio-spatial development and growing hydrosocial metabolic rifts, particularly during neoliberal hydro-modernity (1981-2015). Hydrosocial metabolic rifts occur when people have been separated or dispossessed from direct access and control of their traditional water resources. I conclude by arguing that there is a need to overcome the current unsustainable market-led approach to water governance. I propose the notion of a 'commons hydro-modernity', which is based on growing environmental and water social movements that are promoting a socio-spatial project to reassemble Chilean hydrosocial metabolic relations in a more democratic and sustainable way. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Environmental Social Science 2016

In the conduction of the Brazilian politics, the centralization and decentralization models, in the contexts of the situation in which they are enrolled, have been presented in the apparent as opposites, and they indicate in their essence strategies of space control in the different interfaces of the unequal geographical development of the capitalism. The politics of decentralization of the last governments (starting from the end of the 80s) is associated to the crisis of the development model and the exhaustion of the supplying State, what gives it the attribute of potentializing of the strategies to promote the development and the redefinition of the size of the State. The speech of the decentralization is affirmed by identifying it with emancipation and and democratization, resultant of fights and social conquests of rights and citizenship, what means ideologically, a positive reinforcement for the elaboration of neoliberal public politics. In this context it is enrolled the politics of health (SUS), whose historical roots are connected in the democratic fights of the 80s, at the same time in that the neoliberalism was settled in the country. Seemingly, it is revealed a politics in the wrong way of the neoliberal project, but the dialetical glance undresses the apparent and exposes the contradictions of the (des) centralizing politics of the State. The reading of the reality starting from the category of the totality allows the understanding that the politics of decentralization of the health and the invigoration of the local spaces (the municipal districts) was not only an answer to the financial crisis and the governmentality problems. The decentralization politics has in the municipal districts the strategy to the accomplishment of the located territorialy development, as an instrument of the flexible accumulation that acts in the reformulation of the scales functionalities to adapt them to the deregulation of the markets. The area is valued, fetished as the place to solve the structural crisis of the money, in which the crisis of the State is just a symptom of its terminality. The scalar redraw printed by the decentralization was studied in this research, accomplished in Sergipe starting from the hypothesis that the democratic speech present in the politics of decentralization of the health masks the deprived appropriation of the services and actions of health in the ambit local/nacional/global, through a selective and excluding nested net. For it, it also competes, the patrimonial treatment of the public thing that unchains disputes and takes out the responsibility of the municipal and state governments to the attendance of the health needs of the population. To the Geography it fits the (un) concealing of the reality through the space reading, to the unveiling of the strategies contradictions of the space control for the money. / Na condução da política brasileira, os modelos de centralização e descentralização nos contextos conjunturais em que se inscrevem têm sido apresentados no aparente como opostos e indicam na sua essência estratégias de controle espacial nas diferentes interfaces escalares do desenvolvimento desigual geográfico do capitalismo. A política de descentralização dos últimos governos (a partir do final dos anos de 1980) está associada à crise do modelo de desenvolvimento e ao esgotamento do Estado provedor, o que lhe dá o atributo de potencializadora das estratégias para promover o desenvolvimento e a redefinição do tamanho do Estado. O discurso da descentralização se afirma ao identificá-la com emancipação e democratização, resultante de lutas e conquistas sociais de direitos e de cidadania, o que significa ideologicamente, um reforço positivo para a elaboração de políticas públicas de cunho neoliberais. Nesse contexto se inscreve a política de saúde (o SUS), cujas raízes históricas estão imbricadas nas lutas democráticas dos anos 1980, ao mesmo tempo em que o neoliberalismo se instalou no país. Aparentemente, se revela uma política na contramão do projeto neoliberal, mas o olhar dialético desnuda o aparente e expõe as contradições da política (des) centralizadora do Estado. A leitura da realidade a partir da categoria da totalidade permite a compreensão de que a política de descentralização da saúde e o fortalecimento dos espaços locais (os municípios) não foi somente uma resposta à crise financeira e aos problemas de governabilidade. A política de descentralização tem nos municípios a estratégia para a realização do desenvolvimento territorialmente localizado, como um instrumento da acumulação flexível que atua na reformulação das funcionalidades das escalas para adequá-las à desregulação dos mercados. Valorizase o local, fetichizado como o lugar para solucionar a crise estrutural do capital, na qual a crise do Estado é apenas um sintoma da sua terminalidade. O redesenho escalar impresso pela descentralização foi estudado nesta pesquisa, realizada em Sergipe a partir da hipótese de que o discurso democrático presente na política de descentralização da saúde mascara a apropriação privada dos serviços e ações de saúde no âmbito local/nacional/global, através de uma rede hierarquizada seletiva e excludente. Para isso concorre também, o tratamento patrimonial da coisa pública que desencadeia disputas e desresponsabiliza os governos municipais e estaduais para o atendimento das necessidades de saúde da população. À Geografia cabe o (des)ocultamento da realidade através da leitura espacial, para o desvelamento das contradições das estratégias do controle espacial pelo capital.