Knowledges co-creation and water conservation in the Global Souths: An introduction

This Special Issue seeks to offer empirical evidence of the forms of knowledge valued by different actors involved in water conservation practices, the dynamics of cross-fertilization dynamics, and possible tensions that emerge. It investigates knowledge dialogue and co-creation around water conservation through case studies at the local, regional and global levels


Valuing water: between clashes and dialogues
The improvement of water conservation practices and knowledges sharing is central to ensure the sufficient provision of and access to drinking water and sanitation services in the Global Souths, as stated in Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 6, Target 6.1: "By 2030, achieve universal and equitable access to safe and affordable drinking water for all", and Target 6.b, aiming to "Support and strengthen the participation of local communities in improving water and sanitation management."The global SDG framework adopted in 2015 is intended to ensure the effective implementation of the human right to water at the local level for the most marginalized people (Weststrate et al. 2019;Herrera 2019).
Beyond the global recognition of water conservation and access goals, there are competing forms of knowledge and practices in relation to water resources.On 22 May 2021, the main topic debated during World Water Day was "Valuing water", demonstrating the importance of recognizing the various forms of knowledge and practices around water resources which range from productive and economic values to socioorganizational and cultural values, politico-legal values, and technoscientific values (Dupuits et al. 2023).
At the global level, the production of expert knowledge (Jasanoff 2004) about water is often associated with technoscientific and market-based approaches to water.These approaches are present in discourses of integrated water resources management (IWRM) as well as ecosystem services (ES) and other types of market-based mechanisms that reveal economic and technical valuations of water.Water resources are at the cornerstone of payment for watershed and hydrologic ES programs, through the implementation of local and regional water conservation funds, and the promotion of integrated watershed management practices (Porras et al. 2013).In the same vein, ES programs are often produced in the Global North and associated with scientific and technical knowledge.Consequently, global and regional ES conservation initiatives tend to produce a 'commodification' of water territories and clashes with local water rights, as well as a 'depoliticization' process (Boelens et al. 2014;Dupuits et al. 2020).
Instead, at the local level, actors from socio-environmental movements and grassroots organizations are rethinking sustainability and conservation schemes from a water justice approach.This approach pays more attention to political dynamics and draws attention to the existing inequalities around access to and control of water, and the distribution of benefits associated with its use.Discussions on water justice also consider debates about the rights of nature and the use of local/traditional knowledge and cultural practices.Water justice movements tend to interpret the global SDG agenda more from a cross-sectoral and integrated perspective, compared to the deterritorialized and functional ES schemes (Rodriguez-de-Francisco & Boelens 2016;Boelens et al. 2016;Boelens et al. 2018).
This Special Issue seeks to offer empirical evidence of the forms of knowledge valued by different actors involved in water conservation practices, the dynamics of cross-fertilization dynamics, and the possible tensions.It contributes to this reflection by investigating knowledge dialogue and co-creation around water conservation through case studies at the local, regional and global levels, and including various types of actors -local and indigenous communities, parish and municipal governments, national governments and private businesses.It draws attention to the diverse voices and knowledge on water that are produced from the Global Souths, including traditionally marginalized actors and approaches.
The Special Issue is a call for a knowledge dialogue that questions decontextualized global approaches to the study of water and that requires a continuous repositioning and relearning based on the concepts and values that are produced by grassroots movements and organizations.It pays particular attention to the processes of co-creation, negotiation and resistance around the production of water conservation knowledge at different interfaces, including urban-rural, academic-activist, local-global, public-private-community, and empirical-scientific contexts. Vol. 30, 2023 361 Knowledge Co-creation and Water Conservation in the Global South The key questions that inform this reflection are the following: The Special Issue features contributions from various perspectives of transdisciplinary research.On the one hand, it opens up reflections at the crossroads of different disciplines and theoretical approachespolitical ecology, international law, anthropology and science and technology studies (STS) -around core concepts of environmental studies such as science, knowledge, justice and sustainability.On the other hand, it offers a combination of various research methods, including local case studies, interviews, surveys and focus groups.

Identifying knowledge co-creation dynamics in the field of water studies
Approaches that highlight the co-creation, co-production and the dialogues involving knowledge are gaining currency in water studies, mostly inspired by debates in political ecology and STS.The interactions between different forms of knowledge have been widely studied from a political ecology perspective, through the notion of environmental knowledge politics (Horowitz 2015;Foyer & Dumoulin 2017;Ulloa 2019;Boelens et al. 2019;Ulloa et al. 2020).This literature has analyzed the emergence of knowledge coproduction in community water management (Goodwin, 2021;Dupuits, 2021), multi-stakeholder negotiation processes in the midst of water conflicts (Dupuits et al. 2020), and the encounters and tensions between different types of knowledge around water (Boelens et al. 2019;Ulloa et al. 2021), among other things.
Another approach to knowledge co-creation is found in work on knowledge ecology and the coloniality of knowledge (Quijano, 2008).It considers the capitalist and colonial dynamics of knowledge imposition and the need for more knowledge dialogues, where there is a: …demand for new production processes and assessment of valid knowledge, scientific and non-scientific, and new relationships between different types of knowledge, based on the practices of classes and social groups who have systematically suffered unfair inequalities and discrimination caused by capitalism and colonialism.(de Sousa Santos 2011: 35) The definition of knowledge co-creation remains open, however: it lacks empirical evidence to show how knowledge dialogue occurs in practice, as well as the main obstacles to its emergence and the tensions that it can generate among actors.In this Special Issue, we identify four categories of water knowledge cocreation around values, scales, epistemologies and spaces, and their potential connections or tensions.These four categories are articulated around four themes: • global/local knowledge co-creation; • technoscientific/traditional knowledge co-creation; • academic/activist knowledge co-creation, and • urban-rural knowledge co-creation.
Additionally, we identify three steps in co-creation processes: knowledge co-production (when two or more knowledge systems are completely articulated and integrated); knowledge negotiation (when knowledge systems are debated by different actors and adapted in specific dimensions); and knowledge resistance (when knowledge systems are in conflict, dialogue is absent, and one actor must sacrifice or abandon their knowledge system to adopt another).Below, we elaborate the classification of the different knowledge co-creation dynamics and how the contributions to this Special Issue address these challenges.

Cocreating values: technoscientific/traditional knowledge
Water resources are interpreted according to the values held by actors, revealing multiple competing ontologies of water (Bonelli et al. 2016;Blaser & de la Cadena 2018).Two main values that stand out in the interpretation of water resources are local and traditional knowledge and technoscientific knowledge.
On the one hand, local environmental knowledge -or, alternatively, indigenous knowledge or traditional ecological knowledge -refers to a "cumulative body of knowledge, practice, and belief, evolving by adaptive processes and handed down through generations by cultural transmission, about the relationship of living beings (including humans) with one another and with their environment" (Berkes 2012: 7).In his analysis of the epistemologies of the South, de Sousa Santos (2011: 27) explains how "the movements of the Latin American continent, beyond contexts, build their struggles based on ancestral, popular, spiritual knowledge that they were always alien to the scientism typical of Eurocentric critical theory."In their contribution to this Special Issue, Duarte, Galarza & Hidalgo-Bastidas analyze how for the peasant and indigenous communities of the Tungurahua páramo in Ecuador, irrigation canals are essential to make their land green, feed themselves, and offer products to the market in this high tropical mountain ecosystem.The management, control and direct access to water guarantees their daily subsistence.
On the other hand, for public authorities and the private sector, water is mainly defined as a resource of vital importance for the industrial and energy production processes necessary for the reproduction of the neoliberal model (Swyngedouw 2015;Jasanoff & Kim 2015).This productive and economic value of water is often related to technoscientific and sociotechnical knowledge (see Peytavi, Bouard, Le Meur & Lejars in this issue).One particular characteristic of modern Western society is the historical and colonial imposition of scientific knowledge and the claim of its superior credibility over other forms of knowledge (De Sousa Santos 2011; Leff 2015).Duarte, Galarza & Hidalgo-Bastidas provide a concrete example of technoscientific knowledge, showing how water funds adopt technical indicators to measure water conservation, leaving aside socio-cultural indicators.They argue that technoscientific knowledge is gaining legitimacy against more traditional and cultural forms of knowledge, used to justify the exclusion of local communities from decisionmaking and participation processes.
In their article, Petavi et al. show how indigenous water perspectives held by the Kanak people of New Caledonia interact with official norms, designs and laws.They reveal how New Caledonia's current land tenure and water management situation is characterized by the co-existence of a public domain, private land ownership and customary land.They analyze the co-production and frictions (Tsing 2005) between two different interpretations of water: water management and water care.Water management considers water to be a technical object encapsulated in tubs and pipes, transformed and cleaned through different physical and chemical treatments.But water care highlights the reciprocal relationship between water and the surrounding world (Domínguez-Guzmán et al. 2022).
Various contributors to this Special Issue trace the conflicts that emerge between local and traditional water knowledge, on the one hand, and global processes of commodification and privatization of water, on the other (Durai & Babuji 2023).In her article, Yate Cortes highlights how the notion of injustice is at the center of conflicts between the privatization of water and collective forms of governing water at the community level.She cites the emblematic example of the 'water war' in Cochabamba, Bolivia, in the 2000s, where communities protested the privatization of water.She also analyzes how the inclusion of the indigenous notion of Sumak Kawsay, or Buen Vivir, in the 2008 Ecuadorian Constitution did not result in a concrete recognition of the plurinational values of water at the national level.
At the same time, several authors emphasize the need to go beyond dichotomous approaches that oppose scientific and local knowledge.They highlight the strategic encounters, political uses and dynamic entwining between them, where there are unequal power structures (Robbins 2003;Li 2013).It is necessary to question the borders between technoscientific and local/traditional knowledge and focus on the situated practices of different actors in the co-production and co-creation of knowledge around water conservation.For example, grassroots and indigenous movements may use expert and scientific knowledge strategically in community environmental monitoring, or for the co-management of natural protected areas, to gain credibility and support (Bäckstrand 2004;Sanchez-Vasquez 2019).
Peytavi et al. mobilize the concept of 'tinkering' (Mol et al. 2010) to understand the intertwining of different water knowledges beyond their apparent opposition.Tinkering refers to the small social adjustments and continuous adaptations and negotiations between humans, institutions, and their environment.It allows us to consider elements of water management and water care together, showing how they are continuously and variously linked in Kanak daily practices.
Other examples of knowledge co-creation are the attempts made to integrate indigenous and local knowledge in the production of scientific expertise at the global level.Authors analyze how nature-based solutions (NBS) should combine various valuations of nature and types of knowledge, community engagement processes, and ecosystem management practices (Palomo et al. 2021).They find that over 80 percent of NBS combine various knowledge types, from scientific knowledge to indigenous and local knowledge, which is useful for transformative change.However, NBS also tend to reproduce the domination of technoscientific knowledge over other forms.
Global conservation and Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) policies crystallize the interactions between technoscientific knowledge and local knowledge, as well as placing power relations between actors centrally (Vadrot 2014).Ecosystem Services were originally designed to highlight the importance of ecosystems in providing goods and services to society.Yet authors have warned against the limitations of using an economic and monetary lens, ignoring other interpretations based, for example, on cultural and traditional values (Norgaard 2010;Rodríguez-de-Francisco 2013, 2015).To respond to this limitation, some authors suggest rethinking ES through their co-production between biophysical and social dimensions and their co-constitution with humans and non-humans (Schaich et al. 2010;Budds & Zwarteveen 2020).One alternative concept to do so is 'cultural landscapes,' highlighting how social, cultural and discursive dynamics shape ecosystem services.
An illustration of how global schemes are being reframed at the local level is the recent proposal by the Confederation of the Kayambi people in Ecuador for a water resources conservation funding mechanism, named the Plurinational Water Fund (Fondo Plurinacional del Agua) (Dupuits & Mancilla Garcia 2022).This eco-territorial alternative aims to integrate urban centers, the flower industries and private companies in the conservation of high tropical páramos, as well as to redistribute benefits to support social development for indigenous communities and community resilience.It illustrates the local adaptation of global PES programs (Rodary et al. 2016), but also the possible tensions and necessary negotiations that may emerge during these processes.
In her article, Cottyn analyses the knowledge co-creation dynamics at stake around the disappearing Lake Poopó in Bolivia.The Uru people, who live around the lake and who self-identify as Qot Zuñi or "people of the lake", have developed an intimate relation of identity and belonging with the lake (more-thanhuman), which they guard and worship as Qota Mama (Mother Lake).Together with totora (Schoenoplectus californicus) and other reeds, aquatic birds and fish, the wind, and the water itself, the Urus have co-created water knowledges between humans and more-than-humans.However, imposed Western technoscientific schemes to manage Lake Poopó tend to reduce the lake's disappearance to a quantifiable loss of water content and equate this with the loss of cultural expressions.This has resulted in management schemes to enforce rational water use criteria that overlook Uru water needs and ancestral practices and rituals around the variability that characterized the lake's cyclical movements.

Co-creating scales: Global/Local knowledge
Despite the differences that exist between global and local approaches, there is no clear delimitation of the levels at which water knowledge intervenes (Smith 1993).On the contrary, there are various dynamics of co-production between levels, for example regarding the scalar interaction of normative systems.In her article, Yate Cortes mobilizes the concept of 'normative pluralism' (Kyed 2009;Boelens 2009) to grasp the mutual influences or resistances between normative water governance systems at the global and the local scale.She analyses to what extent the global capitalist framework around water resources clashes with national and consuetudinary legal frameworks in Ecuador.
One concrete example of how scales are interconnected is the promotion and adoption of the human right to water as a new legal framework (Bakker 2007).Yate Cortes (2023) explains how the concept addresses the contradictions between public and private management of water, through the promotion of citizen participation as a neoliberal approach.Knowledge co-creation at the international scale does not fit with local interpretations of the human right to water, as defended by social and grassroots movements in past decades.Durai & Babuji (2023) investigate the interactions and tensions between global capitalism and the local economy of shrimp aquaculture in a coastal village located in the Mayiladuthurai district of Tamil Nadu, India.They found various relationships to water resources, from the subsistence practices of local farmers to industrial and productive interests of private businesses.They analyze the history of shrimp aquaculture in the 1990s and 2000s, and how the collapse of big corporations due to diseases and bad management turned into an opportunity for local shrimp farmers to catch hold of the economy of the village.However, within a decade of shrimp aquaculture, the subsistence economy was transformed into a market economy captured by local elites who monopolized power over lands and resources.This is again an illustration of the blurring categories of local and global scales in water knowledge co-creation dynamics.
The transnational processes of knowledge co-production may lead to different forms of social interaction between actors inserted in specific scales and interests.On the one hand, grassroots movements can act at the global scale in support of territorial water justice initiatives; on the other hand, the technoscientific approaches produced at the global scale are adapted and negotiated to be implemented locally.However, knowledge co-production may lead to tensions and conflicts between actors and scales.While knowledge co-production can improve the visibility and recognition of grassroots actors (Goodwin 2019), the increased professionalization and the acquisition of global expertise by grassroots organizations can also lead to a disconnection with local realities and with diversity (Laurie et al. 2005).
Many global norms are framed as blueprints and best practices that should be replicated in different contexts to improve water conservation.This is the case for water funds promoted by international experts as a successful tool for water conservation, silencing the existing tensions in their local implementation (see Duarte, Galarza & Hidalgo-Bastidas [2023]).This is an illustration of a non-functioning knowledge cocreation process between scales.As mentioned by Durai & Babuji (2023), another example of global norms promoted by international experts is the notion of 'Blue Revolution' as a best practice for water agribusiness in India (Immanuel & Narayanan 2022).
The local appropriation of globally produced knowledge can also mean conflicts and tensions between actors operating at certain scales and with specific interests (Dupuits et al. 2020).Numerous authors have analyzed the negotiation, adaptation and co-production processes that are at stake between global watershed and hydrologic services, on the one hand, and local water justice knowledge on the other (Southgate & Wunder 2009;Martin-Ortega et al. 2013).They do so through a particular focus on the political and power dynamics of knowledge co-production at the science-grassroots interface (Vadrot 2016;Brethaut et al. 2019).

Co-creating spaces: urban/rural knowledge
The connections or tensions between urban and rural spaces around water conservation are another key challenge for knowledge co-creation and dialogue (Hommes & Boelens 2017;Hommes et al. 2022).Many conflicts arise from the appropriation of rural watersheds to respond to urban water needs.Many times, the objective of water security for urban areas produces water insecurity for rural areas (see Duarte, Galarza & Hidalgo-Bastidas 2023).These conflicts illustrate the absence of, or limitations on, knowledge co-creation and dialogue between spaces, as well as the power dynamics at stake between diverse actors.
In their research, Peytavi et al. adopt a spatial and socio-ethnic viewpoint to analyze the historical and colonial process of Kanak indigenous populations' marginalization from public services, including water access, through tactics of denial, de-legitimation and invisibilization.This historical context contributed to creating two co-existing life-worlds and a dual separation between people and land: the Kanak people living in tribes on restituted land, and the New Caledonian institutions and economic centers mostly concentrated in the Nouméa urban area.
In their article, Duarte, Galarza & Hidalgo-Bastidas study how various water funds have emerged in recent years to improve water conservation in rural areas to ensure water availability in the face of increasing urbanization in the Global South, trying try to foster dialogue between the different actors involved.However, water funds are failing to address equity and development issues for the most marginalized people and tend to give priority to technical conservation issues.They have the potential to be spaces of dialogue, participation and knowledge co-creation but the authors show how power inequalities and asymmetries reduce the possibility of knowledge co-creation and negotiation.Consequently, direct and active participation of local communities in water funds management and conservation efforts is still limited, in comparison with more powerful actors (private companies, the State, and international NGOs).The authors conclude by suggesting that local peasant communities accept 'sacrificing' and abandoning their ancestral knowledge to the benefit of water conservation for urban areas.
In a similar vein, Yate Cortes analyses how the Tungurahua water fund in Ecuador has been prioritizing watershed conservation over the need to improve water access and social development for local communities living in watershed areas in páramos.One illustration of the tensions between different knowledge systems is the requirement defined by the State to create and consolidate water boards in the communities, imposing legal and technical requirements that may go against traditional forms of community organization and management.If the creation of water boards could be considered as a logic for knowledge negotiation, it can easily turn into a dynamic of knowledge resistance.
Another illustration of tensions between spaces is provided in Durai & Babuji's study, who analyze the inadequate formal regulations adopted by the Coastal Aquaculture Authority (CAA) to respond to aquaculture difficulties in Indian farmer villages.These tensions reveal a limited knowledge co-creation process between centralized public authorities mainly based in urban areas, and rural villages.Moreover, tensions occur inside rural spaces between local shrimp farmers and agriculturalists because of land degradation, water salinization and groundwater depletion caused by intensive shrimp aquaculture led by local farmers.This shows how knowledge co-creation can also be tied to tensions and resistances among the same type of grassroots and local actor that may have divergent knowledge systems and interests around water use and conservation.The authors explain how the most marginalized people -the Dalits and womenhave suffered the most from the dispossession and commodification of their lands, resulting in migration and water scarcity in their daily lives.

Co-creating epistemologies: academic/activist knowledge
The growing literature on participatory action research highlights the need for cross-fertilization between academic and activist forms of knowledge and methodologies (Fals Borda 2006).One of the fields that pays particular attention to these challenges is the feminist technoscience approach, part of Science and Technology Studies (STS).This approach focuses on invisible, marginal or excluded actors who often remain outside conventional analyses.Donna Haraway (1995) developed the concept of 'situated knowledge', understood as the valorization of localized knowledge and the understanding of science and technology from their places of enunciation and production.It invites us to go beyond the dichotomy engendered by rational modernity to study the interactions between subjects and objects.It also seeks to analyze the processes of technoscience's domination over nature and oppressed peoples.It stresses the need to translate local knowledge and to assume shared responsibility.
Practitioners and grassroots actors' participation and the inclusion of their expertise in transdisciplinary research processes have the potential to co-produce societally relevant knowledge and to leverage the ability of research to empower marginalized actors and facilitate societal learning, especially in the Global Souths (Muñoz-García et al. 2022).Participation and co-production of knowledge in transdisciplinary research is relational, and social processes require the disclosure of the power dynamics that shape them (Fritz & Meinherz 2020).
Participatory research (PI) occurs when researchers work cooperatively or collaboratively with members of the community (and sometimes other external actors) involved in a problem (Trimble et al. 2014).The different actors participate in each stage as co-researchers, from defining research questions to disseminating the results.In addition to the co-production of knowledge, this strategy allows addressing or solving local problems, articulating and enhancing academic knowledge with local ones.
Another way to enhance academic/activist knowledge co-creation is by involving 'boundary objects' (Pohl et al. 2010) between science and policy.On the one hand, key stakeholders (water boards, community leaders, local public authorities, and NGOs) should be involved in the whole design and analytical process.On the other, the research should respond to local needs in terms of information production and access to results.
Various authors of this Special Issue mobilize ethnographic methods to foster knowledge dialogue and the cross-fertilization between academic and activist practices, reflected in the notion of 'ethnographic cosmopolitics' (de la Cadena 2015).In their research, Peytavi et al. use ethnographic methods to access and learn from indigenous tribes in New Caledonia, allowing for a more realistic understanding of their water knowledge and practices.This empirical involvement is key to deconstruct false imaginaries created around indigenous water knowledge and practices originating in urban areas and from government.
In her article, Cottyn draws on ethnographic methods and oral history practices to analyze the tensions between imposed Western rational knowledge on Lake Poopó in Bolivia and ancestral rituals and cultural knowledge from the Uru people.She concludes that the imposed Western techno-scientific schemes to manage Lake Poopó seemed incapable of dealing with so-called "traditional" uses that exceed "rational," "correct" and measurable procedures.As a result, Cottyn reports that over time many of the rituals the Uru used to perform, in relation to different jalsuri, animals, winds, etc., were discontinued.

Final thoughts for further analysis and debate
We found through the different contributions to the Special Issue and in broader literature that there are various forms of tinkering, interactions and co-production processes between actors, values, scales, spaces and epistemologies.This allows us to break with the classical dichotomies between different forms of technoscientific and traditional knowledge, local and global scales of knowledge production, urban and rural spaces, and academic and activist research production.The different actors involved in co-creation processes often need to adapt their knowledge practices and negotiate their claims and positions around water conservation.These blurring categories reveal the strategic use of different categories of knowledge by specific actors who seek to increase their power over water conservation issues, as seen for example in the case of local shrimp aquaculture in India.These processes echo the need for more creative encounters between scientific and non-scientific knowledge without leading to their mutual destruction (de Sousa Santos, 2011).This co-creation entails engaging with new creative categories of 'scientific science' or 'people's science' (Leff 2015).
Yet, in all the contributions to this Special Issue, the designed spaces and institutions for water knowledge co-creation are failing at some point to facilitate a real dialogue between actors, enhancing the effective participation of the most marginalized actors, or recognizing the legitimacy of 'other' values and ontologies for water.This indicates a missed opportunity to take advantage of existing water conservation institutions to facilitate knowledge dialogue.In the cases of water funds in Ecuador and Colombia, as well as in the case of water management in New Caledonia and local shrimp aquaculture in India, local and traditional knowledges fail to be fully integrated into formal governmental rules and institutions and remain

•
Who are the actors involved or excluded from the processes of knowledge co-creation and what types of water conservation knowledge do they promote?• Under what conditions and in what contexts do water conservation knowledges complement each other, are able to enter into negotiation, or instead promote conflict?• What strategic encounters and conflicts can be identified between local and global knowledges on water conservation?• How do different approaches to knowledge, learning, wisdom and information in the field of water conservation differ or complement each other?