Stretching Scarce Water Into a Public Commons

Permaculture site created by the Oaxacan
Institute for Nature and Society (INSO), storing
water for irrigation and soil conservation



Participants at the Oaxacan water forum


Government official being held to account

Stretching Scarce Water Into a Public Commons

It’s a mighty challenge to ensure that a growing city has enough drinking water when it’s bone dry 8 months a year. The Atoyac River flows the length of the Oaxaca valley – it was the source of life for the great Zapotec city of Monte Alban and one of the earliest agricultural civilizations on earth. Today it’s a stinky trickle, its riparian banks a garbage dump.

The Oaxacan Institute for Nature and Society (INSO) has taken on the challenge of returning the Atoyac watershed to its splendor. This is a gargantuan task of local democracy, negotiating interests of upstream indigenous villages, beer bottlers, municipal water authorities, environmentalists and water consumers – just to name a few principal “stakeholders”.

With some regularity, the INSO convenes these stakeholders in a public forum to discuss problems and solutions. Indigenous authorities describe pirate loggers felling trees on their communal lands, accelerating deforestation. Others complain of the ineptitude of government officials in prosecuting environmental crimes. And still others bemoan the ailing water infrastructure through which upwards of 60% of piped water is lost.

A point on which they all agree is that water is a linchpin of our shared commons – resources shared by all for generations to come. Water is not a commodity to be sold for private gain. It is our creative puzzle to figure out how to create equitable community-led systems of water conservation and distribution. Folks at the forum wrestled with this challenge.

The meeting was held in a permaculture demonstration site. Permaculture is a system design tool to:

look at a whole system or problem;
observe how the parts relate;
mend sick systems by applying ideas learnt from long-term sustainable working systems including agroecology;
see connections between key elements (parts).

Just below the open air meeting room was a tiny dam stretched across a deep and narrow gulch. The little reservoir offered water for irrigation at the same time as it increased the soil's water absorption and managed downstream flow to slow erosion caused by flash floods. It’s just this kind of local experimentation – within a regional political process – that will preserve water as a commons for all.