CONICET | Buscador de Institutos y Recursos Humanos

This work aims at presenting the vulnerabilities of the communities living in the River Mendoza basin to global environmental change as embedded in the territorial organization (space-society relationships) but also articulated to social representations that are legitimizing the distribution and resource appropriation by a dominant social power, this symbolic dimension not duly recognized or legitimized by the local society. In doing this, the paper will examine four significant production processes for the River Mendoza basin area as well as to other drylands of the South American Arid Diagonal: (a) traditional viticulture and the new viticulture now being developed to fill market niches that would make the regional economy fit in the global economy, making intensive use of both water and the irrigated lands of the oases; (b) receptive tourism, an ?emerging? economic activity whose offer relies on the region?s natural and cultural resources; (c) subsistence production processes (mostly goat breeding) -weakly integrated into the capitalist economy- that develop extensively over non irrigated lands, needing natural resources as a support for developing their culture and (d) human settlements production processes, urban and rural. Analyzing exposures and adaptive capacities around these productive processes also discloses water conflicts: conflicts ?between man and nature?, conflicts among different uses and competing users of water and irrigated land and -beyond- clashes of world views as a background to all. These conflicts would certainly reflect the adaptation possibilities of these communities, inasmuch as successful adaptation strategies from some groups could increase vulnerabilities of other groups. This study has shown not only how dependent dry land societies are on water resources, but ?most significantly- the importance that the ways of controlling and manipulating water have in shaping it social tissue and in consolidating their powers. These findings throw light on the challenges that these societies will have to address in order to adapt to an increased water stress. The main adaptation challenges seem to be not only in a growing population on a fixed or reduced amount of water resources or in technical issues of water management, but specially in the possibilities of untying the knots of water conflicts and deeply operating on the way in which the hydraulic society is structured and ruled. This work is a preliminary result of two projects: (1) IAI CRN II SGP-HD Project #004 "Coming Down the Mountain: Understanding the Vulnerability of Andean Communities to Hydroclimatologic Variability and Global Environmental Change", a five-country collaboration project lead by Dr. David Gauthier and (2) PICT #2006-01466 ?Space-society and nature-culture relationships in central western and north western Argentina? under the direction of the author and financed by the National Scientific and Technical Promotion Agency of Argentina. ISSN 1275-155X

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