ROUNDTABLES

WATER FOR PEACE – BUILDING COOPERATION AND SHARING ON WATER CARE

This roundtable has developed considering that water, its production, conservation, valorization, and distribution-consumption has multiple expressions, different perspectives and its development takes place in a context of crisis of values ​​in a change of paradigms era.

That the approach to the theme and the solutions must contemplate transdisciplinary perspectives, not only with a technical or sectoral approach, nor as a commodity, and that water should be recognized as a common good, of vital importance for the existence of living species and especially for the Homo sapiens.

Therefore, it seems clear that the issue of water cannot enter the age of extreme polarization leading to conflict or war, that is, one should neither exclusively assume the ‘logic of the market’ as water resources, nor the simplistic ‘populist logic’ that disregards costs in the water supply chain that must be paid to produce, treat and distribute until it reaches each end user with the transparency of who should bear the costs.

The dialogue showed that in this picture of potential conflict, it is necessary to apply a “culture of peace and conflict mediation” methodology with agreed rules that wins who shares costs and benefits for the use of this common good. Dialogue and listening are essential, since our species, with an accelerated concentration of large masses in urban areas, disputing and destroying biodiversity areas in favor of inadequate land use, can reach extreme coexistence situations.

Cooperation, which means working together with the same goals, is part of this methodology.

The debate with the public sparked some important definitions on this issue: Sharing water is impossible without cooperation in a culture of peace; Water value not in the logic of the market, but in the values ​​of living together; the solution is not only technical, it is necessary to listen to traditional knowledge.