"Water Governance, Community Organizing and Resilience in Puerto Rico"
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"Water Governance, Community Organizing and Resilience in Puerto Rico"
Across Latin America, scholarship has shown that community water governance is a form of provision, a site of political struggle, and search for water justice. Puerto Rico is rarely included in this conversation as its status as a U.S. territory places it between Latin American and U.S. frameworks. Yet Puerto Rico is a critical case for building theory at the intersection of hazards, water systems, and collective action. Reliability is not only a technical property of infrastructure but a social struggle that aggravates quality of life and well-being. Situating Puerto Rico within Latin American and North American water scholarship, provides an opportunity to re-evaluate stopgaps for water security in a region facing compounding disasters.
Anaís Roque is an environmental social scientist and John Hope Franklin Assistant Professor of Environmental Justice at Duke University who studies resource insecurity and health in the Anthropocene. Currently, her research agenda focuses on how households and communities experience, prepare for, and respond to food, energy, and water insecurity during “normal” times and in the wake of a hazard or disaster.