New water policy and centralizing legacies: the basin council in valle de México

Abstract

The new water policy by the Mexican government, implemented
for almost two decades, has among its main aspects water
management by basins and through Basin Councils. In the
official discourse, there is an emphasis in that this public policy
promotes the participation of users in water decision-making,
and that this in turn leads to an integral water management
in the basins. Here, we analyze the legal framework in these
aspects, in contrast with the discourse and the processes that
take place in the Valle de México Basin Council (Consejo de
Cuenca del Valle de México, CCVM), with an emphasis in the
type of participation that this framework allows for agricultural
users of raw sewage waters in Valle del Mezquital, in the state
of Hidalgo. To construct the theoretic-conceptual proposal, we
took up contributions by political ecology, and environmental
history and justice. We carried out a broad literature review
and field work was performed; in the latter, there were
exploratory-descriptive tours and open interviews were applied
to key informants. Research shows that the legal framework
in water issues, far from fostering a broad social participation
in decision-making, as is suggested by the official discourse,
constitutes one of the main instruments used to give continuity
to the historical centralization of the resource, with social
and environmental consequences that are inconsistent with
sustainable development.