Inequalities in water access patterns and limits of water citizenship in rural communities in the semi-arid region

Abstract

This article addresses three dimensions of the problem of access to water in rural communities in the Brazilian semi-arid region: theoretical, public and distributive. It is argued that the main perspectives used to frame the water problem in the region - be it the global water crisis, the social construction of the drought disaster or “living with the semi-arid region” – represent different versions of a “supply paradigm”, in which insufficient water supply gives meaning to the social situations to be faced. Thus, an analysis is performed on the patterns of access to drinking water for human supply that resulted from actions carried out under two public programs aimed at increasing the supply of water in the rural communities through the construction of cisterns to collect rain water and the implementation of saline or underground water desalination systems: One million Rural Cisterns (P1MC) and the Água Doce Program. Finally, a perspective is advocated that emphasizes distributional issues, highlighting inequalities of different types and allowing a new territorialization of the problem of access to water in the Northeast, breaking the dichotomy between rural and urban to signify the problem of access to water as structural inequalities, experienced daily, which makes it possible to reveal latent environmental conflicts, to be overcome from the political mobilization around the notion of water citizenship.