Surfacing Collective Agency in Rural Water Governance: Emergent and Restorative Configurations

Community water governance in Chile faces tension between institutional pressures to standardize rural water management and community-based logics that have sustained rural drinking water systems and their governance committees for decades. This research asks which forms of collective agency are brought to the surface by participatory processes, and what appears to shape them, in two committees at contrasting institutional phases on the edge of Cerro Castillo National Park, in Chilean Patagonia. One has no infrastructure; the other has operated since 1989. In an exploratory two-case design, workshops were held with 25 participants across three sessions, structured by the World Mandala and Three Horizons frameworks and supported by boundary negotiating artifacts that translated between local and technical knowledge. The findings suggest two configurations of agency associated with institutional phase: an emergent agency oriented toward preventing dispossession, and a restorative agency toward reversing eroded autonomy. Both committees meet the same three barriers: a mirage of water security, subdivision without sanitary planning, and institutional amnesia, the loss of the official record of past demands. Together they appear to function as an infrastructure of scarcity, prospectively in one phase and retrospectively in the other. The article closes with phase-differentiated design principles, offered for testing elsewhere.