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Abstract

For years, residents in northeastern Ecuador's Amazonian city of Lago Agrio demanded the expansion of water and sanitation services to peri-urban neighborhoods. Community members regularly filed claims, made demands at town hall meetings, spoke directly to policymakers during neighborhood tours, and assembled an extensive quantitative and qualitative database on the everyday challenges of precarious access to water and sanitation. Their demands were clear: municipal and national governments must use state revenue to improve water and sanitation networks. Engaging an ordinary citizenship framework, this article forwards an interpretation of these actions as ordinary environmental citizenship. Residents dictate how they envisage the role of the Ecuadorian state through citizenship practices that respond to their community's environmental conditions. This article posits that the embodiment of socio-environmental citizenship represented in Lago Agrio is reproduced through relationships cultivated in every day, routine, ordinary experiences textured by a shared sense of insecure access to water and sanitation. Lago Agrians contest exclusion and demand the state use broad financial redistribution to improve and expand public water and sanitation infrastructure.

Keywords

Environmental citizenship ordinary citizenship water Ecuador

Highlights

For years, Amazonian Ecuadorian residents demanded governments use state revenue to expand water and sanitation service into peri-urban Lago Agrio.

Using Staeheli et al.'s (2012) ‘ordinariness’ framework, this article interprets every day routine practices as acts of ordinary environmental citizenship.

Residents filed claims, attended meetings, conducted neighborhood tours, and created databases on everyday challenges of precarious access to environmental goods.

Embodying ordinary environmental citizenship contests exclusion and is reproduced through daily relationships cultivated in the community through routine, social experiences.

Ordinary environmental citizenship allows people to practice politics, dictate how they envisage the state, and influence how socio-environments are reproduced.

Introduction

In 2014, Ecuador's National Planning and Development Industry (SENPLADES) aimed for 95% basic water and sanitation service coverage by 2017 in the northeastern Amazonian town Nueva Loja (colloquially known and henceforth referred to as Lago Agrio).¹ Working alongside President Rafael Correa's administration, Lago Agrio's mayor Vinicio Vega promised to expand water and sanitation coverage to peri-urban and rural areas (Periódico Independiente, 2014). Though encouraging, Vega's statements were not unfamiliar to Lago Agrians. The absence of reliable potable water and sanitation services were primary concerns for residents who often depended on expensive purchased bottled or tanked water. Despite its location in the oil rich Ecuadorian Amazon, Lago Agrio is marred with poverty and lacks many basic services (Sawyer, 2004).²

For decades, Lago Agrians demanded their municipal and national governments provision secure water and sanitation services. Residents often visited government offices to file claims, made demands at town hall meetings, conducted neighborhood tours with policymakers, and compiled an extensive catalog with quantitative and qualitative data on the everyday experiences of navigating life under the challenge of precarious access to water and sanitation. Their demands were clear: municipal and national governments must use state revenue to fund water and sanitation services. Using Staeheli et al.'s (2012) ordinary citizenship framework, this article forwards an interpretation of practices leveraged by Lago Agrians as acts of ordinary environmental citizenship. A shared sense of insecure access to water and sanitation felt in peri-urban neighborhoods dictates the way residents practiced their citizenship and how they envisaged the role of the Ecuadorian state. In this case, Lago Agrians present a kind of socio-environmental citizenship based on relationships cultivated in communities through every day, routine, ordinary experiences textured by challenges of exclusion from access to basic services. Ordinary demonstrations of citizenship that contest exclusion represent forms of political participation and indicate what role the Ecuadorian state must play in the lives of Lago Agrians.

Citizenship is a complex, contingent resource for socio-political life, and conceptualizing it as ordinary recognizes the various ways people define their roles as citizens (Staeheli et al., 2012). Examining environmental citizenship through ‘ordinariness’ means observing routine experiences of daily life as active, embodied, and shared practices cultivated and reproduced through everyday encounters in a community that struggles with exclusion. Locating citizenship onto the environment highlights the expectations people have for critical resources like water and sanitation to be safe, readily available, and public. In Lago Agrio, ordinary environment citizenship is expressed through repeated and persistent demands for state-provisioned water and sanitation services. Diverging from an overreliance on environmental citizenship activated through the citizen-consumer, Lago Agrians posit their demands as entitlements from the state, expressing a citizen-state relationship not predicated on consumption. Rather than internalize responsibility for individual care or engage communal politics of mutual aid, Lago Agrians embody a social solidarity that directs this responsibility toward public elected officials. Rooted in a shared sense of frustration and anger from lack of access to secure water and sanitation, residents engaged in collective practices for redress. Ordinary environmental citizenship, therefore, has the potential to become a powerful tool for mobilizing collective support to obtain access to these very resources (Sultana and Loftus, 2012).

Data for this analysis draws on qualitative, semi-structured interviews (n = 10), household surveys (n = 56), and numerous informal conversations with household residents facilitated in seven peri-urban neighborhoods in Lago Agrio. Fieldwork took place over approximately 6 months, spanning between two summers in 2016 and 2017, and one monthlong research trip in 2018. While the research design was developed independently, I contracted a driver through the local organization UDAPT (Union for those Affected by Chevron-Texaco) for transport to peri-urban neighborhoods affected by frequent water service shortages, water contamination, and lack of secure sanitation. In what follows, I discuss the scholarship on environmental citizenship and the utility of observing this concept through the lens of ‘ordinariness.’ I consider ordinary interpretations of environmental citizenship through lived, active, and everyday frameworks, and focus on how citizenship subjectivities are constructed through access to infrastructure. The lived, the everyday, and the ordinary are useful analytical entry points for practices in Lago Agrio that contest exclusion through a citizen-state relationship materialized as demands for water and sanitation. I then outline a variety of strategies Lago Agrians used to practice their ordinary environmental citizenship and make claims to the Ecuadorian state. Finally, I situate small-scale, ordinary, ‘micropolitics’ in Lago Agrio within larger contexts of extraordinary displays of environmental citizenship in Ecuador during President Rafael Correa's self-described Citizen Revolution (2007–2017). This juxtaposition offers a perspective on why Lago Agrians launched a campaign for state-provisioned expansion of water and sanitation networks.

Environmental citizenship through the ‘ordinary’

Broadly speaking, citizenship is understood as a legal status shared by members of a polity authorizing born or naturalized citizens to certain protections, entitlements, and rights granted by the state (Fyfe and Miligan, 2003; Benhabib, 2004). Yet citizenship also reflects a state-society relationship defined by norms, laws, and policies interwoven with daily routine practices and experiences (Hayward, 2006; Staeheli et al., 2012). Interpretations of environmental citizenship include virtue politics of attitude change driven by social and environmental justice (Dobson, 2003, 2007; Dobson and Bell, 2006), science communication and environmental education (Hacking Barratt and Barratt, 2004), and emphasis on the more-than-human world (Latta, 2014). Early definitions of environmental citizenship were critiqued for a narrow focus on the role of individual as consumer that reinforced neoliberal practices, green governmentality, and the construction of self-regulating environmental subjects (Agrawal, 2005; Rutherford, 2007). Individualism as a barometer for environmental change is a diversion from those in society more responsible for environmental degradation, and a distraction from unsustainable socio-economic systems (MacGregor, 2006; Vihersalo, 2017).

Geographical inquiry tends towards a focus on spatial and social lived practices, processes, and ideas that influence how people perform their environmental citizenship in particular contexts (Huttunen et al., 2020). A relational understanding of environmental citizenship addresses broader questions of inclusion and exclusion, and how ideas and meanings of citizenship are imagined, articulated, and performed (Harris, 2014). Framing citizenship as a social practice embedded within the everyday allows us to observe seemingly ordinary and mundane habits as political actions. Staeheli et al. (2012) offer an interpretation of citizenship through the lens of ‘ordinariness,’ highlighting that status alone cannot explain the experience of being a citizen. They argue:

“Ordinary citizenship trains our analytical lens on how laws and social norms are entwined with routine practices and experiences of daily life, as citizens – and other political subjects – negotiate exclusion and marginalization (630).”

Citizenship is instituted by law, but not reducible to it, and is shaped through interpersonal relationships and experiences that are the essence of being a citizen. It is through mundane and ordinary interactions – at home, school, community meetings or government offices – that nuanced understandings of difference, similarity, and solidarity are produced (Askins, 2015). Furthermore, ordinary practices, processes, and social relationships cultivated in the community have the potential to give rise to larger political acts, and political struggles that challenge exclusion (Staeheli et al., 2012). Everyday interactions sustain relationships that can be used for social change, and a relational environmental citizenship has the potential to form collective identities that challenge marginalization through claims to rights (Sinreich and Cupples, 2014; Crossan et al., 2016). Framing environmental citizenship as ordinary highlights different forms of power that structure and order lives, communities, and societies, and qualifies how citizenship is enacted.

This article uses ‘ordinariness’ as a critical lens to understand how everyday actions of Lago Agrians represent forms of environmental citizenship. Ordinary environmental citizenship diverges from discrete, responsibility-based interpretations of citizenship, and emphasizes how social, rather than individual, actions are levers of change for socio-ecological improvement. The everyday is increasingly observed as a site of transformation, resistance, and as a platform for new notions of citizenship within urban contexts (Rusca and Cleaver, 2022). Citizenship is linked to ordinary actions like filing petitions, attending meetings, and general interaction within communities to develop social demands, what Staeheli et al. (2012) call ‘micropolitics.’ Additionally, micropolitics allow for a broader understanding of what political participation can be, especially when positioned alongside correlative historical examples of large-scale, ‘extraordinary’ demonstrations of environmental citizenship. For example, during the early 2000's, Ecuadorian agricultural and state petroleum workers engaged strikes, protests, and road blockades to shutter oil production and demanded more aggressive oil revenue redistribution (Perreault and Valdivia, 2010). Embodying ‘petro-citizenship,’ workers declared that oil resources belonged to ordinary Ecuadorians, and revenues should be redirected to social projects like roads, hospitals, schools, water, and sanitation infrastructure (Valdivia, 2008).

In this case, environmental citizenship was confrontational and critical of the state, no doubt influencing the political discourse of the incoming Correa administration (Riofrancos, 2020). Ordinary, even mundane demonstrations of environmental citizenship through micropolitics can also be confrontational and articulate similar demands, albeit at different scales. However, while extraordinary and ordinary citizenship practices are differentially deployed, the crux of the demands are social activities targeted at the state for more aggressive, broad, social spending.

Material demands are also formed through a politics of exclusion that addresses territorial citizenship and sovereignty in historically marginalized communities. Anthias (2018) uses ‘hydrocarbon citizenship’ to communicate the tension between inclusion, territorial control, and autonomy for Guaraní communities debating the use of natural gas revenue for development projects in the Bolivian Chaco. Hydrocarbon citizenship situates historical, political, and cultural Indigenous decolonial struggles within contemporary fights for state-led development and economic compensation. Analyzing the need for community-led development and legacies of Indigenous territorial autonomy foregrounds how citizenship and infrastructure co-constitute one another, and demonstrate how people contest exclusion (Hope, 2022). In turn, ordinary environmental citizenship is formed by contextually specific histories of exclusion, and the ‘ordinariness’ of routine, social activities can set the stage for greater political challenges (Staeheli et al., 2012). The micropolitics of ordinary environmental citizenship can give rise to sweeping, ‘extraordinary’ demonstrations that contest political and cultural exclusion and demanded material redistribution, social spending, and infrastructure.

Like ordinary environmental citizenship, the politics of moral economies and water exchanges similarly identifies how everyday social relations are sources of power. Critical scholars recognize these practices as forms of resistance against exclusion (Wutich et al., 2018), as environmental citizenship through an ethics of care (MacGregor, 2004; Waitt and Rankin, 2022), and as political strategies that secure alternative sources of water against technocratic or weak governance (Neves-Alves, 2022). Water exchanges are used to address shortages rooted within moral economies or mutual aid, and the urgency that comes from precarious access to water influences meaningful social relationships and community networks (Gonzalez, 2019). Forms of exclusion shape environmental citizenship in peri-urban spaces where residents draw on community support, kinship, and solidarity, characteristics certainly present in water exchanges and reciprocity practices (Robinson, 2021). However, when residents articulate demands for a state to fulfill public obligations, they leverage their state-society relationship to secure improved access to water and sanitation. These actions move beyond reciprocity, and towards an entitlement or expectation fulfilled only by the state, based on demands for publicly provisioned services residents frame as “owed” to them from their government. While both strategies contest environmental exclusion, the specific articulation of demands is what diverges water exchanges from ordinary environmental citizenship.

The social, material, and practiced aspects of ordinary environmental citizenship

‘Being’ a citizen is a deeply varied experience often difficult to capture in mainstream literature on environmental citizenship (Latta, 2007). In theory, a ‘good citizen’ is an active one, though some interpretations of ‘active’ inculcate normative subjectivities that narrowly define civic participation and belonging (Horst et al., 2020). Active citizenship that highlights individual responsibilities can also reproduce a neoliberal state's broader ideologies, political projects, and strategies (Kivelä, 2018). Neoliberal constructions of environmental citizens as actors of change have long been criticized (Agrawal, 2005), and citizen-subjects challenge normative notions of active citizenship to include broader relationships and everyday activities cultivated within communities (Hoekstra, 2019). Reframing citizenship through the everyday emphasizes how it is lived and experienced. Lived citizenship mirrors ordinary citizenship by drawing attention to the significance of embodied practices within domestic and informal spaces. The ‘ordinariness’ of lived experiences entwines everyday patterns of society with economic, political, and environmental patterns which shape socio-spatial relationships that define daily life (Kallio et al., 2020). When fixed to critical infrastructure like water and sanitation, lived citizenship problematizes the role of the state and determines why people employ specific social practices. Unequal access to water and sanitation shape interpretations of and relationships to the state, and citizenship subjectivities are constituted by the presence or absence of formalized service delivery (Rodina and Harris, 2016).

Citizenship is an important site of struggle, contestation, and political engagement within environmental contexts where ordinary social practices are tactics used to make demands (Pallett, 2017). Everyday encounters with water and sanitation infrastructure produce and shape citizenship subjectivities and reveal how urban spaces are governed, making them key terrains in which people encounter and articulate the role of the state (Anand, 2017; Pilo’, 2022). Lemanski's (2020) “infrastructural citizenship” demonstrates how infrastructure sites mediate encounters with the state, often through state absence. Functional water and sanitation infrastructure is expected to be present, and the “long-term” citizen-state relationship becomes a space to make political and material demands (Lemanski, 2020: 590; Ramakrishnan et al., 2021). The demand for expansion of social services like water and sanitation infrastructure is the realization of communities leveraging a state-citizen relationship that disputes absence and precarity.

Uneven access to water and sanitation are foundational concepts of environmental justice frameworks linking ecological and socio-spatial struggles (Perreault, 2014; Ranganathan and Balazs, 2015; Harris et al., 2018). Context-specific histories of environmental injustice use environmental citizenship to contest marginalization, and form collective identities that claim rights to space, services, decision-making, and participatory governance (Rodina and Harris, 2016). Environmental justice is a useful analytical bridge to link tactics with expressions of environmental citizenship, yet it is important to maintain a distinction between the two frameworks. Environmental citizenship more usefully explores how ordinary practices shape explicitly material rather than moral demands for redress directed at the state, narrating a precise political relationship between the people and the government. Morality, justice, and virtue are tenets that fuel social engagements but are somewhat constrained as tools for observing outcomes of specific practices because they remain abstract, all-encompassing, and voluntary (Huber, 2022). Environmental justice or human right to water models sometimes have little purchase in peri-urban communities that rarely find them applicable to their lived experiences (Mehta et al., 2014). Justice is of course foundational to citizenship, and environmental justice can be read in terms of a politics of citizenship that claims legal, participatory, or distributional rights (Bullard, 1990; Schlosberg, 2004; Latta, 2007). When observed through ‘ordinariness,’ justice and citizenship are not only rooted in law, but “extend into social relationships of daily life (Staeheli et al., 2012: 634).” Through ordinary environmental citizenship, moral concepts like justice and fairness are made material with concrete demands for state-provisioned water and sanitation services.

The politics of ordinary environmental citizenship in Ecuador are considered within broader historical contexts and decades of social struggle that interlock the state, citizenship, and the environment (Becker, 2011; Riofrancos, 2020). Invoking the Kichwa principle of sumac kawsay (“living well”), Rafael Correa campaigned on post-neoliberal development alternatives that sought to establish long-term social, ecological, and economic plans to address poverty, environmental degradation, and cultural diversity protection (Radcliffe, 2012). Sumac kawsay is a framework through which to understand socio-environmental rights but ruptures the nature-society dualism and enshrines nature as part of the social world, and vice versa (Latta, 2014). Correa's administration positioned themselves as working on behalf of citizens and codified their responsibility to provision water and sanitation in the 2008 Constitution (Harris and Roa-García, 2013; Boelens et al., 2015). Ordinary environmental citizenship is the hinge that joins rights and justice with citizenship in a state-polity relationship. This association has the potential of becoming a powerful tool for mobilizing collective support and obtaining access to water and sanitation (Sultana and Loftus, 2012, 2020).

Lago Agrio: “Home of a wise and persistent people”³

Lago Agrio's first industrial oil well (Pozo-01) was installed in 1967 by Texaco, and for the next two decades, the northeastern Amazonian region was transformed by oil reconstruction (Lu et al., 2016). Lago Agrio grew and expanded around Pozo-01 and became the capital of Sucumbíos province in 1989.⁴ When the Ecuadorian national oil company Petroecuador acquired operations from Texaco in 1992, communities in Lago Agrio first opposed continued oil extraction. After protests, strikes, and violent encounters with national police, residents negotiated with Petroecuador to install potable water and sewage systems, and public green spaces as compensation for extractive activities (Durán et al., 2020). Petroecuador built one potable water station in 2015 that reached 10% of the population, but many residents still depended on collected rainwater and poor-quality groundwater. At the time, there were still no formal sanitation services in the area.

Ordinary environmental citizenship compels persistence to hold governments accountable for delivery of water and sanitation services, and to address issues like water contamination:

“People are no longer quiet. When a polluting event happens, people demand accountability (la gente reclama). That's good, but there needs to be a more comprehensive plan. That is more difficult. But people are standing up at least, which is good. This didn’t happen 30 years ago (Author interview, June 2016).”

The use of reclama translates to “claim” or “reclaim something.” Residents communicated receiving something from the state, but rather than use words like pedir (request), demandar (demand), or preguntar (to ask for), they used reclamar. Declaring a claim, or reclaiming, reveals a right to entitlements and an understanding of a citizen-state relationship that demands redistribution. While not explicitly presenting themselves as citizens, Lago Agrians direct their demands at the state, using ordinary environmental citizenship practices to make claims on public environmental services. Citizenship practices are “experimental, socio-political negotiations and modalities that include ordinary claims-making, anticipation, [and] resistance that fuse theories of urban politics, citizenship, and rights to the city (Truelove, 2021: 298).” Ordinary environmental citizenship is a practice formed through lived experiences of insecure access to water and sanitation, seen as a politics of waiting that shape perceptions of the state (Auyero, 2012).

The challenges of navigating daily life with precarious access to water and sanitation were experiences that Lago Agrians reiterated to public representatives. Residents engaged in recorridos, or tours, through peri-urban neighborhoods led by members of the community. The recorridos offered Lago Agrians a chance to contest precarious access to and poor quality of water, or lack of safe sanitation options. For some, the recorridos were important because they let residents share their experiences of exclusion from these services and “be the protagonists of their own stories with their own rights, as affected people (Author interview, June 2016).” For others, speaking to elected officials meant addressing the state directly, rather than through back channels, non-governmental organizations, or roundabout ways to deliver their message to authorities. Sharing testimonies was difficult, in some instances even painful to retell, but the ability to make direct demands to state representatives was a crucial part of contesting marginalization, and an important tactical strategy of ordinary environmental citizenship that necessitates a direct state-citizen relationship.

Ordinary environmental citizenship is rooted in social practices aimed at improving the community and strengthened through relationships developed by those engaged in or supporting participation. Residents in peri-urban Lago Agrio collected oral and written testimonies from their neighbors describing the daily challenges of living with insecure access to water and sanitation. These statements were shared with Ecuadorian officials to strengthen the case for state-provisioned services. As one resident remarked, the difficulties of navigating work and home life while worried about their family's health resulting from poor quality water, and the economic stress of privately provisioned water should be avoidable when other options are available. These experiences animated social resistance throughout peri-urban Lago Agrio that inspired residents to collect testimonies and present them to officials during recorridos, town hall meetings, or at government offices in Lago Agrio and Quito (Author interview, June 2016).

Despite Correa's persistent declarations to reduce poverty through state spending (Valdivia, 2018), Lago Agrio saw minimal improvement during his tenure, particularly in water and sanitation infrastructure. Residents were disappointed that material investment did not go far enough even though Ecuador's government, “has a discourse on redistribution and environmentalism, but their actions aren’t demonstrating this (Author interview, June 2016).” The demand for improvement denotes a citizen-state relationship predicated on rights and entitlements, an expectation of poverty reduction, and living conditions that better the community:

“In Lago Agrio, we live in a dire situation because of [transnational] oil extraction in the 1960's through the 1990's, but now that the government has adopted responsible policies for extraction, they must improve our lives (nos deben) after 40 years of abandonment (Author interview, June 2016).”

Using nos deben, or “they owe us,” invokes a demand for redress to improve socio-environmental conditions for the community after years of state absence. Rather than express a form of environmental citizenship that internalizes responsibility for maintaining a healthy environment, the social declaration of them (the state) and us (the people), inverts the citizen-state relationship, giving way to a social politics grounded in collective understandings of exclusion. These ordinary and common experiences form the base of support for social power that manifests as material social demands (Staeheli et al., 2012). In Lago Agrio, this meant a redistributive project of public environmental goods and services.

Residents insisted the Ecuadorian state improve drinking water services and expand safe sanitation networks, especially considering the state's heavy investments into petroleum infrastructure. Some neighborhoods had “virtually no sewage systems” at the same time Petroecuador continued installing new oil wells, and Lago Agrians demanded the Ecuadorian state “take care of the basic services of the community, since they clearly have money to invest (Author interview, June 2017).” Occasionally, representatives from local and national offices held roundtable discussions or public forums with the community for what they called ‘the betterment of Nueva Loja.’ Here, residents shared testimonies on navigating daily life while challenged with unpredictable access to water pumps that sometimes only functioned between midnight and 2 a.m. Other common practices include weekly complaint filing at municipal offices to demand the expansion of the water and sanitation grid (Author interview, June 2016). Persistent claims-making may seem ordinary, yet the state is enmeshed in the ‘ordinary,’ and environmental citizenship practices demonstrate what citizens want from the state regarding a healthy and safe socio-environment.

Lago Agrio is no stranger to collective action and residents know the importance of their own power in social struggles. In the early 2000s, Amazonian labor unions rallied alongside Indigenous social movements and campesino workers to contest neoliberal austerity policies in Ecuador (Valdivia and Benavides, 2018). A long-time community organizer and retired oil-worker explained the transformation he saw in Lago Agrio:

“Lago Agrio has changed over the last 40 years. It's not like before, it's so different from before, it's a city now, no longer a small town. It's better now. But to have what we have now in Lago Agrio was not a direct benefit given to us by the petroleum industry, or by the government from extracting petroleum and through taxes. If Lago Agrio has improved, it's because we fought for it. We had strikes, stoppages, protests, some which got violent. But its thanks to the social struggle, for years, that Lago Agrio is the way it is today. The fight never stops…one has to keep going, but we can’t do it individually, it has to be a collective struggle, you have to have a collective force… and you have to keep going, trying, if you want to achieve change (Author interview, June 2016).”⁵

Staeheli et al. (2012) frame ‘ordinariness’ as citizenship grounded in community and relationships with the potential to make way for larger political struggles. Ordinary environmental citizenship draws on this same idea, rooted in a social base that mutually experience precarious access to water and sanitation. Building a case to secure safe, reliable sources of water and sanitation means working collectively in the community. Contemporary fights where citizens leverage their social power to contest environmental marginalization are situated within historical contexts where Lago Agrians previously challenged economic marginalization. This fight “can’t be done alone or isolated. The only way things change is with a strong social base willing to struggle, to defend our lives collectively (Author interview, June 2016).”

Variegated water and sanitation infrastructure in Lago Agrio

When residents were unable to purchase bottled water, they turned to household groundwater wells, formal rainwater catchment systems, and informal water infrastructure that included rainwater barrels made from plastic trashcans, water buckets, and concrete basins coated with a plastic sheen to prevent water from absorbing into the material. The uneven patchworks of ad-hoc water infrastructure served as improvised conduits that fill institutional gaps, in what Furlong (2014) calls “infrastructural coexistence.” Sanitation services are major challenges in Lago Agrio, where many households lack connections to public systems and thorough monitoring and management of treatment plant discharge into rivers and estuaries is spotty at best (Bayón et al., 2020). Variegated water infrastructure is a coping mechanism to combat service failure, but not a long-term solution. State absence is viscerally felt at infrastructure sites, potentially making them key spaces for citizenship subjectivity formation (Rodina and Harris, 2016). Access to water and sanitation infrastructure are deeply embedded with divergent experiences and articulations of power and political negotiations (Meehan, 2014; Truelove, 2021). Infrastructure – in its absence or presence – is a key terrain in which citizens contest exclusion, make demands for inclusion, and define their relationship to the state (Lemanski, 2020).

Consequently, there were attempts to improve services in Lago Agrio, though with multiple setbacks. In 2015, mayor Vinicio Vega established a municipal water administration board (EMAPALA) to supply water and sanitation efficiently and effectively throughout the city. However, the city's outstanding $1 million debt delayed the construction of a potable water network (El Comercio, 2018). Vega petitioned the Planning and Budget Commission to repair, replace, and expand drinking water systems, reporting a 95% increase in coverage (El Telégrafo, 2017). However, an official at EMAPALA disputed this report, stating that expanded coverage was uneven, fragmented, and inadequate because water pressure was too low to reach outer rim neighborhoods (Bayón et al., 2020: 14). Rates of gastrointestinal illness were high, and residents took frequent trips to health clinics or pharmacies. Alongside testimonies of daily challenges, Lago Agrians collected technical data on water quality to strengthen their case for state-provisioned services. They submitted household water samples to laboratories in Lago Agrio and Quito for microbial and trace metal contamination testing. Results were compiled into a database demonstrating the presence and severity of contamination throughout the community (Author interviews, June 2016).⁶ Lago Agrians presented this data during recorridos and town hall meetings to confirm the challenges of navigating everyday life with unsafe, precarious access to water and sanitation. The technical data and qualitative testimonies revealed the urgency for improved infrastructure, and residents insisted the Correa administration use state revenues for the public works projects (Author interviews, June 2016). These ordinary practices were highly coordinated, social activities that levied the role of citizen to demand redress from the state.

Water and sanitation were topical points of debate during the 2019 mayoral race, and Vega was ultimately defeated by long-time political figure Abraham Freire Paz.⁷ Freire Paz recognized that public pressure for water and sanitation service improvement came from historical exclusion by the national government, acknowledging that “anything Lago Agrians now have are things they’ve won through struggle, through strikes and protests (Madera, 2019).” After the election, Freire Paz moved quickly to improve and expand potable water systems that “should be a reality for people who have been demanding them for years, but previous administrations didn’t do much else except talk about them (Periódico Independiente, 2019a).” His administration signed aid agreements with local and national governments, the National Secretary of Water for Ecuador, the French Agency for Development, and the Development Bank of Ecuador to invest $7.5 million in water infrastructure projects (Periódico Independiente, 2019b). In 2022, the municipality completed two major public works projects in peri-urban Lago Agrio: an expansion of sanitation systems that included 500 meters of pipe installations, five major sewage wells, and 30 inspection boxes (Quezada Morocho, 2022a), and the installation of potable water infrastructure (Quezada Morocho, 2022b). Freire Paz announced plans to extend the sanitation network by an additional 3500 m by 2023, and to construct new municipal water treatment plants.

The everyday social and spectacular environmental citizenships of Ecuador

Water is materially and culturally symbolic, and access to basic infrastructure like pipes, pumps, or taps becomes a spatial signifier for citizenship in the waterscape (Sultana, 2020). Ordinary environmental citizenship observes the dynamics between Lago Agrians and their relationship to the state, framing commonplace practices within broader hydro-social politics in Ecuador. Following decades of state-managed water during the Developmentalist period of the mid-twentieth century, Ecuador faced international pressure to decentralize and privatize state water systems during the neoliberal turn (Swyngedouw, 1997; Hoogesteger et al., 2017). With public spending drastically cut and citizen discontent palpable, mass uprisings led by Indigenous and labor movements spilled onto the streets of Ecuador to condemn decades of austerity that deepened poverty and inequality, and to demand more substantive economic redistribution, social welfare, and the return of the state (Valdivia and Benavides, 2018; Riofrancos, 2020). It was this energy that ushered in Rafael Correa and his Alianza País (AP) party in 2006, who committed to poverty reduction programs, social spending, an increase of public goods and services, and expanded citizen participation (Grugel and Riggirozzi, 2012; Yates and Bakker, 2014).

Displays of extraordinary citizenship in Ecuador at the turn of the twenty-first century are the context within which to observe the micropolitics of ordinary environmental citizenship in Lago Agrio. The confluence of water and citizenship are useful analytics that fuse the national and the local to observe citizenship practices through the lens of everyday relations and lived experiences (Gearey et al., 2019). AP's post-neoliberal government committed to state spending, engaged citizenship, and a constitution that explicitly detailed the state as primary provider of water services. These decrees signaled to ordinary people a more visible and available state that imagined new forms of democratic participation. Correa's self-described Citizen's Revolution reinforced the kind of environmental citizenship where Ecuadorians felt entitled to public water and sanitation infrastructure. In fact, the Citizen's Revolution was “the period of greatest social conflict since the return of democracy in 1979,” with over 2000 water-related social protests between 2010 and 2012 (dos Santos, 2019: 131). Ordinary environmental citizenship practices are subtler opportunities that allow Lago Agrians to engage politically and potentially improve access to water and sanitation in their communities.

The symbiotic state-citizen relationship is reproduced through electoral politics yet voting only takes place every 3–5 years. Protests and strikes are other ways people demonstrate their citizenship, but not everyone has the capability to strike or participate in mass demonstrations. Fortunately, a citizen-state relationship can also be reproduced through routine activities and daily practices within environmental contexts that reflect political demands for inclusion. Ordinary environmental citizenship creates productive sites of struggle for water services and is relationally constructed through citizen demands, expectations, and state responses. Contesting established relationships between citizens and the state reinvents and challenges forms of governance and creates or strengthens political communities. Legal citizenship status is both constituted through relationships formed during ubiquitous, ordinary interactions, and embedded within daily lived experiences situated in complex institutional contexts (Staeheli et al., 2012).

Access to water and sanitation are important elements of the lived experience that shape how people perform their citizenship (Sultana, 2020). The geography of ordinary citizenship highlights intersecting socio-spatial, political, and economic relationships, and ordinary environmental citizenship emphasizes social relationships and practices cultivated in the use, or more specifically, lack of access to necessities like water and sanitation. Expanding frameworks of environmental citizenship through ‘ordinariness’ captures the variety of ways citizens understand and practice their role within society and in relation to the state. ‘Ordinariness’ encompasses how social relationships are necessary for changes aimed at improving a community (Staeheli et al., 2012). Social forms of environmental citizenship focus less on individual consumption or internalized green virtue and emphasize collective approaches at local and national scales. These practices can range from ordinary, everyday activities to weeks-long protests and demonstrations, all cultivated through common relationships and enacted to solve environmental problems (Sawyer, 2004; Valdivia, 2008; Riofrancos, 2020). Constructing a robust understanding of Ecuadorian water politics must include analysis of localized forms of resistance as environmental citizenship. Evaluating local (and often subtle) forms of citizenship open avenues for working class communities to make claims for public services, to participate in political action, and to feel a sense of dignity when making demands.

Conclusion

Water and sanitation services and infrastructure constitute the way we structure our daily lives. In Lago Agrio, precarious access to environmental goods is a social issue that led to stress, anger, and frustration, but this shared challenge also opened channels to seek out and create spaces of solidarity. Encounters with water and sanitation, especially those considered public, influence citizen perceptions on the role of the state and define how people practice their citizenship. Ordinary environmental citizenship is one more tool with the potential to make change in a community by contesting exclusion from access to critical environmental resources necessary for production and social reproduction. Strong relationships of solidarity are developed within communities that people use as a source of energy to organize and secure socio-environmental demands. Ordinary actions like claims-making, attending meetings, and creating an archive of testimonies on everyday struggles with water and sanitation are practices that reveal a collective politics and social citizenship. Emphasizing ordinary citizenship practices highlights how subtle, everyday actions are powerful demonstrations of politics that dictate what people expect for themselves and their communities.

Staeheli et al.'s ordinary citizenship is grounded in the notion that community and social relationships are forces that can be harnessed in the context of a lack of access to public necessities, from access to education to access for water and sanitation. Lago Agrians felt a social marginalization from environmental goods, and as a result, presented solutions to socially contest this exclusion. Recently, peri-urban spaces in Lago Agrio have seen significant changes in environmental policy aimed at improving access to water and sanitation, partially due to the persistence of ordinary members of the community. While organizing in Lago Agrio did not emerge from specifically defined or formalized labor, environmental, or Indigenous social movements, those who participated in ordinary environmental citizenship still understood the power of collective action. Past social movements in Ecuador demanded state redistribution and practiced forms of environmental citizenship that brought attention to local and national issues. The relationships Lago Agrians cultivated have the potential to build out into larger movements that engage direct-action disruption at multiple scales and cultivate local connections within communities motivated by a desire to challenge environmental marginalization. These actions bring attention to various ways that people participate in politics and potentially influence how their environments are reproduced. Lago Agrians demanded their government provide them with the necessary services they need to live dignified lives in a healthy environment they are entitled to as ordinary citizens.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I would like to express my deep appreciation to the people of Lago Agrio who shared their time and experiences with me during this research. Thanks as well to UDAPT (Union for those Affected by Chevron-Texaco) for putting me in contact with a driver who took me to peri-urban neighborhoods in Lago Agrio. Thank you to the three peer reviewers for their very helpful and generative feedback that significantly improved the article. Finally, I would like to thank Tom Perreault for his insightful comments on early drafts of this article and Carlo Sica for many productive conversations and encouragement throughout the writing process. Funding for this work was supported by the Tinker Foundation and the Graduate and Professional Student Council Grant Award at the University of Arizona. All errors and limitations remain my own.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by the Graduate and Professional Student Council University of Arizona, Tinker Foundation.

ORCID iD

Claudia Díaz-Combs

Notes

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“People are no longer quiet”: Ordinary environmental citizenship in Lago Agrio,Ecuador

Abstract

Keywords

Highlights

Introduction

Environmental citizenship through the ‘ordinary’

The social, material, and practiced aspects of ordinary environmental citizenship

Lago Agrio: “Home of a wise and persistent people” 3

Variegated water and sanitation infrastructure in Lago Agrio

The everyday social and spectacular environmental citizenships of Ecuador

Conclusion

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

Declaration of conflicting interests

Funding

ORCID iD

Notes

References

Lago Agrio: “Home of a wise and persistent people”³