Abstract
This book develops an international comparative approach to water conflicts in several American cities (USA, Mexico, Brazil, Peru, Bolivia). Struggles for water can be related to different issues: increase in water prices, installation of water catchment systems, negotiations of commissioning contracts, promotion of municipal plans for water delivery, etc. Such conflicts tend to structure coalitions which, in turn, influence policy-making; they impact local orders that are embedded at multiple levels of social practices; they involve most of the environmental and political institutions of a city or a country. In order to understand how these hydrocracies work, this book proposes a new framework of analysis taking into account the beliefs of the protagonists of the conflicts, their positions in the policy networks and their social characteristics.