ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the close interrelationships that exist between peasant livelihood strategies, the recreation of community, and irrigation management. It explores how irrigation management is part and parcel of Andean peasant economies. The chapter discusses how policies that are built on market mechanisms to sustain Water Users' Associations (WUAs) have a very different meaning once they land in local Andean irrigation systems. The Andean peasant economy is neither autarchic nor self-sufficient, but interwoven in the commoditized/mercantile and community/non-mercantile spheres of production, reproduction, and consumption. In Andean communities and irrigation systems, families apply several reciprocal social relationships of labor exchange which provide the workforce and other scarce resources needed for production and reproduction at both family and group levels, without having to buy them in the market. In spite of capitalist market penetration in Andean rural communities, non-mercantile sphere exchanges and interactions have resisted – and will resist in the future – substitution by purely commoditized relationships.
