ABSTRACT
Based on ethnographic research in Caylloma province in the southern Peruvian Andes, this chapter argues that the effects of climate change and adaptation projects can have unequal impact and unintended consequences. Furthermore, the author suggests that to gain a more complete understanding of these consequences we should not only take socio-economic factors into account, but also human–nonhuman relations and the ways that worldmaking practices are enacting diverging, yet partially connected, worlds. Taking as a starting point that Andean water governance is not an unchanging body of knowledge and customs standing in opposition to modern statecraft and science, the author proposes to understand water-related worlds as open-ended and emerging through practices and encounters. Some of these practices are contradictory, creating tensions, disagreements and “disencounters,” and yet, in everyday life there are pragmatic ways of navigating difference and creating points of connection across diverging worlds.
