From Drought to Plunder: Grassroots Organising, Water Security Governance, and Societal Resilience in Uruguay

This project examines how communities in Uruguay defend water sovereignty and build collective resilience in response to worsening water insecurity and environmental degradation. It focuses on the ways grassroots initiatives resist the privatisation and contamination of water within a broader landscape of struggles and tensions that includes the Neptuno privatisation project, the 2023 water crisis, industrial water use (such as pulp mills and green hydrogen projects), and extractivist pressures, including forestry expansion and agrotoxin use.

Using an interpretative qualitative approach over 12 months, the research combines solicited letters, interviews, participant observation, and document and social media analysis to explore perceptions of environmental degradation and its effects on water availability and purity. It investigates the strategies grassroots organisations use to mobilise and examines how power relations and policy decisions shape societal resilience amid growing water insecurity.