Current Perspectives on Community, Land, and Water in the Cordillera Blanca

The Cordillera Blanca is often viewed as a frontline climate change hotspot, where ice loss has created climate emergencies ranging from glacial lake outburst floods (GLOFs) to drought to avalanches and landslides. However, research addressing the experiences and perspectives of diverse residents of the region should be added to studies on ice, water, rocks, and other geophysical processes. Social science and humanities research on the Cordillera Blanca region has increasingly addressed these issues, illustrating complex social, political, cultural, and economic processes that define the region. Through a review of the social science and humanities literature published on the Cordillera Blanca during roughly the last decade, this chapter demonstrates how research has increasingly engaged with the complex social and environmental dimensions of climate change, ice loss, and beyond. It shows how human perspectives about glaciers, climate, and landscapes are socially produced and negotiated. In this chapter, we explain some societal contexts of Cordillera Blanca communities before addressing the central socio-environmental spaces connected to land and water. The chapter then moves to discuss how trust, control, and accountability are key themes at play in the Cordillera Blanca. We also highlight how enduring calls for trust-building and community engagement require greater engagement in key areas, including: inter and intracommunity dynamics, resource negotiations in changing glacial watersheds, and interacting global and local forces that challenge easy understandings of the Cordillera Blanca’s future under conditions of ice loss and climate change.