Proposal for an Indicator to Study Water Security at the Household-Community Interface in Rural Chilean Areas

Abstract

This paper proposes a composite indicator to identify levels of water security at the household-community interface. It analyses the hydro-social processes that give rise to water scarcity situations experienced by the rural population supplied by community organizations in rural Chile. The indicator is based on a case study of ten community organizations selected to represent the heterogeneity existing in the country, where semi-structured interviews with their leaders and field observations were applied. Two main findings emerge from the study: 1) there is no correlation between the size of organizations and the levels of observed water security; 2) cases with greater difficulty accessing sufficient resources are not the ones facing greater water insecurity, as organizations compensate for this difficulty with other components.