“People are no longer quiet”: Ordinary environmental citizenship in Lago Agrio, Ecuador

Abstract

For years, residents in northeastern Ecuador's Amazonian city of Lago Agrio demanded the expansion of water and sanitation services to peri-urban neighborhoods. Community members regularly filed claims, made demands at town hall meetings, spoke directly to policymakers during neighborhood tours, and assembled an extensive quantitative and qualitative database on the everyday challenges of precarious access to water and sanitation. Their demands were clear: municipal and national governments must use state revenue to improve water and sanitation networks. Engaging an ordinary citizenship framework, this article forwards an interpretation of these actions as ordinary environmental citizenship. Residents dictate how they envisage the role of the Ecuadorian state through citizenship practices that respond to their community's environmental conditions. This article posits that the embodiment of socio-environmental citizenship represented in Lago Agrio is reproduced through relationships cultivated in every day, routine, ordinary experiences textured by a shared sense of insecure access to water and sanitation. Lago Agrians contest exclusion and demand the state use broad financial redistribution to improve and expand public water and sanitation infrastructure.