Social representation around water resources to meet the need for the human right to water in a salvadoran community

Abstract

water as a subject matter, their values, beliefs, behaviors, experiences and future thoughts in the natural construction of a common reality, which translate into their daily actions. The purpose was to understand how people organize themselves to meet the need for their human right to water and how they form common sense regarding its preservation in a Salvadoran community. To achieve this objective, we worked from a mixed research approach with a predominance of the qualitative approach that helped to interpret the perspective of social actors. Among the most important findings, it is mentioned that the inhabitants of the sector under study have a common thought regarding about ‘the sense of abundance and property over water’, in terms of access and availability, they are not concerned about scarcity, nor do they occupy life time to obtain the liquid for their homes, some of them use an intra-domiciliary well and the others have installed the drinking water service; however, as a fact matter it is also clear the lack of confidence about the quality of water for human consumption, therefore; half of the users of the service adhere to the purchase of bottled or bagged water, regardless of whether it generates an extra cost for the family budget. There are conflicting opinions among the study subjects regarding future thoughts, some have not introjected water as a scarce or limited resource, and others, although there is fear or uncertainty regarding scarcity, no one assume individual responsibility, but they expect other people to influence the making of good decisions, for example, the directive of the water self-supply system that captures and distributes the resource in the area.