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| Titel |
Looking beyond the destruction of the GLOF-Early Warning System of the Lake 513 in the Peruvian Andes by the local rural population |
| VerfasserIn |
Christine Jurt, Luis Vicuña, María Dulce Burga, Christian Huggel, Holger Frey |
| Konferenz |
EGU General Assembly 2017
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| Medientyp |
Artikel
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| Sprache |
en
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| Digitales Dokument |
PDF |
| Erschienen |
In: GRA - Volume 19 (2017) |
| Datensatznummer |
250150417
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| Publikation (Nr.) |
 EGU/EGU2017-14878.pdf |
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| Zusammenfassung |
| The news about the destruction of the early warning system of the glacial Lake 513 at the headwaters of the Chucchún catchment in Peru’s Cordillera Blanca left many people perplexed. The early warning system was installed after around 40 years of glacier hazard management in the region. It was developed within a project that is widely considered as particularly successful with a close cooperation of several Peruvian institutions, the local municipality, the community and Swiss scientists. From a risk reduction point of view, the early warning system is a critical factor and its destruction by local people themselves is hardly comprehensible.
Three month of fieldwork on site in the local communities of the Chucchún catchment during and after the installation of the system, including semi-structured interviews, group discussions and participatory observations as well the participation in the project allowed us to get deeper insights into the context and background of what has occurred.
Here, we approach the destruction of the early warning system by analyzing different perspectives on encounters between different actors involved - local groups, scientists from Peru and Switzerland, technical staff, NGO in the field of development, representatives of governmental institutions. Such encounters between the different actors during the practice of science (e.g. doing fieldwork) or during the installation of the early warning system (as for instance in meetings on site) are crucial for overcoming gaps between scientific and local knowledge as well as between knowledge and practice. This led to new insights into the discussion of the case of destruction in Chucchún.
Mutual perceptions among the groups, self-perceptions and perceptions of both visible and invisible risks shape the discourses about risks and measures in specific situations of encounters during the project. Particularly striking, however, are different perspectives on encounters in the past between representatives of groups which are now involved in the project, and how these encounters are analyzed in the actual in terms of the present and future. |
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