“Water Is Our Mother”: Eco-Spiritual Governance Among the Papallaqta of the Colombian Andes

Abstract

Amid a deepening global socio-ecological crisis, Indigenous eco-spiritual practices are gaining renewed relevance for environmental governance. This article examines the water-caring practices of the Papallaqta, an Indigenous community in the Colombian Macizo—one of South America’s most vital hydrological systems. Drawing on relational methodologies, as well as extensive fieldwork conducted between 2024 and 2025, the study shows how Papallaqta spiritual relationships with water constitute a sophisticated form of governance grounded in reciprocity, reverence, and more-than-human relationality. The article situates these practices within global debates on environmental governance, where recent COP16 (Cali) and COP30 (Belém) summits have revealed the limits of technocratic, market-driven approaches to biodiversity loss, energy transition, and climate justice. Against these constraints, Papallaqta eco-spiritual governance offers an alternative paradigm based on spiritual animacy, legal cosmologies, and embodied ecological stewardship. Empirically, the article documents four interrelated dimensions of Papallaqta water-care: offerings to the water, ecological stewardship, territorial governance, and memory and cultural revitalization. Conceptually, it proposes eco-spiritual governance as an analytic for understanding how spiritual world-making informs environmental ethics, justice, and peacebuilding. The study concludes that Papallaqta practices illuminate viable pathways toward relational and regenerative environmental governance urgently needed in the current planetary crisis.

1. Introduction

The lagoon is my mother—source of life, healer, and teacher. Her waters cleanse fear and selfishness, transforming sorrow into light and renewal. To remain connected to her is to remember who we are and where we belong.

(Author’s fieldnotes, Cusillaq lagoon, June 2025)

At dawn, walking alongside elder Mayor Milo toward the Cusillaq lagoon1, I learned that water listens. As we approached the ridge, he reminded us to quiet the mind and open the heart, because the lagoon “feels” the intention of those who enter her domain. Moments later, the clouds shifted—first tightening in a dark spiral, then opening slowly, as if the waters themselves were acknowledging our presence. Papallaqta elders, who live in the high Andean territory of the Colombian Macizo, teach that water is a sacred living being, a mother, a governor, an ancestor who sustains both territory and spirit.

While these moments unfolded in the highlands of the Colombian Macizo, debates over global environmental governance intensified amid the socio-ecological collapse. Recent international gatherings—including the UN Biodiversity Conference (COP16) held in Cali, Colombia, in October 2024 and the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP30), held in Belém, Brazil, in November 2025, two major global summits on biodiversity and climate policy—have revealed the limits of technocratic, market-driven environmental governance to address the ecological crisis. Despite ambitious rhetoric, both events exposed how difficult it is to translate pledges into tangible results on biodiversity protection, energy transition, and climate justice (Catanoso 2024; WWF 2024; Climate Home News 2024; Rodrigues and Tollefson 2025). At the same time, in both venues, Indigenous Peoples mobilized and raised their voices and concerns about the earth’s future, making their presence impossible to ignore (Gabay 2024; Sengupta et al. 2025). However, despite their increased recognition, these voices still struggle to meaningfully influence state and corporate decision-making. What is truly at stake in these global arenas is the underlying values that guide the economy—whether the extractivist logic that prevails or the eco-spiritual principles long practiced by Indigenous Peoples, as the Papallaqta show: caring as humans for a living sacred planet we are inextricably part of.

This article situates Papallaqta water-caring practices within this broader values shift. Far from symbolic gestures, these practices constitute concrete relational forms of governance grounded in reciprocity, reverence, and the intrinsic value of life. By placing global debates in conversation with situated Indigenous practices, the article argues that eco-spiritual governance offers critical insight and expands the ethical imagination in debates about the urgently needed paradigm shift in environmental governance.

This inquiry enters a growing conversation within the study of religion about how spiritual relations with land and water shape ethical, political, and ecological life. Recent work in Religions has highlighted lived, embodied engagements with more-than-human beings as central to religious experience (Morales 2022; Murad and Tavares 2023; Bock 2024). Building on this emerging terrain, Bock’s (2024) analysis of ecospiritual praxis is particularly illuminating. She argues (p. 3) that eco-spiritual practices foster attentiveness, relational awareness, and emotional engagement with the more-than-human world—drawing on spiritual and Indigenous traditions that emphasize reciprocity and mutual care. For Bock, ecological transformation requires not only institutional reform but a reorientation of perception and relationship. This article builds on that opening, bringing Papallaqta eco-spiritual governance into dialogue with this developing field to affirm that Indigenous water-care practices themselves constitute a sophisticated religious, ethical, and ecological world-making.

The Colombian Macizo is a crucial site for this reflection. Often called the “star of water,” it is the birthplace of Colombia’s major rivers and a biocultural nexus where ecological abundance and cultural diversity converge. Its moorlands, glacial lagoons, and wetlands form the hydrological heart of the country. Yet, they sit at the center of overlapping pressures: criminal groups disputing territorial control, expanding extractive industries targeting high-mountain minerals, and competing sovereignties between state institutions, Indigenous authorities, and private actors. In this context, Papallaqta guardianship of water is not only cultural continuity but a form of territorial governance that enacts resistance, ecological justice, and peacebuilding—preserving life in a region where environmental and political conflicts are deeply intertwined (Gómez Dueñas 2015; CRIC 2022).

The contribution of this article is therefore twofold. Empirically, it brings forward Papallaqta voices and practices that reveal how water-caring is not a symbolic ritual but a concrete mode of governance in one of Colombia’s most strategic ecological regions. Conceptually, it advances eco-spiritual governance as an analytic that integrates spiritual animacy, legal cosmologies, ecological stewardship, and peacebuilding. This framework illuminates how Indigenous relational ontologies challenge and expand dominant paradigms in global environmental governance, particularly those exposed as insufficient during recent global summits. By foregrounding Papallaqta world-making, the article argues that meaningful ecological transformation requires not only institutional reform but a shift in values—toward reciprocity, relationality, and reverence for the more-than-human world. The relevance of Papallaqta water-caring practices lies not in their scalability as institutional blueprints, but rather in their capacity to unsettle anthropocentric and market-based assumptions about how water, life, and territory are valued and governed.

The article is structured as follows. After this introduction, Section 2 outlines the study’s methodological and epistemological foundations. Section 3 provides the geographic and historical context of the Colombian Macizo and the Papallaqta people. Section 4 describes the Papallaqta water-caring practices, detailing four interrelated dimensions: offerings to the water, ecological stewardship, territorial governance and justice, and cultural revitalization. Section 5 draws out the broader theoretical and global resonances of these practices, connecting them to debates on re-enchantment, more-than-human ethics, and fostering care in the global economy. Section 6 offers some conclusions.

2. Methodology

This study builds on phenomenological, decolonial, relational, and holistic science approaches that understand knowledge as emerging through lived experience and encounter rather than abstraction. My positionality is central to this orientation: I write as a Colombian researcher committed to rural livelihoods, peacebuilding and ecological regeneration and as a learner who walks alongside Papallaqta elders and spiritual authorities. Fieldwork was conducted between October 2024 and June 2025 and included interviews in Bogotá, Popayán, Timbío, and Valencia (in the southwestern region of Cauca, Colombia); participant observation of community rituals; and walks to sacred sites, including the Cusillaq lagoon. My engagement with the Papallaqta community was conducted primarily in Spanish, the language used in everyday interactions, alongside ongoing efforts by elders and authorities to revitalize their own language, oral traditions, and ancestral forms of knowledge transmission. These encounters grounded the inquiry in direct engagement with place, revealing knowledge as something generated through relation—knowing with rather than knowing about.

In approaching this research, it is also essential to recognize the more-than-human agencies through which knowledge is understood to emerge in Papallaqta practice. Water—conceived in Papallaqta cosmology as a living presence and authority—figures as a carrier of knowledge, as do the community’s spiritual authorities, particularly Mayor Milo. Much of what I learned emerged while walking the territory: conversations held on the path to the Cusillaq lagoon, the shifting winds across the moorlands, the guidance of birds and plants; and insights that, within Papallaqta interpretive frames, are disclosed through dreams, meditations, and ceremonies. These experiences underscored that knowledge in this context arises relationally, through dialogue with body, land, water, and spirit, rather than through detached observation. Accordingly, claims in this article regarding the animacy of water are grounded in Papallaqta’s relational understandings and their ancestral ways of interpreting the more-than-human world; they are presented as ethnographic documentation of those epistemic and governance practices.

This epistemological foundation resonates with phenomenological traditions that emphasize embodied perception (Abram 1996) and with Indigenous epistemologies in which knowledge is relational, situated, and inseparable from territory (Vargas-Roncancio 2024). As Barbosa-Estepa (2011, p. 58) notes, in Indigenous contexts the knowledgeable person is an integral part of the order that defines the world and therefore cannot think of herself outside it; the knower is above all a member of her culture and land, anchored to it through her own life. Holistic science similarly rejects mechanistic separations between observer and observed; instead, it approaches nature as a dynamic field of relations in which perception is a form of participation (Harding 2009; Capra and Luisi 2014; Bortoft 1996).

Finally, collaboration with Papallaqta authorities shaped every stage of the research—from consent and interpretation to the sharing of insights. Rather than treating Papallaqta practices as data, the research pursued dialogue and reciprocity, recognizing the community and the territory as co-producers of knowledge.

3. Situating the Colombian Macizo and the Papallaqta People

The Colombian Macizo is one of the most ecologically vital regions in South America. This mountainous region, marked by remarkable ecological, hydrological, and cultural complexity, spans the departments of Cauca, Huila, Putumayo, and Nariño. This node—literally Macizo in Spanish—connects the Andes with the Amazon, the Pacific, and the Atlantic basins, functioning as a geological, climatic, and ecological hinge of the continent. The Macizo is the birthplace of Colombia’s principal river systems—the Magdalena, the Cauca, the Caquetá, and the Putumayo—and holds one of the country’s largest reserves of freshwater. At an average altitude of 2700 m, it contains more than seventy glacial lakes, wetlands, Andean forests, and moorlands that act as “cloud catchers,” capturing humidity carried by winds from all directions (De Valdenebro 2021).

The region’s high rainfall, combined with the moorlands’ ecological structure, enables atmospheric moisture to flow into streams and major watersheds, making the Macizo the hydrological heart of Colombia. It is estimated that this area produces nearly 70 percent of the country’s water and contains 12.4 percent of its moorlands, 15.5 percent of its Andean forests, 21.2 percent of its bird species, and 16 percent of its mammals (Parques Nacionales Naturales de Colombia 2013).

The Macizo is not only an ecological reserve but also a region of immense cultural richness and historical resilience. It has long been a center of social and political mobilization, characterized by struggles for differential recognition and self-determination (Herrera 2003). For centuries, Indigenous peoples (Yanacona, Papallaqta, Nasa, Misak, Coconucos), Afro-descendant communities, and peasant populations have inhabited its slopes and valleys, weaving intimate and symbiotic relationships with water and territory (Nates Cruz 2022; Portela Guarín 2000; Velarde Prieto et al. 2021). Through their ancestral practices, knowledge, and spirituality, these communities have safeguarded ecosystems and resisted multiple forms of dispossession, armed violence, extractivism, and state neglect.

Although their roots as a people trace back to an Inca-related tribe documented since the seventeenth century, Papallaqta identity has long been marginalized. Recent studies have mapped the historical presence of Papallaqta and Yanacona peoples as part of ancient lineages connected to the Inca empire (CRIC 2022). While ancestral settlements in the Macizo date back centuries, the organization of the Papallaqta’s autonomous government (cabildo in Spanish) gained strength in 1999 and was formally recognized in 2005 as a cabildo (CRIC 2018). This recognition served not only as a mechanism of political legitimacy but also as protection from stigmatization and threats from armed actors. Today, the Papallaqta community is situated in Valencia, an ancestral agricultural and pastoral settlement in the municipality of San Sebastián, at the heart of the Valle de las Papas. Currently, the community comprises 309 families and 746 people (Unidad de Restitución de Tierras 2023). It belongs to the southern zone of the Cabildo Mayor Yanacona, which in turn is part of Cauca’s Indigenous Regional Council (CRIC, for its initials in Spanish).

During the 1990s, the Papallaqta community suffered severe human rights violations as a result of the armed conflict between paramilitary and guerrilla groups in the region. As part of the implementation of the 2016 Peace Agreement with the FARC guerrilla group, these atrocities were documented by Colombia’s Truth Commission’s ethnic chapter (Comisión para el Esclarecimiento de la Verdad, la Convivencia y la No Repetición 2022). More recently, the Colombian Macizo faces escalating threats that endanger both its socio-environmental equilibrium and the survival of its inhabitants. The advance of legal and illegal extractive economies has deepened the dynamics of dispossession and commodification of nature. In several areas, the expansion of mining—through state concessions, informal extraction, and illicit operations—has exerted intense pressure on mountain ecosystems, contaminating rivers with mercury and cyanide, degrading soils, and fragmenting community life. A striking example is the disappearance of the Sambingo River, once part of the Pacific watershed, which ran through the municipalities of Mercaderes and Bolívar and now survives only in memory—a reminder of how unregulated mining literally dries the Macizo’s living systems (Bonza 2024).

These environmental pressures intersect with persistent armed violence. Illegal armed groups continue to dispute control over strategic corridors in the Macizo, regulating population movements, imposing parallel norms, and managing parts of the local economy—forms of what many in the region describe as criminal governance (Gómez Dueñas 2015). In numerous municipalities and hamlets, this presence undermines community autonomy, restricts basic freedoms, and enforces an order grounded in fear and coercion amid weak or ambiguous state responses. In this fraught landscape, it becomes crucial to focus more closely on the Papallaqta, whose governance practices and spiritual worldview offer a counterpoint to this erosion of rights, embodying a distinct mode of territorial care and water stewardship. Their example also invites a broader reflection on the necessary transition from paradigms of predation and extractivism toward ones grounded in care, reciprocity, and regeneration. The practices of the Papallaqta provide tangible reference points for imagining and enacting this civilizational shift, showing how water governance can be both a spiritual and material pathway to transformation even amid strenuous contexts.

4. Papallaqta Water-Caring Practices

In the words of Yanacona elders, the Papallaqta community lies in the “Womb of Mother Earth,” a sacred center that gives life to two of Colombia’s most significant rivers: the Caquetá, which flows into the Amazon, and the Magdalena, whose headwaters emerge from the Yumamuy (Magdalena) lagoon. This same high-altitude zone nourishes tributaries of the Patía River, including the San Jorge, Cajibío, and Guachicono, which flow through territories such as Río Blanco, Guachicono, and El Oso. In this hydrosocial landscape, water is not simply a natural resource but a living being who governs, remembers and organizes the territory. Eco-spiritual governance is therefore not an abstract system but an embodied practice enacted through myth, ritual, ecological knowledge, and concrete territorial norms deeply rooted in the sensory and spiritual geography of the Macizo. Myth, ritual, and story intertwine with situated knowledge of the territory and with the concrete governance practices that protect the water springs. History, culture, ecology, and governance form an inseparable weaving in which narrative and practice reinforce one another.

What follows is a description of four interrelated dimensions of the Papallaqta water-caring practices: offerings to the water, ecological stewardship, governance and justice, and memory, education, and cultural revitalization. These dimensions are not discrete categories but overlapping expressions of a relational world that, as we will subsequently examine, resonate with global reflections on eco-spirituality.

Analytically, I treat ethnographic data in two registers: first, as Papallaqta interpretations offered by spiritual authorities that frame bodily and atmospheric responses as forms of communication and second, as phenomenological evidence of how governance is enacted through attunement, permission, and affect. I do not claim these experiences “verify” animacy in a positivist sense; rather, they document the relational conditions through which animacy is known and governed in Papallaqta practice. Here I distinguish (i) attributed statements voiced by Papallaqta elders and authorities (especially Mayor Milo) and other participants; (ii) collective understandings enacted and articulated in ceremonies and shared conversations; and (iii) my interpretive synthesis as a researcher working within relational and phenomenological methodologies.

4.1. Offering to the Waters

As ethnographic work has shown, Andean Indigenous Peoples like the Papallaqta, regardless of their villages’ altitudes, tend to locate their sacred sites in the highlands, which are “cooler” and thus help “refresh” norms and harmonize environmental or social conflicts. Their rituals aim to reinforce norms related to the use and management of resources; water ecosystems are of great importance in them as in their broader understanding and explaining the world (Portela Guarín 2000, pp. 18–23; Nates Cruz 2022, p. 59).

Particularly for the Papallaqta, offering ceremonies at lagoons, springs, and mountain passes reaffirm the reciprocal bond between humans and water beings, and constitute a concrete mode of relational governance. As a woman of the community expressed, “the offerings are payments to Mother Earth and Mother Water that we make together in the form of minga [collective work] of thought, and we take them to the water sources” (Tisnes 2025). Such offerings—flowers, maize, songs, poetry, and artwork—are not conceived as symbolic “gifts” in an abstract sense, but as acts of permission-seeking and energetic renewal through which humans align themselves with the water beings’ authority dispositions.

During fieldwork, I came to understand this relational logic not as a theoretical claim but through embodied encounters guided and interpreted within Papallaqta cosmology. Upon arriving at the Cusillaq lagoon, Mayor Milo asked me to close my eyes and attend inwardly, advising me to approach the lagoon “with good intentions and gratitude.” As I followed his guidance and opened my eyes to the lagoon, I experienced an intense emotional release and physical trembling. Mayor Milo immediately contextualized this reaction, explaining that “she is washing away your pains and sorrows—just let it go.” Over an extended period of stillness, I experienced a deep sense of reassurance and containment, which elders later described as the lagoon’s way of receiving and cleansing. Within Papallaqta understanding, such experiences are not individualized psychological events but relational encounters through which the lagoon communicates care, acceptance, and teaching. The lagoon teaches not through verbal instruction but through affective, bodily, and environmental cues that require attentiveness, humility, and relational presence.

This is why offerings or pagamentos sustain a relationship not of worship but of kinship: they help feed the waters and renew the conditions for care. As Mayor Milo explained, “what we do [with these offerings] is to feed all the water bodies full of energy (lagoons, the snow-capped mountains, the mountain ranges, the rivers, the waterfalls, the flooded areas, the moors). Our task is to keep alive that spirituality that has been lost, and to send this message to all humanity. We are all responsible [of caring]” (Tisnes 2025).

4.2. Ecological Stewardship

As Mayor Milo explained, in Papallaqta’s worldview, there is no actual separation between the spiritual dimension and ecological protection, and spiritual ethics translate into tangible conservation practices. Based on interviews and participation observation, Papallaqta profound knowledge of environmental management and conservation is embedded within their broader conception of sumak kawsay (Quechua for “living well” or “living in harmony”). Every member of the community, at every stage of their life cycle, has a role in carrying out the daily activities of moorland protection and stewardship. For Papallaqta, water stewardship is an active, ongoing responsibility that entails walking regularly to springs, wetlands, and lagoons to clear pathways for water flows; replant native trees and moorland vegetation; and monitor animal behavior, weather patterns, and subtle ecological shifts. In this regard, Portela argues that not only Papallaqta but, more generally, the various Indigenous Peoples who have lived in Cauca for centuries represent a harmonious coexistence of these societies with their environment. It is not without reason that they call themselves the “nature stewards” (Portela Guarín 2000, p. 12).

Since 1975, Papallaqta authorities have also sustained a long-standing collaboration with Colombia’s National Parks Agency since 1975. For Mayor Milo, this joint work has brought both benefits and tensions: it has supported ecological monitoring and helped secure broader recognition of the Macizo’s significance, while also introducing bureaucratic constraints that sideline local knowledge and spiritual authority. Still, this experience illustrates how Papallaqta leadership navigates the intersection between institutional conservation frameworks and ancestral forms of environmental care.

4.3. Governance and Justice

An essential aspect of protecting all this territory and the water it gives birth to has been the fight the Papallaqta have given for recognition and collective land titling. According to a former governor of the Papallaqta community I interviewed during fieldwork, now approximately 20,000 hectares of their territory are moorlands, 75–80 percent of which are swamps and forests, while only 20–25 percent are cultivated—primarily for potato farming. A recent milestone in their struggle for land rights was the state’s restitution of 31 hectares of their territory in March 2023, the first collective Indigenous restitution case in Cauca. This judicial decision recognized Papallaqta as victims of the armed conflict (1990–2020) and mandated comprehensive reparations (Unidad de Restitución de Tierras 2023). Since then, the Papallaqta have strengthened their institutions aimed at recovering ancestral practices and asserting territorial control through justice systems and community mechanisms.

Despite these advances, local accounts consistently pointed to persistent regulatory gaps and unresolved tenure arrangements. In practice, a significant portion of the moorland remains under private ownership, where indiscriminate potato cultivation destabilizes ecological balance, reduces water availability, and undermines the well-being of both Indigenous and peasant communities. Gold and mineral extraction, particularly in the upper parts of San Sebastián, adds further pressure. However, social and community organizations—both peasant and Indigenous—have resisted peacefully, preventing the entry of multinational companies and small- and medium-scale mining operations. Their resistance is sustained by collective organization and a shared commitment to community transformation and ecological defense.

A former governor told me that, through their system of Gobierno Propio (self-government) and the defense of autonomy in territorial stewardship, the Papallaqta have developed community norms and institutions to protect water, reaffirming their role as “guardians of the mountain.” Guided by their cosmovision, they understand their responsibility to preserve life in its totality. The inauguration of the first woman to serve as community Governor in June 2025, which I was able to attend, marked a moment of profound symbolic progress in their Gobierno Propio. During the event, I observed elders, midwives, and spiritual leaders perform rituals of harmonization and offering to the water spirits, invoking the lagoon’s blessing for her mandate. Their ongoing commitment reflects an enduring effort to protect the “womb of Mother Earth” as a site of spiritual, ecological, and political regeneration. As elders proclaimed during the ceremony, “the Governor takes care of the water, and the water takes care of the people.” Governance is thus inseparable from spiritual responsibility.

Drawing on a documentary coproduced by the Papallaqta traditional authorities (Tisnes 2025), it is possible to examine how, in terms of justice, the Papallaqta regulate access to land, land use, and conflict resolution through their ancestral justice systems, such as the Papallaqta Council of Ancestral Authorities, grounding these processes in spiritual principles that prioritize balance and collective well-being over individual ownership. According to a traditional authority, justice is not punitive but restorative; key decisions are made after rituals of harmonization, during which elders attune to the landscape and listen to the voices of water and wind. From their own perspectives, certain conflicts require consultation with water beings who “mediate” justice while traditional authorities interpret their guidance through signs and dreams. In this sense, I view Papallaqta customary justice as operating through a plural normative register: it draws on constitutional recognition and legal procedure, while remaining accountable to rivers and more-than-human mandates.

4.4. Memory, Education and Cultural Revitalization

In Papallaqta’s vision, water holds memory, wisdom, and life-giving force. They bring back their ancestors’ teachings by spiritually connecting with water. Festivals, gathering spaces, and traditional education practices strengthen collective memory and ensure the transmission of cosmological teachings to younger generations amid various cultural pressures. The Yachay Wasi (House of Knowledge), as one community member told me, aims to foster cultural, health, and environmental projects, as well as spaces of exchange that reinforce solidarity and ancestral medicine. Within the Yachay Wasi, children and elders weave stories, songs, and medicinal teachings that preserve the Papallaqta language of care. These acts of cultural renewal are not merely commemorative—they are pedagogies of belonging, ensuring that, in Papallaqta terms, the spirit of the lagoon and mountains continues to guide future generations. More recently, they have also revitalized cultural identity through festivities such as the Kapaq Inti Raymi—the ancestral festival of the Great Sun—dedicated to spiritual and environmental restoration, reciprocity, and gratitude.

The Elders are also in the process of creating the Willka Aya Wasiya—the Sacred House of the Spirit of Water—that aims to offer a space for educating their own communities, as well as Colombians and foreigners, in the sacredness of water and Papallaqta’s spiritual connection with her. According to Mayor Milo, moving forward with this initiative requires first and foremost obtaining permission from their ancestors, and especially from the Water-Mother Spirit. “Once it is built, in this House we will give guidance on how to care for water and the springs that exist on a global scale” (Tisnes 2025).

Together, these practices reveal a model of governance in which spirituality, law, ecology, and culture are inseparable. Papallaqta eco-spiritual governance not only protects the sources of water but also nurtures the conditions for peace, autonomy, and the regeneration of life itself. As Portela Guarín (2000, p. 65) emphasizes, the mountains and waters are inhabited by the tutelary spirits who ensure balance and reciprocity between beings. In my interpretation, Papallaqta water-care practices translate this cosmological premise into everyday institutions of justice, stewardship, and education—so that ritual, ecology and governance operate as mutually reinforcing domains of relational responsibility.

5. Global Resonances

Amid the global socio-ecological crisis, Papallaqta’s eco-spiritual governance holds importance that goes beyond the Macizo or Indigenous peoples, insofar as it articulates ethical, legal, and political principles relevant to environmental movements and ecological global justice. By foregrounding these practices in their specificity, the analysis illuminates how Papallaqta communities govern socio-ecological relations through values of reciprocity, reverence, and responsibility. The relevance of these practices lies not in their prescriptive scalability as universal institutional models, but in their capacity to offer territorially situated insights that expose the ethical limits—and expand the ontological horizons—of dominant assumptions about how water, life, and territory are valued and governed in contemporary global frameworks. Rather than advancing a comprehensive governance blueprint, these practices may be understood as a heuristic, relational and ethical vocabulary that can enter into dialogue with plural legal, political, and cultural traditions in contexts marked by deep value diversity. To frame this discussion, I propose three distinct but interconnected contributions of the Papallaqta water-caring practices: one related to the re-enchantment and animacy of the global ecological commons, another to more-than-human ethical mandates, and a third to fostering care and intrinsic value in the global economy.

5.1. Re-Enchantment and Animacy of the Global Ecological Commons

Across scientific, spiritual, and Indigenous traditions, water is understood not merely as a substance but as a living, animating principle. Contemporary phenomenological, holistic science and quantum approaches (Abram 1996; Capra and Luisi 2014; Bortoft 1996; Edney 2016)—such as those advanced by Glenn Edney—suggest that water possesses a “fifth dimension”: a capacity for coherence, memory, and relational responsiveness that exceeds mechanistic descriptions. Water forms dynamic molecular structures capable of storing and transmitting information, positioning it as a medium of connection across ecosystems and bodies.

MacFarlane (2025) traces how cultures throughout history—except in the recent period since Industrialization—have revered water as sacred, recognizing its role in shaping land, consciousness, and cosmology. For many Andean and Amazonian peoples, water is both origin and destiny: the womb of life and a living intelligence. Indigenous epistemologies thus converge with holistic science in affirming water’s intrinsic vitality and agency. These perspectives help illuminate Papallaqta cosmology: the lagoon as womb, the moorland as breathing body, rivers as gendered relational beings. Scientific, philosophical, and ancestral knowledges meet in recognizing that water is not a resource but a presence—a Being who governs, communicates, and sustains life.

Moreover, drawing from recent scholarship (Vargas-Roncancio 2024; De la Cadena 2015; Querajazu 2024; and Edney 2016), Papallaqta eco-spiritual governance sits within broader movements of re-enchantment and the resurgence of more-than-human ethics. Vargas-Roncancio’s idea of “legal lives” reveals how Indigenous law operates through relational obligations. Querajazu’s “spiritual animacy” extends this to sacred beings as political actors. Edney (p. 49) expands the frame to planetary scales, calling for a renewed covenant with the ocean and water as living presence. Together, these approaches provide a language for understanding Papallaqta governance as a grammar of water-care grounded in reciprocity and reverence.

Papallaqta practices also expand our “regimes of perceptibility” (MacFarlane 2024, p. 144), challenging the invisibility of water guardians marginalized in mainstream policy debates. They expose how consumerism and disconnection from nature perpetuate ecological degradation and emotional alienation. Healing this void requires a reconnection with the living world. Recognizing ourselves as constituted by the same Sacred Water—as Mayor Milo teaches—invites practices of offering, gratitude, and attentiveness. For the Papallaqta, spiritual contemplation and ecological care are inseparable daily acts that continually renew ties to heart, community, and land. In an era of ecological collapse, purely technical solutions cannot address the deeper crisis of meaning and relationship at the heart of the Anthropocene. Papallaqta practices reveal that regeneration arises from reweaving spiritual, emotional, and ecological relations.

5.2. More-than-Human Mandates for Ecological Justice

Papallaqta eco-spiritual governance reframes justice not as the distribution of resources among humans, but as the continual restoration of balance among human and more-than-human beings. This perspective illuminates the profound limits of prevailing anthropocentric responses to the ecological crisis—particularly the reliance on market instruments, technological fixes, and carbon accounting that dominated recent global environmental governance debates at COP16 (Cali) and COP30 (Belém). These frameworks assume that ecological breakdown can be solved within the same logics of extraction, efficiency, metrics, and growth that fueled the crisis in the first place. By contrast, Papallaqta practices foreground obligations—to water, to land, to ancestors, to future generations—rather than rights or incentives. In pluralist societies, such mandates cannot be imposed as shared metaphysical commitments; rather, they operate as ethical provocations that unsettle anthropocentric assumptions while remaining compatible with institutional plurality.

Within Papallaqta’s relational world, water does not merely sustain life: water participates in governance. Justice emerges through practices of attunement and permission. In this sense, Papallaqta justice offers insights on how to regulate socio-ecological relations. This orientation resonates with global movements challenging anthropocentric governance and proposing diplomatic ethics rooted in humility before life. For example, Rodríguez-Garavito (2024) argues that environmental law must expand beyond anthropocentric frameworks by recognizing ecosystems and nonhuman entities as political and legal actors. Read in this light, Papallaqta rituals of offering, protection, and harmonization illuminate pathways for materializing a moral ecology in which giving back is the foundational principle of governance—an ethic that can inform policy and legal debates not by replacing liberal institutions but by widening what counts as justice, who counts as judge, and what kinds of obligations anchor legitimate ecological governance.

5.3. Fostering Care and Intrinsic Value in the Global Economy

Papallaqta eco-spiritual governance offers regenerative alternatives to extractivist paradigms that dominate the global economy. Their teachings illuminate a radically different ethic of care—one grounded not in abstract norms but in embodied relationality. As Mayor Milo explained, “we all have our own bodily waters and can connect with nature’s waters” (Tisnes 2025). To recognize this is to understand that care is not a moral obligation imposed from outside, but a felt reciprocity that arises from knowing ourselves as part of the Water-Mother’s body.

Responsibility arises from relationship—what ecological feminists call affective responsibility (De la Bellacasa 2017). Action is born not from compliance but from affection, gratitude, and kinship. This relational ethic challenges the foundations of contemporary environmental economics, which continues to rely on market incentives, cost–benefit logic, and mechanisms such as carbon markets, biodiversity offsets, or “payments for ecosystem services.” These instruments presuppose that nature must be valued economically in order to be protected. Papallaqta governance shows the opposite: protection arises from reverence, not from price.

Responsibility becomes a relational impulse—a sentient, affective desire for the well-being of the other. Papallaqta water-care also points to a common theme in various eco-spiritual traditions: that no life exists independently, and that genuine ecological action emerges from love, not discipline. Concrete, situated practices of care cultivate attentiveness, reciprocity, and gratitude, values that are largely absent from the growth- and profit-driven logic that structures today’s global economy.

This reflection naturally leads us toward broader discussions on alternatives to development (Gudynas and Acosta 2011). Here, the Papallaqta experience converges with Latin American debates on “Buen Vivir” or Sumak Kawsay. Buen Vivir challenges the extractivist and growth-centered logic of development by affirming that collective well-being emerges from reciprocity, territorial self-determination, and ecological harmony with Nature. Papallaqta eco-spiritual governance offers a concrete example of these alternatives: a regenerative paradigm grounded in interdependence, and care that reframes prosperity not as accumulation or economic growth but as the continual renewal of life.

5.4. Examples of Concrete Measures Adopted

While this article does not seek to provide an exhaustive survey of global institutional and policy frameworks currently engaging with holistic or relational approaches to environmental governance, it is nevertheless important—by way of illustration—to point to concrete developments that demonstrate how paradigms resonant with Papallaqta eco-spiritual governance can be translated into institutional and legal measures. These examples do not indicate convergence toward a single model but instead reveal an emerging plural landscape in which relational ontologies increasingly inform environmental governance across diverse contexts, especially amid systemic failures in conventional technical and management approaches (Macpherson et al. 2024, p. 1).

One clear area of institutional innovation is the growing body of jurisprudence recognizing rivers, forests, and ecosystems as subjects of rights. Landmark cases like the Whanganui River in New Zealand, the Ganges and Yamuna rivers in India, Ecuador’s constitutional recognition of the Rights of Nature, and Colombia’s Atrato River ruling present significant legal shifts (O’Donnell et al. 2020; Macpherson et al. 2021). While these rulings vary widely in scope, design, and effectiveness, they introduce legal imaginaries that resonate strongly with Indigenous relational ontologies. As O’Donnell et al. emphasize (O’Donnell et al. 2020, p. 13), the transformative potential of these legal innovations does not lie merely in the formal attribution of rights, but in whether they meaningfully reconfigure governance practices, redistribute authority, and sustain Indigenous relational values in decision-making processes. Read in this light, Papallaqta eco-spiritual governance highlights a deeper shift—viewing water as a governing subject rather than a resource.

A second domain where such relational perspectives are gaining traction is global environmental governance. Within the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), Indigenous movements have advanced safeguards that recognize the spiritual, cultural, and cosmological dimensions of biodiversity conservation (Simpson (Mitchell) 2022). Article 8(j) and its subsequent decisions explicitly affirm the role of Indigenous knowledge systems, customary governance, spiritual values, and free, prior, and informed consent in biodiversity protection (CBD 2024). Importantly, these provisions seek to prevent the reduction in Indigenous knowledge to market-based instruments or extractive data, instead acknowledging it as embedded in living territories, ceremonial practices, and ethical obligations. This institutional recognition creates formal space—however contested—for eco-spiritual perspectives to inform conservation policy at the international level.

6. Conclusions

The reflections developed in this discussion circle back to the conceptual framework introduced at the beginning of this paper. The Papallaqta case demonstrates how eco-spiritual governance is not an abstract category but lived realities that guide the governance of water, land, and life itself. Their practices embody the very synthesis of spirituality, law, and ecology envisioned by Querajazu’s spiritual animacy. They show that to care for water is to participate in an ongoing dialogue with the Sacred, one that reshapes our sense of belonging and responsibility.

What emerges from the Papallaqta’s example is an invitation to reimagine peacebuilding and environmental governance through an ontological shift—from managing resources to sustaining relationships (Gegeo et al. 2025; Vargas-Roncancio 2024). The water-caring practices observed in Cusillaq reveal that justice flows not from human institutions alone but from alignment with the rhythms and wisdom of the Earth. This is a form of cosmological governance where knowledge arises from listening, healing is collective, and diplomacy extends beyond the human. As McDonagh et al. (2021, p. 8) argue, planetary diplomacy must be grounded in shared spiritual values capable of bridging ecological, ethical, and religious consciousness. In this sense, Papallaqta eco-spiritual governance does not offer a universal template but rather a situated diplomatic ethic—one that, based on its relational repertoire, can enter into dialogue with plural legal, political, and cultural traditions while unsettling dominant extractivist and anthropocentric assumptions.

This conclusion also reflects on my own positionality. Writing from a phenomenological stance shaped by embodied experience, I recognize that the knowledge shared here arises from an ethics of listening—to water, to land, to spiritual authorities, and to the subtle forms of guidance perceived in the journey to Cusillaq.

Ultimately, the Papallaqta remind us that regeneration begins in reverence. Their teachings affirm that every drop of water is both memory and promise—a living testament to the Earth’s sacred continuity. To walk with them is to remember that peace with each other is impossible without peace with the Earth and that our shared task—as scholars, citizens, and caretakers—is to ensure that the waters that sustain life continue to flow clear, free, and alive.