Restoration perceptions and collaboration challenges under severe water scarcity: the Aculeo Lake process

A governmental watershed collaborative process in Aculeo, a semi-endorheic 149 km² sub-basin in Chile, debated options for the water scarcity problems they were facing, including their lake desiccation. However, instead of joining forces, discussions around the possibility of recovering the lake generated further conflicts, revealing that it was not a goal shared by all. In this article, we explore the different perceptions and reasons that influenced preferences on restoring or rehabilitating the Aculeo Lake. By collecting, coding, and comparing before and during collaborative process perceptions, we analyzed the perceptions of the proposed Aculeo Lake rehabilitation that are shared among both those who oppose and those who support it. Results indicate that the underlying disagreement was primarily due to differences in shore property rights and lake access, which was also linked to different opinions about land uses in the territory. This research displays how both values and understandings of problems, along with history of a site, can impact stakeholders' restoration preferences and turn into a collaboration challenge.