I use the case of Oaxaca's water crisis to explore how development organizations engage with local water problems, what kind of projects they propose, and the degree to which they engage with local actors and context-specific knowledge. I analyze sources across three levels of development discourse production—local, national, and international—to examine the narratives surrounding Oaxaca's water crisis and draw out discrepancies between discourse scales. I find that local sources present the most complex narratives, while international sources flatten Oaxaca's water crisis into a technical problem. National sources fall in between, and individual source outliers shed light on nuances and intersections within and between discourse scales. I argue that international sources exhibit significantly less narrative complexity than local sources, falling short of capturing the realities on the ground and reproducing flattened depictions of Oaxaca's water problem. This thesis contributes to empirical and theoretical understandings of narrative complexity and development discourse and offers novel insights into how narrative complexity and flattening fit into the paradigm of development shortfalls in Oaxaca's water crisis.
Audrey Weckwerth (Sun,) studied this question.