This article presents a systematic review of sustainable watershed management at the international level. Based on the risk regulation approach, this review approaches the specific gaps in the literature related to relevant issues outlining the international freshwater resources socio-environmental regulation issue, especially in regards to its sociological dimensions: the organizational capabilities of agents involved in regulatory efforts, issue-implicit challenges, and regulatory effort-generated socio-environmental risks. The study identifies the reflexive components of the involved institutions, outlines the deployment of organizational processes in normative regulatory components, and explores the modalities for addressing change and complexity in the regulatory field. A corpus of 64 articles published in the Web of Science (WoS) and Scopus databases between 2021 and 2024 was analyzed, and the following findings are demonstrated: (1) regulatory requirements emerge across the three dimensions due to sociological factors, with the need for broad-ranging coordination capacities and socio-technical improvements highlighted, (2) while high political–technical capacities are exhibited by regulatory agents in the field of study, significant regulatory challenges persist, complicating the sustainable management of watersheds, and (3) decision-making based on socio-environmental risks is deemed feasible within the field of study, enabling advancements in techno-scientific and socio-political areas, although achieving this is considered challenging. It is concluded that sustainable watershed management can be better understood when the risk-based approach is used as an explanatory framework, particularly in priority areas for addressing—and regulating—the global and local dilemmas involved in governing water resources. As this field has been scarcely examined from this perspective, a series of potential research avenues with substantial scope are faced by the social sciences. Socio-environmental challenges related to water should be rigorously analyzed in future studies through innovative approaches, with the social components of the issue prioritized.

The regulatory conditions present regarding anthropogenic pollution of two large Chilean Northern Patagonian lakes, Llanquihue and Villarrica, are analyzed. Taking the risk-based approach (RBA) as a reference framework, the study addresses three relevant dimensions of the socio-environmental risks present in the regulatory regimes of each ecosystem: (1) the reflexive components of the institutions involved, (2) the deployment of organizational processes regarding regulatory norms, and (3) the modalities for addressing change and complexity in the regulatory field. Developing a qualitative multiple-case study with criterion-oriented maximum variation sampling, 40 individual interviews conducted with participants who perform tasks in both cases are analyzed, examining their regulatory configurations according to the investigated dimensions. The most important findings account for: (1) an institutional attenuation that bureaucratically minimizes socio-environmental risks, hindering the transition towards preventive approaches marked by a political culture that prioritizes formal compliance over territorial management; (2) a profound institutional fragmentation and centralization of regulation that dilutes responsibility, operating under logics of minimal efforts that prevent the watershed perspective from achieving normative legitimacy; and (3) a regulatory field overwhelmed by wide-ranging phenomena of difficult regulatory management, where the binary classification of saturation proves insufficient to address diffuse pollution and risks of difficult reversibility. It is concluded that strengthening the regulatory capacities of emerging nations regarding the socio-environmental protection of large lakes requires gradually integrating risk as an organizing criterion and prospecting watershed governance based on multiple regimes complementary to the regulatory effort of the already atomized and centralized normative instruments available.

This article examines how the expansion of agribusiness and water infrastructure has reconfigured Pontal do Paranapanema, Brazil, through neoextractivist dynamics with neocolonial traits. Drawing on documentary analysis and socio‐environmental indicators, it investigates how transnational capital, state mediation and integration into global commodity markets reorganise the territory. The findings show that these mechanisms concentrate control over land, water and strategic infrastructure whilst externalising socio‐environmental costs onto local communities. The article's main contribution lies in distinguishing neoextractivism as a territorial pattern of accumulation from neocolonialism as the power relationship that sustains it.