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The Commodification of Water, Social Protest and Cosmopolitan Citizenship

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Title: The Commodification of Water, Social Protest and Cosmopolitan Citizenship


1
The Commodification of Water, Social Protest and
Cosmopolitan Citizenship
  • Professor Bronwen Morgan
  • University of Bristol

2
Introduction
  • Water is a basic necessity, essential to life.
    Profiting from this incontrovertible fact is
    politically problematic, and the commercial
    delivery of drinking water services to domestic
    consumers, especially by the private sector, is
    highly contested.
  • Two recent trends have politicised urban water
    consumption
  • a sharp increase in private sector investment in
    the delivery of water to household users across
    national borders
  • intensified social protest against the
    commodification of water in both developed and
    developing countries.
  • The project explored conflicts surrounding the
    provision of drinking water to domestic consumers
    that were embedded in global governance dynamics
  • The project did not focus on broader water
    resource issues such as river basin management,
    nor on the allocation of water to industry and
    agriculture.

3
Water-related research intersections
4
What we did
  • identified sites where transnational companies
    had invested in water service delivery in both
    developed and developing countries
  • studied four specific disputes arising from this
    (in New Zealand, France, Bolivia and Argentina)
    and two changing dispute contexts (in South
    Africa and Chile) in qualitative comparative case
    studies
  • attended and took part in multi-stakeholder
    meetings in global water policy
  • mapped global policy networks in the water sector
  • tracked developments in international rule-making
    processes relating to water service delivery
    (trade and investment, professional
    self-regulation, social and economic human rights)

5
Research questions
  • What range of ethical and ideological visions
    animate protest against water commodification?
  • What strategies have protestors used to
    institutionalise these visions?
  • What rules or principles at the local, national
    and international levels have been important in
    shaping and resolving the conflicts?
  • How have those protesting engaged with these
    rules, and what have been the results?

6
Key finding 1. - Water activists transform norms
of responsible consumerism through practices of
civil disobedience and use of quasi-judicial fora
  • Conflicts often viewed mainly through the lens of
    national legislative politics are also shaped by
    court hearings, less formal spaces such as
    ombudsman or small claims tribunals, and on the
    street with direct action
  • The less formal spaces can play an important role
    in channelling direct protest into sustained and
    more routine political leverage
  • This is because legal and quasi-legal dispute
    resolution particularises and makes concrete very
    general rules, thereby allowing small sequential
    wins and losses for otherwise polarised forces,
    thereby routinising and legitimising unruly
    consumer tactics
  • In some circumstances, this can secure social
    changes to the regulatory framework of water
    service delivery, particularly when allied with
    significant participation in legislative reform
  • E.g. more redistributive tariff structures
    Argentina
  • E.g. term limits on contracting-out water
    services NZ

7
Key finding 2. Iterative interaction between a
wide range of actors at different levels is
cumulatively constructing a nascent regime of
global water welfarism
  • Global water welfarism a set of institutions and
    rules that attempt to establish a legitimate
    transnational public sphere for the governance of
    water
  • Two models are being constructed from the
    cumulative effects of varying local experiences
  • Managed liberalisation organized rule-based
    response that shapes the national governance
    structures on which it relies for delivering
    outcomes (France has a critical shaping role,
    Chile is example)
  • Praxis-based restructuring (and re-energising)
    of public sector operators working with civil
    society at the national and local level,
    supported where necessary by a framework of
    formal rules at the global level (Bolivia,
    possibly South Africa)

8
Infusing governance strategies with agency,
resistance, and the everyday understandings of
ordinary citizens
  • One striking aspect of research on the nonstate
    is how little its chroniclers have had to say
    about institutionalisation. The emphasis is on
    movements, actors, networks, and relationships,
    but not on embedded, enduring sets of roles and
    rules that give shape and form to a whole array
    of struggles over time
  • - Ken Conca, Governing Water Contentious
    Transnational Politics and Institution-Building,
    MIT Press 2006, p.24
  • What remains difficult for research concerned
    with governing is to imagine people as citizens
    in anything other than the most perfunctory
    sense. This marks a failure of imagination in a
    research field that continues to conceptualise
    the political field as a realm of policy,
    regulation and governance rather than one of
    mobilisation, participation and contestation.
  • Malpass et al in Governance, Citizens and
    Consumers Agency and Resistance in Contemporary
    Politics (eds Bevir and Trentmann) forthcoming
    2007
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