The Commodification of Water, Social Protest and Cosmopolitan Citizenship

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The Commodification of Water, Social Protest and
Cosmopolitan Citizenship

• Professor Bronwen Morgan
• University of Bristol

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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.

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Water-related research intersections
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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)

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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?

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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

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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)

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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