In response to the growth of private sector involvement in water supply management globally, anti-privatisation campaigns for a human right to water have emerged. Simultaneously, alter-globalisation activists have promoted alternative water governance models. This paper explores a generic market environmentalist reform model, and examines debates and concepts around ‘neo-liberalising nature’. Comparing anti-privatisation and alter-globalisation activism, it finds that the ‘human right to water’ is a limited concept, and that a focus on the commons offers a more coherent and successful activist strategy.
Much of the literature on ‘neoliberalising nature’ is concerned with the creation of private property rights for resources previously governed as common resources. This may be undertaken through different processes, such as privatisation, de-regulation, private sector partnerships, corporatisation, marketisation, commercialisation and devolution or decentralisation. Correctly distinguishing between different neoliberal processes is essential to accurately characterise the aims and trajectories of market reforms.
Implementing a ‘right to water’ is problematic, in terms of a lack of clear responsibility and capacity for implementation, conflict over transboundary waters, and the potential for abuse through corrupt governance. The adoption of a human rights discourse by private companies indicates its limitations as an anti-privatisation strategy. Human rights are individualistic, anthropocentric and state-centric, and therefore compatible with capitalist political economic systems, and private sector water provision. Rather than cast as a ‘human right’, water may be defined as a ‘commons’, and in this way contrasted with water as a ‘commodity’ (a resource with attaching property rights).
If the ‘human right to water’ argument has failed, how can resistance to neoliberalisation be negotiated?
- Pursuing a rights-based anti-privatisation campaign inaccurately conflates human rights with property rights, fails to distinguish between types of property rights and service delivery models, and thereby fails to foreclose the possibility of increasing private sector water supply.
- Commodification of water is fraught with difficulty; a high degree of state involvement is usually found even in countries experimenting heavily with neoliberal forms of water management.
- Alter-globalisation movements explicitly reject state-led water governance models, and a public/private binary paradigm, in favour of constructing alternative community economies of water.
- The ‘commons’ view means that collective management by communities is not only preferable but necessary, as water supply is subject to multiple market and state failures – community involvement is essential in managing water wisely. The cultural and spiritual dimensions of water cannot be left up to private companies or the state; the protection of ecological and public health impacts most deeply at community level, where it must be mobilised and enabled.
- The commons approach is complex, requiring reforming (rather than abolishing) state governance, and fostering and sharing local models of resource management.
Alter-globalisation activists are calling for radical strategies of ecological democracy, decommodifying public services and enacting commons models of resource management. How does a more refined understanding of neoliberalisation assist in this task?
- Activism can be more precise in its characterisation of specific neoliberalisms (for example, the ‘commons’ concept can effectively combat privatisation because it accurately opposes a collective property right against private property rights).
- Locating the application of neoliberalisation in specific historical and geographical contexts shows that it is not monolithic, but creates political opportunities that may be progressive and congruent with alter-globalisation activist goals, such as decentralisation leading to greater community control of water resources.
- It is important to recognise the different types of reforms occurring when ‘neoliberalising nature’ – not just those involving property rights. They open up new political ecological and socio-natural relationships through which an ethic of care may be developed.
