Two opposing perspectives toward water dominate the worldwide debate over water provision and regulation. One view, championed by advocates of neo-liberal economics, posits that the most efficient way to regulate (indeed, conserve) water is to subject it to market-based norms, like any other commodity. Decentralization and privatization are distinct (and mutually exclusive) policies that re-characterize state regulatory roles. Under a decentralized system, central water administration is nixed and new regulatory “monitoring” agencies are created in its stead. Local governments, then, are obligated to concession water provision to private, for-profit entities, under a variety of potential schemes. “Full-cost recovery,” is also a commonly adopted policy, which allows water providers to charge the full per unit cost of water delivery (which includes a nominal surplus value) to consumers. This has meant huge increases in monthly water bills when privatizations take effect and a change in the choreographies of power of water management away from democratic control. While a diverse combination of “policy salads” are to be found wherever water privatization is implemented, water-as-economic-good to be subjected to market norms to ensure proper management and environmental control is the driving ideology.
An opposing view states that water is a public good essential for all life and thus cannot be subjected to market norms. In this view, access to water is a considered a human right, as declared by the United Nations Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights in 2002:
“The human right to drinking water is fundamental for life and health. Sufficient and safe drinking water is a precondition for the realization of all human rights.”
According to this perspective, to derive profit from water is unethical while water scarcity prevails. Also, collective management—either by the state or community control—is essential because private ownership will eventually conflict with the public character of the resource. People and organizations acting upon this larger logic also contest the individual policies implemented under privatization. Full cost recovery, they argue, lays a disproportionate burden on poor people to pay for service. Water delivery should be subsidized for the poor, since it is essential for the functioning of society. Furthermore, since water is a social good, it follows that its management should be democratically controlled. A corollary to this argument is that corporate entities make democratic control impossible, since the profit-generating motive of the corporation ultimately trumps all others, rendering an equitable weighing of interests impossible.
Many countries privatized municipal water provision through a variety of schemes promoted through World Bank Structural Adjustment Programs. Most of the initial privatizations were exacted in places where Washington’s political “consensus” was conflated with Washington’s military and economic interests. Military dictatorships in Chile and Argentina were the first governments to implement water privatization. Resistance was unlikely in these places, as social movements had suffered heavy repression, including systemic human rights violations that destroyed the democratic social structures and institutions that would have housed such a debate. Since people are not easily dispossessed of what is theirs, guns have often served to cajole the privatization process in its initial stages.
- Bakker, Karen (2006). “Water is Life!” Not for Sale, Decommodifying Public Life. Ontario, Canada: Broadview Press.
- Swyngedouw, Erik (2007). “Dispossessing H2O: The Contested Terrain of Water Privatization.” In Hayden et al. Neoliberal Environments: False promises and unnatural consequences. New York: Routledge.
- UN Committee on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights (2002). “Substantive issues arising in the implementation of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (Advance Unedited Version).” New York: UN Press.
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