Water Politics

Governance, Justice and the Right to Water

Farhana Sultana,Alex Loftus

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429843112
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Environment & Energy Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Scholarship on the right to water has proliferated in interesting and unexpected ways in recent years. This book broadens existing discussions on the right to water in order to shed critical light on the pathways, pitfalls, prospects, and constraints that exist in achieving global goals, as well as advancing debates around water governance and water justice.

The book shows how both discourses and struggles around the right to water have opened new perspectives, and possibilities in water governance, fostering new collective and moral claims for water justice, while effecting changes in laws and policies around the world. In light of the 2010 UN ratification on the human right to water and sanitation, shifts have taken place in policy, legal frameworks, local implementation, as well as in national dialogues. Chapters in the book illustrate the novel ways in which the right to water has been taken up in locations drawn globally, highlighting the material politics that are enabled and negotiated through this framework in order to address ongoing water insecurities. This book reflects the urgent need to take stock of debates in light of new concerns around post-neoliberal political developments, the challenges of the Anthropocene and climate change, the transition from the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), as well as the mobilizations around the right to water in the global North.

This book is essential reading for scholars and students of water governance, environmental policy, politics, geography, and law. It will be of great interest to policymakers and practitioners working in water governance, as well as the human right to water and sanitation.

1 The right to water in a global context

Challenges and transformations in water politics

Farhana Sultana and Alex Loftus

Introduction

The right to water is widely recognized to have effected a paradigm shift in water governance and water politics. In addition, it has transformed struggles to achieve water justice across scales and sites. In this book, we aim to give some form to such a paradigm shift while simultaneously demonstrating how the right to water has transformed and been translated over the last decade. Much has happened over this time, something we are only too conscious of in reflecting on the years that have passed since we sat down to write the introduction to our last book – The Right to Water: Politics, Governance, and Social Struggles (Sultana and Loftus 2012). While published in 2012, we wrote the Introduction in 2011, only one year after the UN General Assembly adopted a resolution recognizing the human right to safe and clean drinking water and sanitation in 2010. In the Foreword to that book, renowned water scholar-activist Maude Barlow, who was then serving as the Senior Advisor on Water to the 63rd President of the UN General Assembly, wrote of the joyous scenes at the UN upon the announcement of the General Assembly’s unanimous vote. Our own take was cautiously optimistic. While never ignoring the obstacles and difficulties in achieving the promise of the right to water – in particular, as many others had noted, we were acutely aware of the possibility that the right to water could open the way for a new wave of private sector involvement in the provision of potable water – we were, nevertheless, unwilling to downplay the huge efforts on the part of social movements, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and scholar-activists who had effectively deployed claims to the right to water as part of a struggle for water justice. Our own perspective was that while the right to water could become an empty signifier, it still represented an important starting point for social mobilizations – a condition of possibility – for broader and deeper struggles for water justice.

Although perhaps something of a cliché to note how much the world has changed since 2010, it is also patently true. The dramatic effects of the 2008 financial crisis were not yet fully clear when we were writing in 2011. And although many may well have accurately predicted that the result would be a growth in inequality, few at the time predicted the viciously revanchist policies now adopted by many governments around the world. At the same time, as the red tide in Latin America stalled – prompted in large part by the collapse of a commodities boom – so several new experiments in social and ecological justice collapsed under the same resource curse that had befallen development projects in the past. Left popular projects appeared to give way to a resurgence of right-wing populism globally, a social project that articulated with a set of economic prescriptions threatening to extinguish of any remaining sparks of socioecological justice from the preceding decade. The formal recognition of the right to water was born at a difficult moment in world history. With our cautious optimism, we were thereby forced to confront some brutal realities.

Nevertheless, having witnessed and survived these years, much of what we argued previously seems not far off the mark. The right to water and sanitation remains one of several tools within the armory of those struggling for water justice, whether in the moment of global revanchism we find ourselves now or during the interregnum in which we were writing before. Perhaps surprisingly, this tool now appears to be deployed as readily in the global North as in the global South, despite the lack of formal recognition or adoption of the right in many countries of the former. The movement of struggles and discourses around the right to water from the global South to the global North is, therefore, elaborated upon within this book, in which we now have as many empirical studies of the right to water in the global North as we do in the global South.

Aside from a reconfirmation of our earlier arguments and a broadening of the range of empirical studies, this book nevertheless strikes a different tone. Whereas earlier, the debate among water activists and scholars revolved around whether or not the right to water was likely to be a progressive force in the struggles for water justice, many would now take this progressivism as a given. Instead of debating whether or not the right to water is a positive or a retrograde step, therefore, in what follows, the contributors focus on how best to achieve the right to water in ways that can articulate with other frameworks emerging around water governance, with other conceptions of water justice, and with new perspectives on water security. This book is as much about future trajectories – intersectional and articulating ones – as it is about debating the right to water. In establishing such an argument, the text seeks to provide a set of understandings for new research on water politics more broadly. The arguments put forth here, therefore, collectively animate new possibilities for advancing the right to water. Power constellations and relational understandings of different actors become more evident within these arguments. Indeed, given that the right to water is open to contestation, reinterpretation, and negotiation, multiple potentialities are opened up and alternative imaginaries might be envisioned. Thus, we would reassert the point that the right to water and sanitation remains an important political discourse in supporting the fight for water for the most vulnerable. The right to water remains a profoundly important galvanizing call for pursuing water justice at various scales (see also Sultana 2018; Boelens, Perreault, & Vos 2018).

This book, furthermore, echoes broader shifts – while seeking to capture and analyze them – within its chapters: indeed, the scholarship on the right to water has proliferated in interesting and unexpected ways. Through highly productive sets of conversations, both discourses and struggles around the right to water have: opened new perspectives, politics, and possibilities in water governance; fostered new collective and moral claims for water justice; and effected changes in laws, policies, and institutions around the world. In light of the 2010 UN ratification, changes have taken place in policy, legal frameworks, local implementation, as well as in national dialogues within the majority of countries globally. The novel ways in which the right to water has been taken up in Europe, Latin America, Africa, and Asia point to the enduring appeal and material politics that are enabled and negotiated through this framework in order to address water crises and water insecurities. There is, thus, an urgent need to take stock of debates in light of new concerns around post-neoliberal political developments, the challenges of the Anthropocene and climate change, the transition from the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), as well as the unexpected mobilizations around the right to water in the global North. This book, therefore, broadens existing scholarship on the right to water globally in order to critically shed light on the pathways, pitfalls, prospects, and constraints that exist in achieving lofty global goals, as well as advancing debates around water governance and water justice.

In this chapter, we frame the book in relation to emerging debates, paying particular attention to intersections with recent discussions in water justice and water governance more broadly. If the right to water is now widely recognized as having forced a paradigm shift in the governance of water and in water politics, it has simultaneously provided a range of tactical and strategic priorities for activists, policymakers, and advocacy groups. Nearly a decade on from the United Nations General Assembly’s recognition of the right to water, the present moment provides a unique opportunity for reflecting on the gains, the losses, and the future trajectories for struggles around the right to water. By opening up dialogues with debates around water justice and water governance, we evaluate these gains, losses, and trajectories while also providing a critical framework for new research in the remainder of the chapter.

Institutional questions: whither the state?

Several important institutional questions are important to reflect upon in the present conjuncture. First, as a range of different actors have sought to understand how best to achieve the right to water and in whatever form possible, these debates appear to have recentered questions of the state. How the state is understood, its form and function, as well as its potential capacities have all been questioned. In one of her final contributions to efforts for achieving the right to water, the then UN Special Rapporteur on the Human Right to Safe Drinking Water and Sanitation, Catarina de Albuquerque (2014), developed a Handbook, rather like a toolkit, in which the state is positioned as one of the crucial actors through which citizens can seek to achieve the rights to which they are entitled. In many respects, the centrality afforded to the state is unsurprising, for while the UN may recognize the right to water, it is clearly the member states that are responsible for giving this right any meaning.

Nevertheless, such a position poses some awkward questions. Some of these questions were already noted in our 2012 book. Thus, Bustamante, Crespo, and Walnycki (2012: 223), drawing on the Bolivian experience, had argued that:

If we are to consider how rights can be recognized and employed by the state, we are recognizing and justifying the state as responsible for ensuring compliance. A rights-based approach means that other institutional and organizational forms are not recognized, even though they may occupy spaces for interaction and rights that don’t necessarily originate from the state.

Indeed, although the mechanism that de Albuquerque noted makes intuitive and practical sense, the consequence is a strengthening of the very state institutions that may themselves be responsible for entrenching new forms of hierarchy and perpetuating existing inequalities. Forms of water privatization, to take one example, while appearing to minimize the role of the state, rely on sets of decisions made within the form of the state. Decisions over infrastructure, appropriate levels of investment, and legislation ranging from the ability of water companies to disconnect for nonpayment to the recognition of different groups are all made through the form of the state, very often to the detriment of those who are the least powerful within a given society. Although wrong to generalize from one experience, the South African struggles charted by Clark in the 2012 book, and discussed further in relation to sanitation experiences by Bond in the current book, show how the South African state was able to proscribe a deeper, more participatory, reading of the right to water and, more recently, to inscribe a new “color line” that produces deeply uneven access to different forms of sanitation infrastructure.

Nevertheless, it would be equally wrong to simply dismiss the state as only ever a harbinger of hierarchies or an executive of a racialized bourgeoisie. Indeed, the fact that rates of re-municipalization now outstrip the rate at which water services are being privatized (Kishimoto, Lobina, and Petitjean 2014) – a process that, once again, clearly recenters the state within water provision – is surely something to be celebrated, potentially bringing water services back under some form of democratic control while removing the profit motive with regards to the provision of this most basic of needs. Unsurprisingly, the picture is complicated. As McDonald argues in his chapter in this book, while proponents of privatization are wrong to argue that the involvement of the private sector will bring about the efficiency savings and reduced prices through which the right to water might be realized, the counter-argument that re-municipalization is the only possible way of realizing that right is only partly true. McDonald’s chapter, therefore, demonstrates that there is no universal outcome: instead, outcomes are context-dependent, associated with both the form and function of the state, its historical legacies, and the forms of municipal provision that have emerged in relation to that form, function, and legacy.

For some scholars, conversations with work on state theory necessitate a more relational understanding of both the state and of the right to water (Angel and Loftus 2019). Rather than posing a simple question of whether to posit or reject the state as the key agent through which to achieve water justice, it might be possible to adopt an approach that simultaneously works within, against, and beyond the state. Developing such a position necessitates a move beyond more fetishistic understandings that posit the state as a coherent agent capable of enacting particular sets of policies (Abrams 1988). Indeed, it might be possible to think of strategies that move within, against, and beyond the right to water.

Whereas Clark (2012), Angel and Loftus (2019), and the chapters by Bond and McDonald all tend to focus predominantly on the national and local state, the chapters by Bieler and by Van den Berge et al. demonstrate the ways in which supranational institutions, such as the European Union (EU), have also come to mediate particular struggles around the right to water. In a remarkable feat of mobilization, water activists were able to achieve the first-ever Citizens’ Initiative within the European Union, thereby paving the way for a debate over the right to water within the European Commission. The Citizens’ Initiative, coordinated by a broad coalition of trade unions and civil society organizations, gathered over 1.9 million signatures across 14 of the 27 countries comprising the EU, in order for the right to water to be prioritized within EU legislation. While certainly not an unqualified success, the Citizens’ Initiative serves to demonstrate the ways in which new institutional frameworks now embody and express the different struggles for water justice and, furthermore, how new tools are opened up at different scales – and fundamentally different locations – for pursuing greater water equity.

The chapter by Mehta and Langmeier, alongside that by Schmidt and by Meehan, show the ways in which the UN, through its High-Level Expert Panel has also sought to further clarify the roles and responsibilities of different institutions within a broader governance framework. Schmidt charts in forensic detail the evolution of discourses within the UN High-Level Panel on Water and the likely implications of apparent shifts in focus. By beginning to integrate questions around resilience – in its turn to “Valuing Water” – the arguments in favor of non-contingent human rights appear to lose their force. Instead, and problematically, explanations of water scarcity appear to be rooted more in instances of “moral luck.” Such discourses clearly matter both for the prominence or otherwise of the right to water and for the political pressure that can be exerted on institutional frameworks in ensuring equitable access to water. As charted in the chapter by Mehta and Langmeier, Mehta’s own involvement in the High-Level Panel of Experts on Food Security and Nutrition enabled her to push for far greater attention to the necessary relationship between the right to food and to water, even against the apparent wishes of the Special Rapporteur at the time, for whom such a focusing would distract from the more immediate task of achieving change in the water sector. The Foreword to this book from the current Special Rapporteur, Léo Heller, furthermore, demonstrates the continued importance of the Special Rapporteur’s role and for the position to be able to shape and influence debates, both in terms of the particular lens brought to the analysis and through the thematic reports covered in their role. These institutional levels, positions, platforms, and networks clearly matter.

Water security discourses

If institutional structures have shifted and new institutional forms have come to mediate struggles over the right to water, a range of discourses have also emerged that may or may not be complementary to struggles to achieve that right. Perhaps most prominent among these is a whole set of discussions over how best to achieve water security. Such discussions then pose questions around the degree to which efforts to make communities “water secure” can be considered to be the same as affording the right to water.

The turn to water security in recent decades should be distinguished from earlier discussions – emerging from realist approaches in International Relations(IR), theory – in which water security’s primary referent object was the nation-state. In the immediate post-Cold War era, discussions over environmental security appeared to be enrolled in efforts to script the new threats faced by the world. Often couched in thinly disguised – or even avowedly – neo-Malthusian frames, water security was said to pose dangers to national security and to require both careful military planning and new engineering solutions (Starr 1991). Critical perspectives remained unsurprisingly wary of such concerns, and instead sought to demonstrate the ways in which water insecurity is socially produced in relation to broader classed, sexed, racialized...