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Privatization, the World Water Crisis, and the Social Contract

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 January 2007

Richardson Dilworth
Richardson Dilworth
Affiliation:
Drexel University
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Extract

To deny someone the right to water is tantamount to denying them the right to life, and to set a price on water is to set a price on life. It comes as no surprise then to find a good amount of anxiety and contention over who gets to set the price of water and how much they charge. And over the past two decades, throughout both the developed and developing world, setting the price of water has fallen increasingly to private companies at the same time as various demographic changes have increased water scarcity. Thus we hear water described simultaneously in terms of both a humanitarian crisis of global proportions—one standard though very rough figure is that more than one billion people lack access to safe drinking water (Davis 2005, 146; Black 2004, 28)—and as the “oil of the 21st century” (Wessel 2005).

Type
FEATURES
Information
PS: Political Science & Politics , Volume 40 , Issue 1 , January 2007 , pp. 49 - 54
Copyright
© 2007 The American Political Science Association

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