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18 results

  • 12 - Uniting Diversity to Build Europe’s Right2Water Movement

  • from Part III - Exclusion and Struggles for Co-Decision
  • Edited by Rutgerd Boelens, Wageningen Universiteit, The Netherlands, Tom Perreault, Syracuse University, New York, Jeroen Vos, Wageningen Universiteit, The Netherlands
  • Book:
    Water Justice
    Published online:
    26 February 2018
    Print publication:
    15 March 2018, pp 226-245

  • Summary

    The European Citizens’ Initiative (ECI) “Right2Water” ran and collected 1.9 million signatures across Europe in 2012-2013, uniting cities and villages against water privatization. With that result it also became the first successful ECI, simultaneously building a Europe-wide movement and put the water issue high on the European political agenda. “Right2Water” proposed to implement the human right to water and sanitation in European legislation, as a strategic-political tool to fight privatization. Its struggle involved fundamental water quantity and quality distribution issues as well as the question of building a democratic political framework for organizing and defending public water services. The chapter examines how the ECI became successful from a point of awareness raising and a social movement perspective. The campaign united a huge diversity of organizations, in countries with very different conditions of water provision and degree of privatization of water utilities. The European Commission has been forced to subscribe to the principle that “water is a public good, not a commodity”. But, implementing such water justice notion is part of an ongoing socio-political struggle.

  • 1 - Introduction: The Multiple Challenges and Layers of Water Justice Struggles

  • Edited by Rutgerd Boelens, Wageningen Universiteit, The Netherlands, Tom Perreault, Syracuse University, New York, Jeroen Vos, Wageningen Universiteit, The Netherlands
  • Book:
    Water Justice
    Published online:
    26 February 2018
    Print publication:
    15 March 2018, pp 1-32
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  • Summary

    This first chapter explains how the book examines water conflicts and struggles for socio-economic re-distribution, political representation, and cultural justice that arise when there are questions about allocating water resources and water-related decision-making. We frame this struggle in the context of larger discussions about neo-liberal economic ideology and technocratic interventions. The chapter explains how modernist water policies and neoliberal globalization affect production and distribution of goods and also reconfigure ways of talking, existing and relating. In addition to questions about access to the resource, water justice entails struggles over formulating rules and rights; over the authority to make decisions and enforce norms; and over the systems to establish, legitimize or defend particular water policies. The chapter addresses bureaucratic water administrations, market-driven policies, desk-invented legislation, top-down project interventions, and the booming, unequal competition among multiple water users and uses; and also how marginalized, affected water user groups mobilize against dispossession, and the opportunities for multi-scale response strategies.

  • 19 - Conclusions: Struggles for Justice in a Changing Water World

  • from Part IV - Governmentality, Discourses and Struggles over Imaginaries and Water Knowledge
  • Edited by Rutgerd Boelens, Wageningen Universiteit, The Netherlands, Tom Perreault, Syracuse University, New York, Jeroen Vos, Wageningen Universiteit, The Netherlands
  • Book:
    Water Justice
    Published online:
    26 February 2018
    Print publication:
    15 March 2018, pp 346-360

  • Summary

    This final chapter integrates the previous chapters, their cases and concepts, and seeks to answer the book’s overall questions. The chapters in this book help readers understand the struggles that ensue as “modern” water policies and powerful water use and governance actors confront existing forms of control rooted in the cultures and identities of user groups and their networks. The book questions emerging water allocation patterns and governance arrangements, including the ways they are legitimized in policies or scientific discourses. Conflicts and possible answers go beyond the issue of equal access to water, as questions of water justice are entangled with larger political and economic doctrines. Different forms of interacting with – accessing, knowing, governing – water also form an important ingredient of cultural ways to be and belong, providing normative repertoires for expressing existential philosophies and cosmologies. In this way, the book shows that water provides an illuminating entry-point for grappling with wider environmental and societal justice dilemmas; dilemmas that lie at the heart of contemporary attempts to re-think and re-model human-nature relations.

  • 15 - Neoliberal Water Governmentalities, Virtual Water Trade, and Contestations

  • from Part IV - Governmentality, Discourses and Struggles over Imaginaries and Water Knowledge
  • Edited by Rutgerd Boelens, Wageningen Universiteit, The Netherlands, Tom Perreault, Syracuse University, New York, Jeroen Vos, Wageningen Universiteit, The Netherlands
  • Book:
    Water Justice
    Published online:
    26 February 2018
    Print publication:
    15 March 2018, pp 283-301

  • Summary

    Global virtual water trade has increased enormously during the past decades. Agricultural, mining and hydrocarbon exports are promoted and increasingly governed by international financing, free trade agreements, and water stewardship policies. Increased water extraction, consumption and pollution by agribusiness and extractive industries affect many local communities directly, depleting fragile water balances, re-patterning local water flows and livelihoods, and altering the local-national-global structure of costs and benefits associated with water use. Moreover, governance restructuring is accompanied by emerging global water stewardship discourses that have profound effects on local water user communities’ ideas about water governance and justice. Global extractive industry and agrifood chains endeavor to re-pattern not only hydro-social territories’ material and hydrological foundations but they strategize to also spread and overlay a new water justice imaginary and discourse. However, these new corporate water justice discourses are increasingly contested. The chapter concludes with several examples of “movements against the current”.

Water Justice
  • Edited by Rutgerd Boelens, Tom Perreault, Jeroen Vos
  • Published online:
    26 February 2018
    Print publication:
    15 March 2018
  • Water justice is becoming an ever-more pressing issue in times of increasing water-based inequalities and discrimination. Megacities, mining, forestry, industry and agribusiness claim an increasingly large share of available surface and groundwater reserves. Water grabbing and pollution generate poverty and endanger ecosystems' sustainability. Beyond large, visible injustices, the book also unfolds the many 'hidden' water world injustices, subtly masked as 'rational', 'equitable' and 'democratic'. It features critical conceptual approaches, including analysis of environmental, social, cultural and legal issues surrounding the distribution and management of water. Illustrated with case studies of historic and contemporary water injustices and contestations around the world, the book lays new ground for challenging current water governance forms and unequal power structures. It also provides inspiration for building alternative water realities. With contributions from renowned scholars, this is an indispensable book for students, researchers and policymakers interested in water governance, environmental policy and law, and political geography.