Fixing and Nixing: The Politics of Water Privatization

Social uprisings in response to privatization dynamics in the water sector have triggered widespread debate on the social and ecological impact of neoliberal water policies. Much of this debate remains in the urban and domestic water sector, thereby disregarding the struggles of marginalized urban and rural producers who use water for multiple purposes. Furthermore, while private providers are blamed for prioritizing profit over people, it is increasingly clear that while water may be a valuable commodity, the sector as a whole inhibits long-term profitability. Instead, using the concept of "accumulation by dispossession," the current process of privatization is understood as a new round of enclosures of the commons, implemented by a neoliberal state to open up new territories to capitalist development and to capitalist forms of market behavior. The contraction of global markets and the reconfiguration of the public sector as notions of nation and citizenship take on new meanings allow for the commodification and privatization of public goods and assets. Using the case of a Mexican irrigation district the paper shows how notions of scarcity are mobilized during neoliberal reform to reconfigure social relations of agricultural production so as to free up land, water, and labor for the market. This has not only resulted in large-scale dispossession of land and water, but also in stripping a group of their collective rights, and thereby dismantling a collective identity forged on past struggles over land and water.privatization; accumulation by dispossession; Mexico; irrigated agriculture

Informal space in the urban waterscape: Disaggregation and co-production of water services

This special issue explores the realities of water provision in 'informal' urban spaces located in different parts of the world through eight empirical, case-based papers. The collection of articles shows that formality and informality are fluid concepts that say more about the authority to legitimate certain practices than describe the condition of that particular practice. In this introductory article we provide a historical overview that links the academic discussion on informality to urban water supply practices. Subsequently, we propose the concepts of disaggregation and co-production to describe how informality works, and how ideas about (in)formality are mobilised to label particular practices and service modalities. Disaggregation reveals that a single service delivery mechanism may incorporate activities, varying according to the degree to which they are formal or informal. Co-production describes a process where hybrid service provision modalities are produced as a result of the articulation of socio-political, economic, biophysical and infrastructural drivers. The article concludes by identifying a series of research directions that emerged as a result of producing this special issue

Participatory processes and support tools for planning in complex dynamic environments: a case study on web-GIS based participatory water resources planning in Almeria, Spain

Democratization of water resources management through the involvement of stakeholders has been widely advocated over the past two decades. In light of mediocre results of such processes and severe criticism of the claimed benefits of stakeholder involvement, there is continued need for improving these processes and for supportive tools through which stakeholders can collaborate in decision making. In response to new European legal requirements, an innovative planning process was initiated to facilitate a productive dialog among stakeholders to develop a shared river basin management plan. This paper presents and discusses the results of action research on this participatory planning process in a semiarid river basin in Spain. We discuss: (1) to what extent participatory processes and tools address the needs of stakeholders and planners, (2) what enables or disables implementation in a complex socioeconomic reality, (3) to what extent the participatory approach leads to alignment with policy embodying a new water management paradigm, and (4) how tools can be flexible and their use adapted to changing contextual dynamics. Research results confirm the potential for increased participation assisted by web and GIS tools, however, such processes are highly sensitive to changing contexts as well as the mandate and continuity in support from management authorities. Fragmentation of responsibilities in the water arena and the weak interpretation of the coordinating role of the water administration undermine the democratic ruling sought for by public participation. Improved methodologies to evaluate and improve the effectiveness of participation are required, and tools need to be flexible in design and used in a facilitated participatory process, adaptable to changing contextual dynamics

The Political Morphology of Drainage—How Gully Formation Links to State Formation in the Choke Mountains of Ethiopia

To understand why soil erosion is persistent despite three decades of massive investments in soil conservation, this paper explores how drainage and soil conservation change a hill slope in the Choke Mountains. By paying close attention to the practices that reshape the hill, we account for the active roles of people and material flows in shaping their identities, forms, and power relations. Social relations can be read in the landscape as their material outcomes are literally scoured into the hill slope. Such a material reading of Ethiopia's “developmental state” reveals three issues: First, drainage and soil conservation practices are configured by particular historical regimes of land distribution and rent appropriation. Second, the power of the Ethiopian government's model of the developmental state derives from the exploitation of this configuration by a new coalition of landholders and government officials. Government officials mobilize landholders to construct terraces in exchange for government support in conflicts over land and input distribution. When the terraces create obstructions that can trigger flooding, landowners convert them into drains and divert drainage flows to plots sharecropped by landless families. Consequently, the yearly mobilization for terrace construction does not halt soil erosion but further aggravates it. This continues because the performance of this yearly ritual affirms the authority of landholders and government agents. Third, landless families which fail to live up to the model of the “farmer interested in soil conservation” have created a competing “trader model” with its own institutions. The denial of their non-farmer identities by landholders and officials fuels generational conflicts over drainage which deepen the fractures in the hill and pose a challenge to government authority. Land degradation thus embodies both the powers and the limits of the developmental state.Water Resource

Why infrastructure still matters: Unravelling water reform processes in an uneven waterscape in rural Kenya

Since the 1980s, a major change took place in public policies for water resources management. Whereas before governments primarily invested in the development, operation and maintenance of water infrastructure and were mainly concerned with the distribution of water, in the new approach they mainly focus on managing water resources systems by stipulating general frameworks for water allocation. This paper studies the rationales used to justify the water reform process in Kenya and discusses how and to what extent these rationales apply to different groups of water users within Likii catchment in the central part of the country. Adopting a critical institutionalist’s perspective, this paper shows how the water resource configurations in the catchment are constituted by the interplay between a normative policy model introduced in a plural institutional context and the disparate infrastructural options available to water users as result of historically produced uneven social relations. We argue that, to progressively redress the colonial legacy, direct investments in infrastructure for marginalized water users and targeting the actual (re)distribution of water to the users might be more effective than focusing exclusively on institutional reforms.Water Resource