Category Archives: Water economics

Bakker, K. 2010. Privatizing water: Governance failure and the world’s urban water crisis. New York: Cornell University Press.

The primary goal of this book was to “constructively critiquing proposed alternatives to privatization” of water resources. The dilemma that is at the heart of the book’s thesis is the failure both by government and private companies to improve water-supply crisis: a stalemate in developing a governance framework that clearly identifies the roles of sate, markets and communities to provide environmental services. In other words, “the question is not whether governments should be involved, but how…raise[ing] questions of citizenship, identity, and political power to distribute access to social services the aegis of modern developmental states.” Three central questions were used as a conceptual framework in this book that consisted of: (1) why has privatization emerged as an increasingly widespread mode of resource management, and what are the arguments made by proponents and opponents; (2) can privatization fulfill proponents’ expectations (particularly with respect to water supply for the urban poor in developing countries); and (3) given there are limits to privatization (particularly with respect to urban water supply to the poor), what might be the alternatives.
Bakker observes that the top-down technocratic management of water resources has seen numerous failures in governing water resources and explores new practical alternatives to the status quo management and governance of water resources. Bakker recognizes that the conflict facing common pool water resources stems from a range of fundamental challenges including: tensions between representation and participation, centralized oversight and local preferences, economic factors and environmental imperatives.
Bakker argues that the academic concept of “neo-Hardinian” management solutions for common-pool resources involve ”better governance and optimized institutions and incentives.” This neo-Hardinian framework for the commons is described as an inappropriate “blueprint utopia” by all intense and purposes, where “the notion of the commons serves as a fictional rather than a blue-print utopia…the message is simple: communities can successfully govern resources in a cooperative manner, and we should not assume that resources can be governed only via states or markets.”
As a practical alternative to current water governance, Bakker calls for a fostering of a “political society”, or in other words the need to recognize “legal rights, and further, to transform them to social rights, as a means to resolve conflicts in a more equitable and ecologically sensitive way.” Bakker coins the phrase ‘biopolitical’ as a means to acknowledge and describe the ‘intensely political’ nature of water and the characteristic as a ‘flow resource’ – one that connects “individual bodies to the collective body politic.”
Advocating for national government leadership, the author articulates a clear need and requirement for action at multiple scales. That being said, Bakker recognizes the limited role community governments can play in water management, due largely to their limited authority within a broader watershed context that does not accounts for upstream and downstream externalities. Within a multi-jurisdictional governance framework, Bakker suggest that the role of the state should include “encouraging redistributive models of resource management, progressive social relations, and environmental protection.”
Bakker further argues that human rights to drinking water must be associated with community water rights and the broader nonhuman water rights in order to be effective. Moreover, ecological rights – and the concept of ecological governance – need to be included within the broader discussion of rights and how they apply to water and community. The idea that water rights should be acknowledged as a ‘tactic’ and not a ‘goal’ is emphasized and is used to support the notion that “access to water is properly viewed as a material emblem of citizenship: a symbol of political inclusion.” Bakker argues that the framework for water governance should include socioeconomic, political as well as ecological considerations.
In conclusion, Bakker identifies communities and government as the “key actors” in the continued negotiation and development of water governance. However, the private actors will need to be included and involved in the evolution of water governance frameworks but in significantly different ways than are expressed in today’s polarized government-private sector management paradigm.