Too Costly: Water and Privatization

Brisman, Avi; McClanahan, Bill; South, Nigel; Walters, Reece

doi:10.1057/978-1-137-52986-2_5

Avi Brisman^7,8,9,
Bill McClanahan⁷,
Nigel South^10,8 &
…
Reece Walters⁸

Part of the book series: Critical Criminological Perspectives ((CCRP))

520 Accesses
2 Citations

Abstract

The phrase ‘water is the next oil’ is widely used to describe the exorbitant profits produced as a result of its growing commodification (Zabarenko 2009). As McGee (2014) observes, ‘Companies proclaim water the next oil in a rush to turn resources into profit—Mammoth companies are trying to collect water that all life needs and charge for it as they would for other natural resources’.

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Notes

1.
To put this in perspective, in the mid-2000s, the bottle water industry generated about $35 billion/year (see Arnold 2009: 809). In October 2016, Schlossberg (2016) reported that ‘[f]or the first time, bottled water [was] expected to outsell soft drinks in the United States…’.
2.
See Arnold (2009: 816 and accompanying notes) and Ballestero (2015: 275 n.3) on the issues of how much water fulfils individual need (and thus a right), and how meeting water quality standards determines what makes water ‘safe’ for human consumption.
3.
In her research on the processes by which Costa Rican regulators set water rates, Ballestero (2015: 264) notes that ‘[i]n the early 2000s, Costa Rica’s constitutional court recognized access to water for human consumption as a fundamental right and explicitly assigned responsibility to the state for securing its enjoyment in appropriate quantity and quality’. This development, along with the UN General Assembly’s resolution in 2010, ‘did not significantly alter the thinking of most Costa Rican public servants and citizens’, Ballestero (2015: 264) explains, because ‘people already recognized the existence of a universal human right to water as something of a natural fact’ (footnotes omitted). Indeed, Ballestero (2015: 275 n.4) notes that ensuring the human right to water has gained traction around the world, and points to Bolivia, Ecuador and South Africa as examples. For a discussion of rights to clean water in the United States, see Foderaro (2017).
4.
For a discussion of the Transboundary Freshwater Dispute Database (www.transboundarywaters.orst.edu) that is intended for use in aiding the process of water conflict prevention and resolution on a local/regional scale in the Pacific Northwest of the United States, see Amster (2015: 157).
5.
These documents are now available in the UK National Archives, Kew, London.
6.
See Arnold (2009: 793–96), who describes a number of conditions that have contributed to the water privatization trend, including (in the United States) changes to the tax code enabling private water companies to compete on better terms with public sector water system operators, as well as socio-political-economic ideologies and agendas to increase the role of the private market and private sector providers of public services.
7.
While indigenous peoples’ concerns are often ignored (see Norman 2017 for a discussion), in March 2017, the New Zealand Parliament, for the first time, voted to grant the Whanganui River—whom the local Māori people view as ‘an indivisible and living whole’— ‘the legal rights of a human’, ensuring that the river will be represented by guardians in legal matters that concern the waterway (Dwyer 2017).

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School of Justice Studies College of Justice and Safety, Eastern Kentucky University, Richmond, KY, USA
Avi Brisman & Bill McClanahan
School of Justice Faculty of Law, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, QLD, Australia
Avi Brisman, Nigel South & Reece Walters
Newcastle Law School Faculty of Business and Law, University of Newcastle, Callaghan, NSW, Australia
Avi Brisman
Department of Sociology, University of Essex, Colchester, Essex, UK
Nigel South

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Brisman, A., McClanahan, B., South, N., Walters, R. (2018). Too Costly: Water and Privatization. In: Water, Crime and Security in the Twenty-First Century. Critical Criminological Perspectives. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-52986-2_5

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