4

TO BE OR NOT TO BE THIRSTY

As the earth’s atmosphere warms, the climate is changing. This situation is causing extremes in the hydrologic cycle, placing the world’s water resources and the species and ecosystems that depend on them under serious stress. The CO₂ content of the earth’s oceans is currently increasing at a rate of approximately 2 billion tons a year, causing ocean acidification. Since industrialization, the oceans’ acidity has grown 30 percent, and this situation has negatively impacted the thousands of calcifying organisms on earth (mussels, coral reefs, algae, plankton), posing a serious threat to the fragile marine ecosystem.¹ Between 2002 and 2006, Greenland lost thirty-six to sixty cubic miles of its ice sheets; and between 2002 and 2005 Antarctica lost thirty-six cubic miles.² In 2006, severe water shortages throughout wildlife reserves and parks in Rajasthan, India, resulted in the deaths of monkeys, chinkaras, and cheetal deer. In June 2010, landslides and floods in Bangladesh killed fifty-three people. In January 2011, the Australian city of Brisbane was devastated by flooding that covered an area equal to France and Germany combined; killed twenty people; drowned many pets, farm animals, and wildlife; and ruined the habitat, food, and water sources for the wildlife that did survive. After channeling water over fifteen hundred miles for the past six million years, the Colorado River is gradually drying up; now it sometimes no longer reaches the ocean. Groundwater withdrawal, polluted waterways, and water projects such as dams continue to be significant contributing factors to species extinction and biodiversity loss.³

In August 2008, Scientific American featured a six-point plan to avert the global water crisis, and the plan was accompanied by the following headline on the front page: “Running Out of Water.” In April 2010, National Geographic ran a special issue titled “Water Our Thirsty World,” which included several detailed maps of the world’s shrinking freshwater reserves. This publication was followed by a series of articles in the New York Times from September to November 2010 that focused on India’s struggle for potable water. All commentators shared the following theme: as glaciers continue to retreat and lose mass, deserts expand, rivers run dry, meat consumption increases, and the global population grows, the existential conundrum of the twenty-first century will sadly be “to be or not to be thirsty”!

Water covers roughly 70 percent of the earth’s surface, and the total global water stock is approximately 1.4 billion cubic kilometers, with 97 percent of it being saltwater and only 2.53 percent freshwater. Put differently, 3.5 million cubic kilometers of the world’s water is fresh.⁴ Only 0.036 percent of global freshwater supplies can be found in rivers and lakes. A large amount is locked in glaciers and ice caps (1.6 percent); a small fraction is in aquifers and wells (0.36 percent). The remainder resides in the bodies of animals and plants and in the air.

When solar energy is consumed, it does not negatively impact the net amount of energy produced by the sun, regardless of how much is used. For this reason, solar energy is a renewable resource. Unlike solar energy, however, water is both a renewable and a finite resource.⁵ Because the earth is a closed system, just one part of which is water, the earth neither gains nor loses water (water is recycled through processes of evaporation and precipitation). When used responsibly, water supplies regenerate. However, this regeneration requires that water resources be used within renewable limits. In addition, not all water remains potable when recycled (such as when it is polluted).

The UN predicts that by 2025 two out of three people will be living in conditions of water stress, and 1.8 billion people will be living in regions of absolute water scarcity.⁶ Our bodies consist of anywhere between 55 percent and 78 percent water. We need it to quench our thirst, for basic sanitation, for energy, to cook, and to grow food along with other crops (such as cotton). A single person needs approximately twenty to fifty liters of water per day to meet his or her basic survival needs (drinking, cooking, and cleaning).⁷ Therefore, with the current world population at 7 billion people and projections for population growth to peak at 9.22 billion in 2075, it is not surprising that freshwater shortages are projected to worsen dramatically.⁸ We also need to heed some caution here because the ratio of water consumption to population growth is not consistent. The World Resources Institute has reported that over the course of the twentieth century global water consumption rose more than twice the rate of population growth, increasing sixfold between 1900 to 1995.⁹ The figures suggest there are other important contributing factors to the surmounting water crisis than population growth, and it is this discrepancy that I intend to unpack here.

Thirst affects existence; it impacts what a body can do. Approximately one in eight people lacks access to safe drinking water, and 3.5 million people die annually from water-related diseases.¹⁰ If 443 million school days are lost each year because of water-related illness, and millions of women and children spend hours collecting water every day instead of attending school, caring for family, or doing income-generating work, then the costs associated with water access are high indeed.¹¹ Factor into this assessment the lack of access accrued over time,¹² which is important to consider because it means that if one country has consistently enjoyed 100 percent access to improved water, but another has not, then the cumulative disease and economic burdens of the country that has low rates of access will be far greater than those for the country that has consistently had a high percentage of access.

Creating systems through which all people, species, and ecosystems can access the water needed for survival will be one of the defining political issues of the twenty-first century, and models of water governance vary. Some common solutions informing water management and governance include decreasing water wastage by increasing the cost of water, instituting more state regulation of water supplies, and encouraging local communities to develop their own institutions of water governance. The focus of all of these systems is human health and well-being. The invisible party continues to be other species and ecosystems.

Changing individual patterns of consumption can improve available global supplies of potable water. The growing global middle class that can now afford to eat meat and, more important, wants to change to a high-meat diet, which I discuss in more detail in chapter 6, is by default increasing global water consumption. Between 1999 and 2001, global meat production was 229 million tons, and it is expected to grow to 465 million tons by 2050. If this prediction is correct, water resources will be placed under tremendous pressure, especially when we consider that the typical meat eater’s diet requires approximately 5,400 liters of water a day to maintain.¹³

So at the risk of seeming paranoid, I would like to share with you the water footprint of a seemingly modest day of food consumption for the average person living in a high-income country. The hidden freshwater costs (depletion and quality) associated with everyday consumption is called the “water footprint.” You are not consuming one cup of water with that cup of coffee you enjoy first thing in the morning, but rather 140 liters of water. Similarly, as you start your day with a bowl of Kellogg’s Mini-wheats and milk, stop to eat a roast beef, cheese, and lettuce sandwich for lunch, and later sit down to a bowl of meatballs and pasta served with a generous grating of fresh parmesan cheese for dinner, followed by a slice of carrot cake with cream cheese icing and ice cream for desert, you need to be reminded that it takes 1,000 liters of water to generate one liter of milk, 1,350 liters of water to produce one kilogram of wheat, and, more disturbing, 16,000 liters of water to produce just one kilogram of beef.¹⁴

There is mounting research on water-intensive products such as beef and cotton that stresses the importance of considering both the amount of freshwater needed to produce a product along with the freshwater used throughout the supply chain and in particular what country’s water resources are being tapped to produce a product. This consideration is the basis of Arjen Hoekstra’s concept of the water footprint. It takes into account direct water use, such as the water used to water the lawn, and indirect “water used in the production and supply chains of goods and services consumed.”¹⁵ The concept is not restricted to calculating water volume. It also takes into account the complex geography of water usage—such as different kinds of water (blue water or surface and groundwater, green water or rainwater stored in soil as moisture, and gray water or water needed to absorb pollutants); where water was used (if it came from an area with an abundance of water or not); and when it was used.

One common failing of statistics on population growth and increased water consumption is that they do not consider the hidden differences in water-consumption patterns between high-, middle-, and low-income countries. It is this hidden distortion that represents the biggest challenge to the sustainable extraction, usage, supply, storage, and overall care of the world’s freshwater resources. The concept of the water footprint introduces a critical structure into how we calculate global water usage because it encourages us to take into account the connection between capital, transnational politics, and power as well as, in turn, the inequitable social arrangements this system produces. It also highlights the manner in which water is a commons that traverses the borders of nation-states, ethnic identity, class, gender, race, and species. And because water is an important commons for the well-being of all life on earth, the equality between the poor and the wealthy, the private and the public, men and women, human and other than human species and ecosystems is being fought over. For instance, the scarcity of water in the Middle East has been the source of disputes among Israel, Palestine, Syria, and Lebanon, all of whom stake a claim in the waters of the River Jordan. Further, when the inequitable relations defining capitalism enter the realm of water politics, the geography of the hydrologic cycle is striated through acts of enclosure, dispossession, and appropriation. In this regard, water access is in the first instance a political problem of common life that traverses the boundaries of nation-states, regions, private property, and habitats.

The water crisis is unsurprisingly capturing the attention of social activists, journalists, and politicians, and it is being billed as a problem of far greater magnitude than the looming oil crisis. The reason is almost too obvious to state: a person might be able to live without food for several weeks, but she cannot survive without water for more than a few days. As a result, there is a lively discussion over how to avert the crisis most effectively by restructuring systems of water management. This discussion has spurred a blossoming water market that has facilitated the privatization of water infrastructure, resources, and technologies.

PRIVATE GOVERNANCE

In 1999, the Bolivian government auctioned off Cochabamba’s (the country’s third-largest city in the Andes Mountains) public water system SEMAPA and oddly received only one bid by the consortium Aguas del Tenari, which consisted of International Water Limited (United Kingdom), Becthel (United States), and Edison (Italy). The Bolivian government took less than $20,000 as a down payment, signing a $2.5 billion forty-year concession. Many residents subsequently had to spend up to one-fifth of their income on water as rates soared. Community wells also came under the control of Aguas del Tenari regardless of the fact that the company had not dug them. In January 2000, a coalition of community, labor, and human rights activists formed the consortium Coordinadora por la Defensa del Agua y de la Vida (Coalition in Defense of Water and Life), and they protested against the water cutoffs and rate hikes. The city was brought to a standstill for four days.

To break up the standoff, President Hugo Banzer promised the protesters that the city’s water rates would be lowered. When the government failed to fulfill its promise, protesters took to the streets once again on February 4, 2000. The military was brought in to break up the march with tear gas. The government then ordered the leaders of La Coordinadora, including the outspoken Óscar Olivera, to be arrested. Despite this action, the people continued their march, and on April 8, 2000, a “state of siege” was declared. Finally, the government was forced to void the contract with International Water Limited, and the state water utility company SEMAPA was returned to the people.¹⁶

In response to the Bolivian water riots and after having its contract revoked, Bechtel sued the Bolivians for $50 million in damages despite investing only $1 million. In response to international outrage regarding the lawsuit, Bechtel rescinded it.¹⁷ The economic beneficiaries of Bolivia’s “two-decade dance with neoliberalism” include foreign corporations, Bolivian government officials, and other leaders who profited from burying the nation in foreign debt.¹⁸

The Bolivian water wars cast an international spotlight on the issue of water privatization.¹⁹ If we were to join the dots forming the argument used in support of privatizing water governance, our line of reasoning would look like the following. First, as the global population increases, potable water supplies will be placed under more stress. Second, water supplies will be stressed because the real “value” of water is not reflected by the cost. Third, accurately pricing the cost of water will provide consumers with an incentive to use scarce water resources more efficiently and sparingly. Hence, the old model of water governance—the management of water resources and services by the government, regional officials, and local groups—needs be replaced with a new model that better reflects water as an economic value and good. According to this line of argument, the quality, reliability of service, and quantity of supplies will improve only if water governance is tied to the logic of the free market. In other words, as a valuable commodity, water needs to be privatized. Privatization is “an umbrella term that includes selling assets to a private company, tendering a water concession to a private company, or awarding management contracts to a private company,” and this approach has won international support.²⁰

In 1992, there was a shared consensus throughout the international arena that in order to achieve sustainable and efficient water use, the water sector needed radical restructuring. This restructuring was done using neoliberal economic incentives: deregulation, privatization, and competition. The World Bank’s Water Resources Management publication (1993), the 1992 Rio Earth Summit, and the International Conference on Water and the Environment (Dublin) supported handing the governance of the world’s water supplies over to the invisible hand of the free market.²¹

What is especially disturbing is how the World Bank has financed water-reform policies the world over as an integral part of its structural adjustment program. With the purported aim of promoting the sustainable and efficient management of a country’s water resources, the World Bank’s lending policies have in fact supported the mass privatization of water. As a stipulation in approximately one-third (at least 84) of the 276 water supply loans that the World Bank granted between 1990 and 2002, it required the lendees to agree to some form of privatization of water resources—a prime example of how the global environmental crisis is tweaked to become an apparatus through which neoliberal economic policies are advanced.²² A report on this practice concluded that “privatization has been an increasingly important aspect of bank loan conditions.”²³

As the practice was described to economic hit man extraordinaire John Perkins the first day on the job with consulting firm Chas T. Main, where he was to hired to convince underdeveloped countries to accept large loans from the U.S. Agency for International Development and the World Bank,

We’re a small exclusive club…. We’re paid—well paid—to cheat countries around the globe out of billions of dollars. A large part of your job is to encourage world leaders to become part of a vast network that promotes U.S. commercial interests. In the end, those leaders become ensnared in a web of debt that ensures their loyalty. We can draw on them whenever we desire—to satisfy our political, economic, or military needs. In turn, these leaders bolster their political positions by bringing industrial parks, power plants, and airports to their people. Meanwhile, the owners of U.S. engineering and construction companies become very wealthy.²⁴

In other words, private governance of the water commons strengthens the power of economic elites. It is this situation that has produced what Maude Barlow and Tony Clarke describe as a “global water cartel.” The cartel consists of transnational corporations, the World Bank, and governments, all working in tandem over the past couple of decades to privatize water supplies. The largest water moguls include the two French companies Suez and Veolia, RWE-AG of Germany, Bechtel–United Utilities, Biwater, U.S. Water, and Anglian Water.²⁵

Approximately 70 percent of global privatized water is owned by Veolia and Suez. Veolia used to be Vivendi Environment and is known by many other names: General-Des-Eaux, Onx Environmental, Dalkia, and Connex, among others. The water and wastewater units of Veolia Environment serve more than 110 million customers in eighty-four countries. In 2005, it was reportedly number 463 on the Fortune 500; its net income was $2.58 billion; its net revenue was $35.96 billion; and 40 percent of its sales came from its water services.²⁶ Affermage is the business model used by the company, and it refers to a public–private partnership or corporate welfare: the public pays for its water infrastructure, and Veolia Environment and its shareholders profit from the investment of public funds.

A popular argument is that “partial” privatization will diversify local water supplies as a way to hedge against risk, especially for those receiving water in regions where supplies are low or volatile. The public is assured that the public–private water-governance institution will bear none of the upfront risks and costs associated with developing the plant, only the benefits of reliable water at a price they would have paid anyway. This arrangement really translates into the public’s bearing the brunt of the burden for long-term investment and the costs associated with maintenance. Meanwhile, the private sector is in charge of the less costly management of water supplies.²⁷

PUBLIC GOVERNANCE

Left-wing theorists have understandably responded forcefully to the neoliberalization of the world’s water, advocating the visible hand of the state and local communities govern the water commons. They insist that because water is a basic need for life, it ought not depend on one’s ability to pay and should therefore remain under public control. This position is divided, however, over how best to realize the goal of public water governance. One camp favors a model of vertical governance, an old model whereby regional and national governments regulate, manage, and control water services and supplies (both Venezuela’s president Hugo Chávez and Bolivia’s president Juan Evo Morales adopted this approach). However, there is a growing sense of dissatisfaction over the complicity between the state and private sector as well as a lack of confidence in the government to maintain public water infrastructures adequately and to supply all corners of the population equitably with the water they need. This sense of dissatisfaction has recently resulted in a wave of theory in support of a horizontal approach to the governance of the commons (by Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri, and Elinor Ostrom, to name a few). This group argues that this theory is in favor of the management of local water supplies by local collectives and associational institutions. Both positions hold a great deal of validity and are enormously helpful when it comes to democratizing the management of and access to water supplies.

The horizontal approach of public water governance favors local self-organizing systems of management. Hardt and Negri can certainly be situated within this camp. In Commonwealth, they define two senses of the term commons—the first being the earth and its ecosystems and the second being the creative commons, which includes indigenous knowledge, ideas, images, and affects (service and care).²⁸ They recognize that when faced with a crisis, we tend to rule either in favor of more governmental regulation and control or for the neoliberal model of increased privatization. They, however, are more interested in trying to forge an alternative to the private-property system and to “institute a shared common wealth.” The practical question, though, is: How do we go about justly sharing that which is held in common?²⁹ This is also a question that guides David Bollier’s discussion in A Silent Theft: The Private Plunder of Our Common Wealth. It is this commons dilemma that guides the research agenda of political scientist and 2009 Economics Nobel Laureate Elinor Ostrom.

In particular, Ostrom has extensively examined the question of whether communities are capable of effectively managing their own water resources without relying on government regulation or corporate privatization.³⁰ She has used the principles of game theory to study the commons dilemma.³¹ What is especially innovative about her work is the tripartite structure of her method. She uses inductive theorizing in combination with field studies and lab experiments. In her collaborative work with William Blomquist, Ostrom returned to the California West Basin groundwater reserves, where she had previously studied the role of local groups managing the water basin for her 1965 doctoral dissertation.³² Together they assessed whether the partnership between nongovernmental and governmental groups had effectively managed the water basin.³³ Their findings point to the importance of locally generated institutional arrangements that emerge out of informed open communication between common-pool resource (CPR) users.

With Roy Gardner and James Walker, Ostrom went on to develop a series of baseline experiments to examine some of the hurdles CPR users encounter when trying to achieve outcomes they share in common.³⁴ To clarify, CPRs are “natural or man-made resources whose yield is subtractable and the exclusion from which is nontrivial (but not necessarily impossible).”³⁵ Their experiments allowed subjects to earn money by either appropriating the CPR or engaging in private activities. The commons dilemma arises from the individual and social costs associated with the rational choices individuals make. It is also premised upon the notion that CPRs are both an economic good and carry an economic value. Although the payoffs from appropriation might initially be high, they decrease as other users appropriate the resource; the payoff is eventually less than that from private activities that produce a steady but marginal return. Ostrom and her colleagues found that the more individuals could communicate, the more beneficial the results were in overcoming the social dilemma. Subsequent experiments on punishment demonstrated that punishing free riders, regardless of costs, successfully lowered negative CPR appropriation rates because individuals were willing to bear the costs of punishing free riders if doing so proved to be an effective tool of deterrence. Drawing attention to a model of punishment and deterrence in this way highlights how much Ostrom frames her conception of subjectivity and political action negatively.³⁶

Ostrom’s observations and experiments around collective-action problems provide an intriguing look at how people work together to change their environment for the benefit of the majority. One of her work’s greatest strengths is its empirical basis, for it allows her to move beyond the abstractions of theory. Through her studies of real-world problems and how individuals overcome them collaboratively, she provides us with a useful revision of vertical modes of governance that typify state, national, and international policy.

Nevertheless, the self-management model marginalizes transnational and supralocal power relations as well as the way in which these relations structure the commons and its products. For example, the CPR model does not account for the amount of dependency any given community might have on the water resources of another community, region, or country—in other words, the water embedded in the products they consume (virtual water) or how much they rely on foreign water resources in their daily products and energy needs or the water footprint imbalances this reliance produces through the importing of water-intensive products and the exporting of less water-intensive products.³⁷ Factors that influence the importation of water-intense products include water scarcity, lack of fertile land, and scarcity of other raw materials. A case in point: between 1997 and 2001, the virtual water flow was reportedly 1,625 billion cubic meters per year accounting for 16 percent of global water use.³⁸

Ostrom’s analysis and experiments focus on what motivates individual CPR users and in particular the importance of endogenous institutions in motivating the negative subject to act in the interests of the collective. The motivational focus of her work echoes current philosophical approaches to the contemporary subject. Simon Critchley points out that in response to the eternal state of war characteristic of contemporary life, people are suffering from two kinds of deficit: motivational and moral. Together these deficits have produced a lethargic subject, one who is devoid of conscience and is politically uncommitted.³⁹ Critchley proposes that democracy can be brought back to life if and when the subject undergoes a renewed sense of commitment to the “unfulfillable demand” posed by the other, which he explains would prompt a critical anarchic movement to emerge from the ground of the social field—a movement that is resistant to the order imposed from above. His model of collective action shares sympathies with Hardt and Negri’s in that he too embraces the anarchic potentia of the critical ground of the social field, yet unlike in Hardt and Negri’s work his subject is motivated by a lack or by a general sense of dissatisfaction and inadequacy. That said, Critchley’s politically engaged subject is quite different from the fully coherent and rational subject that Ostrom takes as a given, and the negativity defining his subject is different from the negative role that motivation plays in her experiments.

Ostrom never questions the political validity of the liberal notion of the independent free-choosing subject. On the one hand, she strongly advocates for the local, a position usually articulated in alignment with the specificities of place or region. On the other hand, she invokes a universal category—the rational subject—that is anterior to spatiotemporal configurations informing local subjectivity. This tension can have considerable political consequences—namely, stripping local subjects of the very conditions that orient and locate them in a specific context is a neoliberal ideological strategy.

In addition, Ostrom does not tackle the geopolitics of water resources and services (the global dynamics of power are artificially kept separate from the local). Her appropriators of CPRs are considered in isolation to the local attachments and histories that produce and motivate her subjects. This isolation gives all the more power and credibility to the invisible hand of the free market to extend its influence. It is only by virtue of the local, as informed by the forces and energies that make up the global, and their overlapping histories that the local is allowed to articulate its specificity. Granted that this process of articulation is not easily subsumed into a model of identity politics, it is important we recognize that although specificity is distinct from the global whole, it is nonetheless informed by that whole. We do need to heed a word of caution here: although it is important to recognize local specificity, it is equally important that the local is not fetishized. One way to overcome this fetishization is to engage dialectically the differences that “make” a subject.

The local functions politically when it articulates its specificity vis-à-vis the global. In this light, focusing on the rational individual who is free to make choices can constitute an act of political erasure, for it removes from the picture the dynamic interaction of global and local forces and energies that condition subjects and complicates places. This approach also neglects to consider the sense of intimacy that informs how people relate to water. For example, our relationship to water in the shower, on the toilet, in the kitchen, in the garden, or at the river differs across individuals, communities, and cultures. These differences inform the trade-offs in water usage that people and communities make. So because the controlled environment of the lab experiment is an “ideal” experimental CPR situation, devoid of the material exigencies that inform real-life situations, it does not recognize the material forces that constitute and organize subjects, and that positions subjects differently within a local setting and the larger national and transnational community. This is how the biopolitics of water production and exchange works.

Biopolitical production points to “new mechanisms of exploitation and capital control,” as Hardt and Negri recognize. In turn, the dynamic of exploitation at work in capital accumulation, they remark, has taken the “form of expropriation of the common.” Their understanding of the common is both the wealth of the material world that we share in common (air, water, earth, etc.) and the “results of social production that are necessary for social interaction,” such as information, affects, and knowledge. In the biopolitical era, the Marxist contradiction between the “social nature of capitalist production and the private character of capital accumulation becomes ever more extreme.”⁴⁰ Hardt and Negri go on to revise Marx’s constitutive political antagonism between labor and capital as one between the common and capital. I do not deny that there is a struggle occurring between the common and capital, but I am less willing to let go of the antagonism between labor and capital because I believe that if we do, we then marginalize the problem of “working out how the law of value operates,” as Marx put it.⁴¹ Value is an important conceptual ingredient in an analysis of how capital and environmental politics intersect.

The form of the historical circumstances in which the law of value operates today is neoliberalism—privatization, individualism, the free market, deregulation, and the ideology of the liberal subject; and the modality of that law of value is biopolitical—the production of social life, the effect of which is not the common, but the exchange-value of social life. The common is not conditioned by the biopolitical; it is necessarily antagonistic to the biopolitical, and we must keep this analytic distinction intact because without it the common is always already co-opted. It is this co-optation that so many activist groups are struggling against and that forms the basis of a variety of political movements. Part of the struggle that labor is engaged with in the age of neoliberal capitalism is over the equitable distribution of access to the commons, which is increasingly difficult the more capital monopolizes it. Hence, the definition of the commons as inherently political cannot become the same as the capitalist definition of the commons as biopolitical production. The distinction is once again machinic: the capitalist distributes access to the commons by means of the rate of profit, not by means of the political principle of equality.

For Marx, capital was always already a mode of social production, and the way to understand this definition is through the antagonistic relationship between labor and capital. So the explanatory power of the concepts of labor and capital are all the more important as an analytical distinction in understanding the biopolitical production of capital that Hardt and Negri identify as the conditions producing the common. Hardt and Negri see the value necessary for social production as rooted in the common. For them, the common can be both a revolutionary potentia as much as an oppressive potestas (biopolitical production of subjectivity in place of the old model of commodity production). I find the first part of their formulation incredibly useful but would like to revise the second part.

The commons is only potentia, for if we take the liberty to stretch the definition to make the commons also an oppressive force, we lose an important analytic distinction between biopolitics and the commons. Biopolitical appropriation does not change the “common”; it changes the formal relationship of nondiscriminatory reciprocity that conditions the commons as shared. And the violence over access to and control of the world’s water resources is an example of the latter change.

To appreciate fully how capitalist biopolitical production works in the context of the water crisis, it is helpful to scrutinize closely the geopolitics of water governance. Only 8 percent of freshwater supplies are used for domestic use; the rest of the world’s water is consumed by industry (22 percent), by farming for irrigation purposes (70 percent), and by the expanding for-profit system of supplying and managing water.⁴² If we focus too much on the issue of growing human demand for water, we run the risk of resorting to a form of Malthusianism—pointing the finger of blame at the growing global population without recognizing that not everyone consumes water equally the world over and that other-than-human species remain invisible altogether in the dominant political discourse surrounding water equity.

The first approach to horizontal governance gives weight to government institutions. It advocates for a formal model of governance. The second approach favors the informality of civic life. In an era of global capital, it is also important to try and bridge the two positions, all the while recognizing that not everyone or every species can participate equally in political life.⁴³ Greater clarity is needed over the way in which asymmetries of power facilitate and are the effect of the institutionalization of neoliberal economic principles shaping the global water market. Left-wing theoretical discourse therefore needs to address first who the subject of struggle in the water crisis is and then the subsequent problem of how that subject can best be heard.⁴⁴ To do this, our analysis has to move beyond the empirical study of water as an isolated substance or hydrologic cycle or both.

WATER PLUS CAPITAL

Let us begin by breaking down the global average water footprint of 1,243 cubic meters per capita per year. The per capita annual water footprint of China is 702 cubic meters, with only 7 percent of Chinese water consumption coming from offshore. The water footprint of somebody living in the United States is 2,483 cubic meters per year, with 19 percent of that coming from outside the country. Meanwhile, in Kenya the average per capita water footprint per year is just 714 cubic meters, with 10 percent coming from outside the country.⁴⁵ There is a clear correlation forming here between the inequitable distribution and use of water and the inequitable structural dynamics of the global economy. And the geography of the water commons does not stop with a comparison of per capita footprints. It also investigates and interrogates the growing market in water investment, production, and infrastructure.

As the material flows of the hydrologic cycle—a process of evaporation (from bodies of water such as lakes), condensation (clouds), circulation (through atmosphere), precipitation (rain and snow), and dissipation (run off)—are distributed and differentiated by capital, that cycle is placed in the service of capital accumulation. For example, water is distributed by wells through processes of desalination, sewerage systems, or dams. It is differentiated as a private investment opportunity (as an economic good and holding an economic value), a public utility (wastewater-treatment facilities, public drinking-water facilities), or a commons (rivers, lakes, rain, and oceans).

As water is distributed and differentiated, it also enters a process of signification—for instance, when it is defined as a water market. And this process in turn organizes social subjects—namely, those who can afford to pay for water services and those who cannot. This organization concomitantly defines who counts as a social subject and who does not. In other words, the needs of the poor living in urban slums who do not have access to formal water infrastructure or the wildlife that are forced out of their habitats when water sources run dry do not count, for how they consume water circumvents formal water services and the surplus-value generated from these services.⁴⁶

The continual movement of water over, under, and across the earth is a form of social production and reproduction. Unlike capital, however, the hydrologic cycle is a closed system. As such, it does not produce a surplus. Contrary to the logic of capitalism, the hydrologic cycle is healthiest when it operates as a closed loop. So how do capital and the hydrologic cycle connect if capitalism is, as Marx posited, a process of capital accumulation and in this instance what is being accumulated is a closed circuit? First, the value produced by the hydrologic cycle has to move beyond utility (use-value) and the preservation of value. It is reconfigured to generate an exchange-value, whereby additional value is created and a surplus is produced.

To account for the way the production process of the hydrologic cycle is organized to make a profit, it might be helpful to turn to Marx’s labor theory of value. In Capital, Marx explains that capital accumulates by exploiting labor. To put it in starkly simplistic terms, the laborer sells his or her labor power to the capitalist in return for a living wage as the capitalist generates a surplus-value from that labor. For Marx, the important point in all this is that capital accumulation depends on two important transformations taking place. First, labor power has to be turned into an exchange-value. Second, as labor is exploited by capital, it is alienated. However, Marx did not regard water as having a value for the simple reason that it is not produced with human labor but rather is part of the life cycle. As material life has been neoliberalized, this situation has dramatically changed. If we were to put the notion of labor-value to work in a somewhat idiosyncratic way, we might consider the productive forces of the hydrologic cycle that were previously independent of capital as now subsumed by capital. By transforming the movement of the hydrologic cycle into an exchange-value, the effects of the labor of material life are brought under the control of capital, which alienates material life from its ecological cycles (precipitation and so on) and its creative capacity (reproducing life).

For instance, one popular new technology that allows people to tap into new supply options and increase the productivity of the hydrologic cycle is desalination. The desalination process removes salt and other minerals from seawater to make it ready for industrial use or human consumption or both. The popularity of desalination plants, especially for governments, is that they can provide a reliable water supply with high water quality. Nevertheless, there are many unknowns associated with this technology. Desalination can also introduce chemical and biological contaminants into the water supply; produce water that is corrosive to water-distribution systems; create high concentrations of salt brines, leading to the problem of how to dispose of the effluent safely; negatively impact marine organisms; and lead to greater dependence on fossil fuels, which in turn produce GHGs and further the warming of the climate. Then there is the pink elephant in the room: the private ownership and operation of desalination facilities.⁴⁷

And although there is legitimate cause for concern over the environmental impact of developing and running large-scale commercial desalination plants, I am equally concerned over the use of public funds to support the research and development of desalination technologies, which are eventually appropriated by the private sector under the guise of providing a public service.⁴⁸ A brief trot through history helps make my point.

The idea of separating salt from seawater is not new. In 1790, the U.S. secretary of state Thomas Jefferson was asked to sell the government a distillation system that could convert salt water to freshwater. In 1852, a British patent was given for a distillation method that did just this. In 1952, the U.S. Congress passed the Saline Water Conversion Act (Pub. L. 92-60), which would fund the Office of Saline Water in the Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Reclamation. President John F. Kennedy was reportedly a strong supporter of large-scale commercial desalination. In 1977, the United States spent approximately $144 million on desalination research, and further public funds were allocated to offshore desalination efforts in other places such as Japan and the Persian Gulf. After a brief lull during the Reagan administration when public-research funding went to military initiatives, in 1996 Senator Paul Simon (D–Ill.) brought into effect the Water Desalination Act (Pub. L. 104-298). The act provided $30 million in federal support over a six-year period toward desalination research, along with a further $25 million between 1999 and 2002 toward demonstration projects. Interestingly, the fiscal year 2005 Omnibus Bill modified this legislation, requiring the private sector share 50 percent of the costs associated with these ventures, and yet the U.S. government appropriated only $2.5 million for the 1999 fiscal year and $1.3 million for the 2000 fiscal year.⁴⁹

In 2009, Tom Pankratz of the International Desalination Association estimated that the global seawater desalination market might eventually reach $58 billion dollars over the next ten years. Those at the forefront of the burgeoning market in desalination include the usual list of multinational water moguls: Veolia Environment (France), which is desalinating 5.4 million cubic meters a day; Fisia Italimpianti (Italy), 3 million cubic meters a day; Doosan (Korea), 2.8 million cubic meters a day; and GE Water (United States), 2.5 million cubic meters a day.⁵⁰ In 2009, chief marketing officer for GE Water, Jeff Fulgham, expected “double digit growth rates in the [desalination] market.” As he went on to admit, “That is a big deal for us from an investment standpoint.”⁵¹ Not bad, considering his prediction was made during the height of the global economic meltdown.

TRANSVERSAL GOVERNANCE

Social relations (intersections of class, race, gender, and sexuality), material life, technology, reproduction, mental frameworks, and modes of governance and organization are distinct but at the same time dialectically implicated in each other. The horizontal governance model of the commons needs to be fine-tuned with a vertical system of governance that recognizes the borders framing local, regional, and national landscapes as well as the transnational flows of power and privilege that define the geopolitical arena. We need to cast a critical eye over the institutionalized systems of oppression and hierarchy that obscure the visibility of some individuals, communities, species, and ecological systems from consideration. That is, we need to be mindful of how the intersection of labor, power, and capital impedes the visibility and ethical considerability of marginalized groups: the poor, women, other-than-human species, and ecosystems.

Neither privatization nor vertical or horizontal governance models adequately engage with the asymmetries of power shaping the social field. Social arrangements, regardless of operating at a more intimate and “local” scale, do not work equally for everyone.⁵² For instance, although Cochabamba’s water was returned to the people after the protracted water wars, longstanding class differentiations and a culture of political corruption meant poor residents still struggled for reliable and safe access to water. In addition to issues of class, there are also endemic gender biases that inform the water debate the world over. Water is not gender neutral, especially in low- and middle-income countries. Accessing water for subsistence agriculture, basic health and sanitation needs, and domestic consumption needs is primarily the role of poor women in these regions.

In many parts of the world, water collection is women’s work. When women are not included in the management of water projects or programs, their water rights and privileges are often not met. When water supplies are scarce, it is women who spend more time in the day traveling to water sources and girls who are removed from school to assist in the collection of water, so that less time can be spent on subsistence agriculture, simply reinforcing the acute asymmetries of poverty that disadvantage women. A case in point is the Macina Wells project in Mali. It failed because the notion of a community-managed well was blind to differences in gender. Management of the wells was allocated to the men, and yet the women were the ones responsible for collecting water. The failure to consult women in both the planning and the management of the well resulted in equipment the women found impractical to use, so that they eventually removed it; moreover, the men failed in their management duties because they regarded water and sanitation as women’s business.⁵³

Institutionalized gender inequalities present some serious obstacles for the model of horizontal governance for the simple reason that not all social arrangements allow for the equal participation of all members.⁵⁴ In the planning of water programs, skewed gender relations are not sufficiently addressed by inviting women to participate. For example, when a water project was being planned for the Tanga Region in Tanzania, women were not present for three reasons. First, the meetings were held at a time that was impractical for them to attend. Second, they felt the men would not seriously listen to their suggestions. Third, they were not properly informed about the meetings.⁵⁵ Further, women’s participation in the management of local water supplies is not an automatic panacea for equality. How can the inequities of unpaid labor be addressed? Will childcare facilities be available to allow women to spend the time needed for managing a given program?

The disquieting transformation of freshwater into a liquid asset is also a story of the intrusion of market criteria in life. Moreover, the lucrative speculative economy that is growing around the predicted water crisis is driving the push to privatize the water commons. One way to combat the privatization of the commons is for water resources to remain a public utility, and in countries where this is not currently the case, the solution would be to nationalize water resources and infrastructure.⁵⁶ This is exactly what Bolivian president Evo Morales did once he was elected to power in 2006.⁵⁷ Yet since 1970 glaciers in the Andes have lost 20 percent of their volume, and because Bolivia draws 30 percent of its water supply from the glacial basin, the water situation there is becoming critical. The disappearing glaciers have resulted in severe water shortages in parts of Bolivia, especially El Alto, where domestic water taps have reportedly dried up. The World Bank reports that nearly 100 million people might be adversely affected by the melting glaciers.⁵⁸

In other words, stringent national government regulation of water cannot solve the critical water shortages incurred because of climate change. The solution requires a multilateral approach where broader alliances are formed throughout the international community to slow the warming of the earth’s climate and to help the most vulnerable, including other-than-human species and ecosystems, cope with dwindling water supplies. Consider the case of Bolivia: its water shortages are in large part the creation of the market—the long history of industrialization and capitalism that has produced changes in climate, whose impacts exceed the borders of nation-states and which are primarily responsible for the GHG emissions buildup causing ice caps to retreat.

A transversal mode of water governance, one that is mobilized across different geographic scales and that combines horizontal and vertical governance models, is urgently needed to address the transnational character of our water commons. We also need to be mindful of how different power relations create the water crisis and of how this crisis is then used to facilitate a neoliberal agenda that has gradually realized the privatization of the water commons. In light of the corrupted agenda of the World Bank’s efforts to administer the governance of local water, far more transparency needs to be enforced around the conditions of supposed “aid” and “relief” loans and the various corporate interests such loans support, along with more stringent measures of accountability for how international aid organizations do business.

Although individual interests and choices as well as equitable modes of governing the water commons are important, equitable access to fresh-water involves a larger problem of ecological organization. What is needed is a dramatic change in how we relate to one another, our environment, other species, our pasts and futures—all with a view to forming alliances across generations, species, and communities. How does the water crisis generate solidarity among individuals and across communities? This question is not a contractual or legal problem; it concerns the particular attachments people have to a place, the histories they share in common, and how these histories shape and are shaped by the places in which they live. How can we arouse a shared feeling for equality that traverses species? How can we move from “limited sympathy” to “extended generosity”?⁵⁹ Moreover, the question of how solidarities are affected and in turn affect the places in which they live might elucidate future political trajectories.

The social and environmental injustices that the water crisis compounds cannot be fully accounted for by a political theory that focuses exclusively on choosing between vertical or horizontal modes of governance. It needs to shift to a temporal organization that commences with the proposition that if we continue on our current course, by 2050 water scarcity will hinder the flourishing of all life on earth. The question is: What can we do today to stop this process? We also need to understand the water crisis not merely as an effect of the failure of individuals and groups to develop formal and informal rules that effectively manage the resources they share in common. Rather, we need to capture how the unequal distribution and exhaustion of the world’s water resources is rooted in the asymmetrical power relations and social orders emerging out of capital flows and to recognize that this relationship is connected to the neoliberalization of life.

The water commons dilemma marks a breakdown at the level of social cooperation. I am using the term social in its expanded sense to include human beings, other species, environments, ecological systems, and future generations. The dilemma presents a fundamental failure at being inclusive. Now more than ever we cannot afford to forget the ominous pronouncement of French underwater eco-explorer Jacques Cousteau: “We forget that the water cycle and the life cycle are one.” This leaves us with the following question: How might commons dilemmas, such as water access, engage a critique of capital? For that matter, how can commons dilemmas generate alternatives to the neoliberalization of life?

Water is a common good. Unlike for oil resources, another source cannot be substituted for water. Because water is the basis for all life on earth, access cannot be contingent upon the ability to pay. What might seem like a ludicrous example brings the issue into focus. The water company is going to be hard pressed to figure out how it will invoice the local bird population for drinking from its water supply! More important, though, the birds are going to be hard pressed to access the water they need when surface-water sources run dry or are enclosed through privatization.