Water on Tap: Rights and Regulation in the Transnational Governance of Urban Water Services

Description

In the 1990s and mid-2000s, turbulent political and social protests surrounded the issue of private sector involvement in providing urban water services in both the developed and developing world. Water on Tap explores examples of such conflicts in six national settings (France, Bolivia, Chile, Argentina, South Africa and New Zealand), focusing on a central question: how were rights and regulation mobilized to address the demands of redistribution and recognition? Two modes of governance emerged: managed liberalization and participatory democracy, often in hybrid forms that complicated simple oppositions between public and private, commodity and human right. The case studies examine the effects of transnational and domestic regulatory frameworks shaping the provision of urban water services, bilateral investment treaties and the contributions of non-state actors such as transnational corporations, civil society organisations and social movement activists. The conceptual framework developed can be applied to a wide range of transnational governance contexts.

Bronwen Morgan is Professor of Socio-Legal Studies in the School of Law at the Faculty of Social Sciences and Law, University of Bristol, and an Associate Research Fellow of the Centre for Socio-legal Studies, University of Oxford. Her research focuses on the political economy of regulatory reform, the intersection between regulation and social and economic human rights, and global governance.