Abstract
Struggles over who controls water epitomize the growing contestation over the commodification of public goods that has occurred globally under neoliberalism. Since the 2000 ‘water war’ in Cochabamba, Bolivia, a proliferation of academic and popular work has examined social movements that resist the privatization of public drinking water systems in the global South, from Buenos Aires to Manila to South Africa. Although these same dynamics – local governments signing concession or ‘public-private partnership’ agreements with transnational water firms, often under fiscal duress – also take place in Northern countries that have near-universal access to clean drinking water, this facet of the issue has received less scholarly attention. Robinson’s volume represents one of the first book-length case studies of contestation over water privatization in North America, and as such it makes a valuable contribution to debates over the dynamics of social movements that challenge the local manifestations of globalization.
Based on 70 interviews conducted in 2008–2009 with activists involved in anti-privatization movements in two cities – Stockton, California and Vancouver, Canada – Robinson reconstructs the campaigns they waged and analyzes the movement dynamics that led to disparate outcomes in these two cases. In Stockton, the conservative mayor announced in 2002 that the city would contract out the management of its water system to a private firm. A coalition of activists mobilized to forestall the move with a local ballot measure, which passed but was ineffectual because the city council had sped up approval of the contract with the water firm Thames-OMI. An effort to overturn the council’s decision with another ballot measure failed to gather sufficient signatures. After a legal battle using the fairly strong California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) environmental law, the contract was eventually overturned after five years of private management, and the water system returned to public control in 2008. In Vancouver, the regional water agency in 2001 announced plans to contract with a private firm to build and manage a large water treatment plant. Local activists – including labor, environmental, and global justice groups – quickly mobilized public opposition, with assistance from national organizations, to lobby politicians and pack public hearings. Faced with a highly vocal and coordinated campaign, within a few months the water agency had backed down and shelved the proposal entirely.
The first chapter of the book establishes the political-economic context of water privatization on a global level, and previews the book’s structure and arguments. Robinson’s stated goal is empirically to identify the factors that can account for the different outcomes of these two struggles: the rapid success of the Vancouver movement, and the initial failure of activists in Stockton to halt the privatization there. Her overall argument is that two primary factors made the Vancouver campaign more successful: the conscious adoption of ‘global frames’ that were able to unify activists and elected officials against a shared external threat, and the presence there of ‘global connectors’, key organizations and individuals who could link local activists to broader national and global social movement networks.
In analyzing these phenomena, Robinson argues in Chapter 2 for a ‘dynamic theory of contention’ (p. 61) that applies framing and political process perspectives from social movement theory to the context of place-specific movements confronting global threats. ‘Unlike their transnational counterparts’, she writes, ‘coalitions resisting globalization at the local level have the potential to create powerful and lasting movements because they are rooted in territorial communities and demonstrate a shared sense of fate’ (p. 60). The third chapter portrays some of the particular situated understandings of water held by respondents in Stockton and Vancouver – including individual and community connections to particular regional watersheds or surface water bodies – upon which local movements are able to draw to dramatize the threat posed by private control over drinking water.
The next two chapters are the comparative core of the book, effectively using interview data to illustrate the divergent dynamics of the two campaigns. Robinson contrasts the framing strategies used by each movement, as well as the political structures they confronted. The Vancouver coalition, she writes, developed clear and unified anti-corporate and global-justice frames that linked the proposed contract to battles over water privatization elsewhere in the world and the loss of control that private management entailed. They also made an effective argument that global trade and investment rules in the World Trade Organization (WTO) and North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) agreements would threaten local sovereignty if privatization took place. In contrast, the core of the Stockton opposition group, which suffered from internal divisions over tactics and strategy and had few ties to outside networks, overtly rejected global frames and instead framed the proposed contract as a threat to local democratic process. They focused on the conservative politicians who had promoted the deal as the key threat, and on voter initiatives as the prime remedy. Robinson argues that the Stockton activists’ lack of organizing experience and their partial embrace of an anti-government paradigm (even while opposing transfer of the water system out of public hands), combined with closed local political structures, lost them the initial fight. In contrast, she writes, the Vancouver activists cultivated preexisting relationships with local elites rather than targeting them personally. Key decision-makers were more receptive to the argument of threats from global trade agreements, and more politically vulnerable to the organized opposition.
Chapter 6 focuses on the role of cross-movement coalitions, particularly between organized labor and environmentalists, in these struggles. While the union representing workers at the water department in Stockton left the activist coalition early on to focus on retaining jobs under the new private management, in Vancouver, a large public employees union (not representing the water workers) conducted vital campaign research, developed unifying messages, and tapped into deep preexisting linkages with environmental and ‘anti-globalization’ movements, providing crucial glue for the campaign. Robinson highlights the central role of such ‘global connectors’ in the Vancouver opposition’s rapid success.
In the conclusion, Robinson synthesizes the lessons of these two cases and offers a brief set of recommendations for movements elsewhere opposing the privatization of water and other commons resources. She closes by arguing that the most effective future challenges to neoliberal globalization will come from local cross-movement coalitions, which, unlike transnational coalitions, ‘have clear and tangible targets, pooled resources, rooted networks, and a shared sense of fate or collective identity in the face of external threats’ (p. 187).
The book has multiple strengths. Robinson effectively mines her interview data to paint a detailed picture of activists in two very different places scrambling to find the best way to mobilize against looming threats to public control over water. She does a fine job of situating these struggles within a clear global political-economic context, highlighting the role of trade and investment agreements such as NAFTA that constrain national governments’ latitude to regulate to protect the environment, labor rights, and social welfare, and allow firms to sue governments to overturn such regulations through ‘investor-state’ dispute mechanisms. (Interestingly, she asserts that local governments retain a greater degree of freedom vis-a-vis capital under these pacts, as they are not the actual signatories.) The author’s clear commitment to pursuing research of utility to social movements is also highly laudable.
There are a couple of areas where additional detail or analysis might have strengthened the book further. In both the evidentiary chapters and conclusion, Robinson strongly implies that adopting a Vancouver-like strategy emphasizing global frames instead of local political structures would have led activists in Stockton to be successful in halting the privatization there at the outset. Yet, given the substantial demographic, economic, and political differences between the two communities – Vancouver is a much larger, more affluent and cosmopolitan city, with a more progressive political culture and better developed and globally linked social movement networks – such a conclusion is debatable. The public in Stockton, which had elected a staunchly conservative mayor and city council majority, would likely have been less receptive to such global frames even had activists succeeded in overturning the council’s privatization vote. Engaging such particularities of the two settings a bit further might help to reveal other important factors for social movements to consider when making strategic and tactical choices in struggles over control of public goods. Additionally, while beyond the book’s stated aims, it would have been interesting to see some analysis of the parallels and divergences between these North American cases and urban water privatization struggles in the global South. A more detailed description of the research methods would also be helpful to readers.
These minor issues notwithstanding, Contested Water is an important contribution to the literature on social contestation over the fate of public goods under neoliberal globalization. It would make an excellent case study for graduate and upper-level undergraduate courses on globalization and social movements, and would be valuable reading for scholars of commodification and its countermovements.